Teotihuacan was the most influential city in the Classic Mesoamerican worldsystem. Like other influential cities in the ancient world, however, Teotihuacan did not homogenously affect the various cultural landscapes that thrived in Mesoamerica during the Classic period (300-900 CE). Even where strong central Mexican influences appear outside the Basin of Mexico, the nature, extent, and strength of these influences are discontinuous over time and space. Every place within the Classic Mesoamerican landscape has a unique Teotihuacan story. In the Tuxtla Mountains of southern Veracruz, Mexico, Matacapan, located in the Catemaco Valley, drew heavily upon ideas and symbols fostered at Teotihuacan, while Totocapan, a peer political capital located in the neighboring Tepango Valley, emphasized social institutions well-entrenched within Gulf Coast cultural traditions. Through a detailed comparison of these two river valleys, I demonstrate that each polity developed along different trajectories. By the Middle Classic (450-650 CE) each polity displayed different political, economic, and ritual institutions. While they shared an underlying material culture style, the data suggest that the regimes of both polities promoted a different ideology. These cultural divergences did not, however, cause hostilities between them. To the contrary, compositional sourcing of Coarse Orange jars indicates that they engaged in material exchanges with each other. Agents at each settlement within the study region made unique decisions with regard to their involvement in local, regional, and macroregional interaction networks, particularly with regard to the adoption or rejection of Teotihuacan cultural elements. As a result, the Classic period Tuxtlas comprised multiple overlapping, but disjoint, landscapes of interaction. Places of human settlement were nodes on the landscape where these disjoint landscapes intersected in space and time. By examining these disjunctures, world-system studies can reveal a trend of increasing cultural diversity that parallels the better-theorized trend of homogenization emphasized by core-periphery models. In this dissertation, I take the initial steps toward developing an archaeology of disjuncture that examines the cultural variability that develops where groups across the landscape employ different strategies of interaction within the world-system.

The Green River region of western Kentucky has been a focus of Archaic period research since 1915. Currently, the region is playing an important role in discussions of Archaic hunter-gatherer cultural complexity. Unfortunately, many of the larger Green River sites contain several archaeological components ranging from the Early to Late Archaic periods. Understanding culture change requires that these multiple components somehow be sorted and addressed individually. Detailed re-analyses of Works Progress Administration (WPA) era artifact collections from two archaeological sites in the Green River region – the Baker (15Mu12) and Chiggerville (15Oh1) shell middens – indicate that these sites are relatively isolated Middle and Late Archaic components, respectively. The relatively unmixed character of Baker and Chiggerville makes these sites excellent candidates for evaluating aspects of complexity during the Archaic. After developing a theoretical basis for evaluating the relative complexity of the social organization of the Baker and Chiggerville site inhabitants on the basis of the material record they left behind, I employ detailed analyses of the bone, antler, and stone tools from these two sites to examine six microscalar aspects of complexity – technological organization, subsistence, specialization, leadership, communication networks, and exchange. These microscalar aspects of complexity all can be linked materially to the archaeological record of the Green River region and can be evaluated as proxies for changes in social organization among the hunter-gatherers who inhabited this region during the Middle and Late Archaic periods. Although the Baker assemblage indicated greater complexity in communication networks and certain proxies for leadership and technological organization, most indicators suggest that the Chiggerville site inhabitants were the more complexly organized group and were in the process of developing a tribal-like social formation. This research, therefore, tentatively supports the hypothesis of increasing complexity through time during the Archaic. However, marked differences in the technological strategies utilized by the Baker and Chiggerville site inhabitants indicates these groups may not have been historically related, thereby violating one of the primary assumptions of the project. If this alternative hypothesis is confirmed through additional research, then no conclusions concerning change through time can be derived from this study.

Although the Mississippian culture area has been studied for decades, the frontier of the Mississippian region is less understood. Various Mississippian frontiers appear to have been important for the obtainment of trade goods which were important symbols of chiefly power. Studying these frontiers will allow archaeologists to better understand the emergence and maintenance of power within Southeastern chiefdoms. This dissertation explores one frontier site, Carter Robinson (44LE10) in southwestern Virginia, and its role in Southern Appalachian chiefdom power through its control of trade at the border. This research identifies ceramic and non-utilitarian markers of trade and identifies changes at the frontier site over time, an accumulation of power that occurred through control of trade.

Ceramic material culture recovered from archaeological sites has more to offer the researcher than placing the site or strata into a cultural historic timeline. By examining the characteristics of ceramics manufactured during the Woodland Period in southern Kentucky, this thesis answers questions related to the behavior of the potters who lived and worked there. Using the theoretical basis of ceramic ecology and technological choice, this thesis examines the choices made by the potters of two sites, the Long (15Ru17) and Rowena (15Ru10) sites, located along the Cumberland River in Russell County, Kentucky. The two sites are also compared to one another and similar assemblages in the Upper Cumberland River Valley, in terms of temporal occupation and utilization of tempering resources. Ultimately, the potters who occupied the Long and Rowena sites during the Woodland Period used locally available materials to temper their clay, even as they emulated other ceramic types. In terms of the two sites themselves, it appears that while they were not occupied by the same population of potters, they did employ similar tempering agents and stylistic types. Examining the behavior of potters who occupied these two sites informs the researcher about the behavior of the larger region of the Upper Cumberland Valley.

This study examines bifacial technology change at the Knob Creek site (12HR484) in Harrison County, Indiana, from the Late Archaic to Early Woodland periods. Through a statistical and attribute analysis of 2,620 lithic flakes it was possible to detect changes in the lithic reduction process over time. The analysis demonstrates that soft-hammer percussion becomes more prevalent during the Early Woodland component of the site. This is a significant change from the hard-hammer percussion industry of the Lower Late Archaic. The Terminal Archaic Riverton component in this study offers one of the few detailed flake-by-flake analyses for this poorly understood lithic tradition originally identified by Winters (1969) in the Wabash River Valley.

Variation in domestic architecture results from the agency households exercise in their daily lives. This study defines the domestic expression of the megalithic architectural style, based on data collected in and around the ancient Maya site of Ucí, Yucatan, Mexico, by comparing it to its expression in monumental structures. It also shows how the analysis and documentation of architectural variability away from the monumental core can locate more than just commoners and elites within the social organization of the Ancient Maya. This analyzes provides evidence for higher social status for households that possess megalithic architecture since they also possess larger platform volumes and more structures in a compound than non-megalithic groups. Concentration of megalithic platforms also indicate potential communities that often share similar orientation ranges. The diversity in style, size, and quality of stones in domestic settings provide archaeologists with clues to how these households differentially utilized their social, economic, and political resources reflecting the degree of power possessed by each household in relation to each other, the larger community, and beyond. The methodology used here can be replicated for other stone architectures, providing a means by which to differentiate households of similar construction on attributes other than size.

The process of defining heritage is fraught with the inequalities of social and political power concomitant with colonialism. As a result, disenfranchised and marginalized groups worldwide have been given little say in heritage matters until recently. Though often perceived as "experts" on the past, archaeologists are just one of many stakeholders with interests in how the past is used in the present. As such, archaeologists today face the challenge of decolonizing heritage work through engagement with diverse stakeholder communities. In this dissertation, I explore the ways that archaeologists have been working at this over the last two decades through a variety of community-based approaches to the archaeological dimensions of heritage work. I propose a multi-stakeholder model--what I call a "poly-communal approach"-- that builds on and address several shortcomings I identify in these efforts. This approach engages diverse local and non-local stakeholders in collective heritage work that aims to restructure traditional power relationships in archaeological projects. I explicate this approach and, through a case study, evaluate its effectiveness as a tool for decolonizing practice and dominant histories. The case study focuses on the social relationships of multiple stakeholders (Native American descendant communities, heritage institutions, archaeologists, landowners, avocational archaeologists, local residents, and scholars) catalyzed by the archaeology of a seventeenth-century Native American site in Deerfield, Massachusetts. The site, believed to be a fortified place of Pocumtuck peoples, plays a critical role in the dominant English and early American colonial history commemorated in the town for a century. The Pocumtuck Fort is popularly, though inaccurately, believed to be the last place the Pocumtuck lived before they "disappeared" just prior to the first English settlement in Deerfield and this dominant narrative has contributed to historical erasures of Native American peoples in the New England interior. Here, I combine a poly-communal approach to heritage work, archaeological research, and current fieldwork in this case study. I conclude that poly-communal heritage work, like that of the Pocumtuck Fort Archaeology and Stewardship project, can transform sites of historical erasures to places that mobilize and facilitate intercultural discourse and action, demonstrating that heritage and the power to mobilize the past can be shared.

The purpose of this thesis was to identify the different patterns of food consumption across space and time at Liangchengzhen, a Longshan (ca. 2600-1900 B.C.) site located in Shandong Province, China. The primary hypothesis of the research contended that evidence of increasing social inequality with respect to food consumption would be found from early to late phases at Liangchengzhen. In addition, rice and meat from mammals, especially pigs, were hypothesized as the most likely types of prestigious foods for daily and ritual activities. Fish and marine foods in general were hypothesized to be foods that average households could obtain since Liangchengzhen was close to the sea and would not have as high a value as mammal meat. Pottery was sampled from Early Phase storage/trash and ritual pits as well as Late Phase storage/trash and ritual pits located in Excavation Area One. Pottery types included ding and guan, hypothesized for cooking meat, and yan, hypothesized for steaming vegetables and grains. Lipid residue analysis was performed using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GCMS) to quantify the amount of C15 and C17 alkane peaks in the pottery and compare these quantities to the amount of C15 and C17 alkane peaks in terrestrial and marine food reference sources. Results indicated that socially valued food consumption transitioned from marine food sources in the early phase ritual pits to rice and pig in the late phase ritual pits. Millet and plant residues were consistently present in storage/trash pits from both early and late phases. Findings also indicated that the use of pottery types for cooking were not limited to one source, i.e., marine, rice, millet and plant residues were found in all pottery types while pig residues were found in ding and yan pottery. Results of the lipid residue analysis provide partial support of increasing social inequality with respect to food consumption from early to late phases at Liangchengzhen, The findings from the lipid residue analysis in this thesis more closely resemble the distribution of integrative, communal consumption pattern in the early phase and a hierarchical consumption pattern during the late phase. Fish, more abundant in the early phase, was almost non-existent by the late phase. Pig and rice, hypothesized as preferred foods, were found only during the late phase, primarily in the ritual pit, H31. Millet and plant were conspicuously present during both phases, but had greater separation from ritual pits during the late phase. However, these findings are surprising since it does not match the material remains of rice and pig found in early phase pits or late phase storage/trash pits from Excavation Area One. It can be concluded that patterns of consumption at Liangchengzhen changed substantially from the early phase to the late phase with regards to food residues found in hypothesized ritual pits. Considering these data with the understanding that food in China has historically been used as a tool to wield influence and power, it can be hypothesized that a social hierarchy may have developed by the late phase that was not present during the early phase. However, participation in the activities held in late phase ritual pits may have been inclusive for all Liangchangzhen residents rather than exclusive for higher status individuals. The current research provides a starting point for further investigation into the foodways at Liangchengzhen. This thesis is the first systematic study of food residues from the interior of Neolithic vessels from ancient China that relates the results of the residue analysis to patterns of food consumption and social change.

Geoarchaeology -- Pre-Clovis archaeology -- Site search strategies.

The results of an archaeological survey of North Cottonwood Canyon, San Juan County, southeastern Utah, are herein reported. The purpose and background leading up to the survey are followed by a physical description of the canyon and a description of the 36 archaeological sites recorded. The cultural material collected and/or observed at the sites, including architecture, ceramics, and other miscellaneous artifacts, is described and discussed. This is followed by a distributional analysis between sites. This includes altitude, slope, water resources, and vegetation. Cultural materials in North Cottonwood Canyon are then compared with materials from related areas, including Montezuma Canyon, Beef Basin, Salt Creek, Indian Creek, Cedar Mesa, Hammond Canyon, and Glen Canyon. This is followed by the Conclusion, which discusses the time periods the canyon was inhabited, the lifeway of the prehistoric inhabitants, and some possibilities for further work that hopefully will be conducted in the canyon at a future date.