The focus of this thesis is twofold. First, multiple lines of evidence are used to reconstruct the role that Cibicue Painted Corrugated pottery played at Grasshopper Pueblo, a fourteenth century pueblo located in east-central Arizona. An analysis of provenience-based information, functional attributes, and the design work on Cibicue Painted Corrugated suggests that these pots may have been used as personal containers, reserved for use in ritual contexts and buried with their owner upon death. Second, a morphological and stylistic comparison of Cibicue Painted Corrugated to Cibicue Polychrome is conducted to clarify the confusion that surrounds the Cibicue typology. In much of the archaeological literature, Cibicue Painted Corrugated pottery is conflated with Cibicue Polychrome, a type that dates slightly later. The differences that emerge through the course of this analysis support the classification of the two as separate pottery types.

Prehistoric social networks reveal paths of behavior that are vital to the understanding of past life. Utilitarian ceramics that were a part of everyday life and regular household activities, and the elements of technological style they possess, are accurate indicators of local social dynamics. Corrugated ceramic vessels in particular contain subtleties in their decoration that may distinguish learning frameworks within and between groups on a small, perhaps household-level scale. My study uses these premises to examine corrugated sherds, and the social patterns they reflect, from several sites in the Silver Creek area of east-central Arizona.

Understanding the mechanisms structuring increasing aggregation during the late-thirteenth century in the Silver Creek drainage in East-Central Arizona has been central to the Silver Creek Archaeological Project's research over the last ten years. Key questions about this pattern of increasing village size and sedentism concern the changing social and economic environment, particularly the emerging Pueblo IV craft and subsistence economies. Excavation and analysis data from a small site that immediately pre-dates the Pueblo IV-period aggregation, Bryant Ranch Pueblo, allows us to better understand the trends in this transition. This study examines evidence of craft production and circulation through compositional analyses, as well as ceramic consumption patterns through multivariate analyses of the ceramic assemblages to address the changing social and economic contexts in the Silver Creek region and its surroundings during this transition.

A model for differential land use during the Archaic (8500-1700 B.C.) and Early Agricultural (1700 B.C.-A.D. 150/50) periods in southeastern Arizona, specifically the Cienega Valley, the greater Tucson Basin, and the middle San Pedro Valley, is postulated based on the environmental structures of each geographic area. In the Cienega Valley, the model is evaluated by reconstructing land use, settlement patterns, and mobility strategies of foragers and early farmers during the Archaic and Early Agricultural periods from new archaeological survey data and intensive surface collection of 14 Archaic and Early Agricultural period sites. Artifact assemblages, site structure, and artifact distributions from surface collected sites are analyzed. In the greater Tucson Basin and middle San Pedro Valley, land use, settlement patterns, land mobility strategies are reconstructed from Arizona State Museum site files and published archaeological survey and excavation reports. Finally, settlement patterns, land use, and mobility strategies during the Archaic and Early Agricultural periods are compared among the three geographic areas. In Cienega Valley, results indicate temporal variability in Middle Archaic and Early Agricultural lithic technology, settlement patterns, and mobility strategies largely reflect regional trends. Similarities in settlement types and distributions in the Middle Archaic and Early Agricultural periods suggest a major reorganization of settlement did not occur between the two periods, indicating regional cultural continuity during the interval when cultigens were adopted. There are many similarities across the study area in material culture during the Middle Archaic and Early Agricultural periods. These similarities suggest groups in all areas either shared the same culture or had abundant social interaction. However, the physical and vegetative structure of each geographic area produced different availability, abundance, diversity, and types of food resources. As a result, Middle Archaic and Early Agricultural foragers and early farmer/foragers employed somewhat different land use strategies in each geographic area. Finally, this study indicates many subsistence and mobility strategies are possible within an area of shared material culture traits during the transition to agriculture and that this variability needs to be incorporated in models of land use during transitions to agriculture.

The transition from Pinedale to Fourmile style on White Mountain Red Ware marks a critical shift in the production of prehistoric pottery in the American Southwest. As a decorative event, it involved the restructuring of both the painting process and symbolic presentation. As a record of past behavior, it evidences new patterns of social interaction among early Pueblo IV period (A.D. 1300-1400) potters at post-migration communities in east-central Arizona. Ultimately, these patterns reveal social differentiation among coresident groups, not integration as recent ceramic-based models imply. This study is predicated upon an analysis of painted whole vessels that uses measures of style behavior as it is expressed in brushstrokes and other microscale variability. It demonstrates the effectiveness of placing the individual at the core of archaeological inference.

<p> This project investigates the relationship between health and diet in medieval Portugal by combining data on the occurrence of osteoporosis with information on past diet derived from stable isotope ratios. The aim of this project is to identify whether different sources of protein influenced the prevalence of osteoporosis in three populations. Individuals from three different regions of Portugal were previously evaluated for bone mineral density at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and bone samples from 91 of these individuals underwent stable isotope analysis at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Collagen suitable for isotopic analysis was extracted from all individuals and indicated a negative correlation between bone mineral density (BMD) and carbon and nitrogen isotope values for females at one site and a positive correlation for males at another site. These results, combined with the lack of a clear relationship between BMD and nitrogen isotope values for the other subgroups, suggest a complicated relationship between dietary protein source and the occurrence of osteoporosis. While samples sizes are small, the data indicate that future analysis is warranted, particularly considering the high incidence of osteoporosis and the economic and individual strain of the disease.</p>

The current thesis presents a unique approach to the integration of osteological and funerary data. This approach exploits the nature of archaeological funerary and osteological data and their relationship to social factors to examine the social correlates of funerary treatment, diet and health. This is achieved via a reconceptualization of the relationship between osteological evidence and funerary data as a potential juxtaposition between evidence based on the lived reality of the individual and that constituted in the arena of death by the burying group. The new approach was applied to funerary and osteological data from the Classical and Hellenistic city of Ambrakia in northwest Greece. This entailed a detailed assessment of the relationships between funerary treatments, biological variables, indicators of health and stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis of dietary content. This analysis was performed utilizing the multivariate statistical procedures logistic regression and factorial ANOVA (GLM). The results indicate that the current approach permits the identification of variable relationships that cannot be anticipated or visualized utilizing traditional methods of integration. The thesis establishest he importance and complexity of intra-population patterns of health, and of their correlation with funerary treatments, in providing social explanations of observed variation in osteological and funerary remains

Techniques for the extraction of cores from dry historical timbers have been developed. A microcomputerbased ring-width measuring and recording system has been successfully designed and operated. Historical oak structures from the south of England have yielded site chronologies from various historical periods, which cross-match with reference material from throughout the British Isles. These show that, in some circumstances, it is possible to date structures from only a few samples. The historical chronologies did not provide sufficient evidence to be able to either accept or reject the oak-growth model proposed by Fletcher (1978), but they indicate that it is not likely to be valid. Studies on living trees from three sites in East Anglia show that cross-matching between sites from several parts of the British Isles is possible. They suggest that there is no association between the distance apart and the level of agreement either between sites, or between individual trees within a wood. An association between the level of agreement between two sites, and the site conditions in respect of soils, re1 ief and annual precipitation levels is however, indicated. The Fritts model for the production of ~complacent and sensitive ring-width series, is assessed as being over simpl ified. Investigations of the sapwood characteristics of the living trees give lower values for the mean number of sapwood rings per tree than publ ished figures. Significant correlations were found between both the number of sapwood rings, and the width of the sapwood, with the tree's mean ring-width. The growth of standard trees failed in a study to show any affects due to coppicing of the surrounding underwood. An investigation into the affects of insect defo1 iation on the magnitude of the annual ring-width suggests that there is an associ~tion between the severity of the attack, and the subsequent ring-width in the same growth season.

The research originated in a long association with glass making and argues for a revision of the theories and assumed production methods used in Hellenistic and Roman mosaic glass. Knowing how glass behaved in different circumstances under differing heat processes allowed for the possibility of experimenting and demonstrating the inconsistencies in many of the accepted explanations of mosaic production. The experiments were run to test out the production ideas, contrasting the findings with the original mosaic pieces and the production methods suggestedb. y others. The findings bring into question many of the accepted hypotheses for mosaic production, the rod production and the spiral and star pattern contained within, the slicing to form tesserae, the use of release agents and the material used. in the formers are argued for and contrasted with others. The study brings into question the use of a glass furnace, and implies that the need for the traditional furnace as the site of glass production could be mistaken. If this is the case, it raises questions over the archaeological sites, what counts as clues for these sites, and whether these sites would be for a single activity or shared resource sites. The evidence and hypotheses formed from the experiments if accepted will challenge many of the traditionally held ideas for the production of this glass. Locations for ancient glassm aking may need re-addressing,r einforcing the need for and the value of the experimental and practice based approach to this type of new work

Small valley mires situated adjacent to prehistoric field systems on the East Moors of the Peak District have been dated typologically and by radiocarbon dating to the second millennium BC. These have been used as sources of evidence for environmental change, brought about primarily by prehistoric human activity. The mires have been examined using pollen, spore, charcoal and stratigraphic analyses. Regional vegetation change from the third millennium BC is illustrated in a core from a raised mire site, central to the study area. Of the small valley mire sites studied, two display similar stratigraphic sequences where clay, containing pollen types indicative of agricultural activity, is overlain by peat. Palynological evidence from the valley mire sites indicates that woodland clearance with arable activity was occurring in localized areas across the East Moors from the second millennium and through the first millennium Be. Evidence from a core taken through one of the stone boundaries in a cairnfield complex above the valley mire site at Stoke Flat suggests that the fields and boundaries were associated with this agricultural activity. Radiocarbon dating has indicated that at the valley mire sites, peat accumulation started with the decline of evidence of agricultural activity at the end of the first millennium Be. Although local conditions vary at each site, there is evidence that agricultural activity in the vicinity of the field systems occurred through the first millennium Be, towards the end of which evidence of agricultural activity declined and moorland species became established. Following widescale woodland decline at the end of the first millennium Be, evidence suggests that regeneration was prevented by increased grazing pressures, climatic change, increased rates of soil deterioration and the possible abandonment of former woodland management practices.