A recent fluorescence of geophysical and archaeological research in Catholic cemeteries illustrates the benefits and challenges of community-engaged projects. Focusing on four ongoing case studies in coastal Virginia and Maryland (the Chesapeake region)—St. Mary’s Basilica (Norfolk, Virginia); Brent Cemetery (Stafford County, Virginia); Sacred Heart Church (Prince George’s County, Maryland); and St. Nicholas Cemetery (St. Mary’s County, Maryland)—this article explores a variety of archaeological strategies in the context of community engagement. These approaches are shaped by the physical characteristics of cemetery sites, the Catholic diocesan or church communities that oversee them, and the African American descendant communities affected by them. The built environment of cemeteries highlights the way that racism and segregation have shaped both the landscape and public memory of Catholic cemeteries in the Chesapeake region.

When evaluating competing hypotheses in archaeology, researchers frequently invoke the principle of parsimony, which states that simpler hypotheses should be preferred. However, the criteria for measuring simplicity and the rationale for labeling a hypothesis as most parsimonious often remain unclear. More broadly, the epistemic merit of parsimony and its relevance to archaeological reasoning are generally assumed but rarely clarified. This article explores how archaeologists use parsimony in ethnographic analogy and formal model selection. In the first context, it is usually uncertain how simplicity should be measured or why increased simplicity raises the plausibility of an ethnographic analogy. We contend that discussions of ethnographic analogy are better characterized under inference to the best explanation, where parsimony is only one heuristic among others. In the second context, simplicity is assessed by the relative complexity, rather than the quantity, of postulates in a model. This approach to parsimony, which does track plausibility under certain conditions, helps prevent false positives in archaeological interpretation. However, it also heightens the risk of rejecting alternative, complex causes. We argue that parsimony can aid in evaluating the relative likelihood of competing models and, more importantly, serve as a guide to clarify the complex histories of archaeological phenomena.

In this article, we seek to engage concretely with feminist and antiracist dialogues by exploring experiences of Latina archaeologists living and working in the United States, a group whose contributions, experiences, and challenges in the field have remained undertheorized to date. In this qualitative analysis of nine semi-structured interviews conducted in 2023 with Latina archaeologists, we consider historical structural factors that have suppressed representation of Latinas in archaeology; through their stories, we explore barriers and experiences that uniquely affect this group within the discipline, including familismo (familialism), cultural taxation, disenfranchisement, and harassment. Although much work remains to be done to move archaeology toward restorative justice, our goal by centering the experiences of Latinas is to add to conversations that have already emerged in archaeology and anthropology about the extractivist colonial legacies of our discipline and the various impacts of sexism, gender-based violence, white supremacy, and other hegemonic practices. We conclude with suggestions for how the archaeological discipline can change for the better and become more inclusive and equitable, not only for Latinx scholars but also for those from other historically marginalized groups.

The erosion of coastal archaeological sites is a worldwide heritage crisis. However, regional variability in the archaeological record and the natural environment necessitates localized consideration of the erosion of archaeological sites to facilitate informed research prioritization decisions about coastal cultural resources. In this article, we present and compare the results of recent coastal survey programs from southern Nova Scotia and far northeastern Maine to earlier ones to ascertain the extent of erosion since the mid-twentieth century. We then situate regional erosion in culture-historical terms via a case study from archaeological sites at Sipp Bay, Maine, from which materials were collected and tested in the early to mid-twentieth century. We compare the results of that work to our recent excavations. Finally, we model future sea-level rise scenarios to estimate future site destruction and compare these models between regions. Together, these data illustrate patterns in site preservation for geoarchaeological examination, provide insight into erosion-driven biases in the extant archaeological record, and offer information to guide research prioritization.

By the end of the fourteenth-century AD, Native peoples throughout the midwestern and southeastern regions of North America had withdrawn from major monumental and political centers established in prior centuries. In this article, I present the results of a community-level examination of settlement transformations on the Georgia Coast that I argue are the outcome of this large-scale movement of Mississippian peoples. Specifically, I examine the consequences of the depopulation of the Savannah River Valley, a case of a rapid, historically contingent Mississippian emigration beginning in the fourteenth century AD. My results establish how a large-scale immigration event affected community spatial and political organization and demonstrate that migrants and coastal locals engaged in the collective cultural construction of new identities and lifeways in response to the challenges of negotiating the use of common pool resources, such as fisheries and suitable farmland. Reconstructing the spatial organization of communities can help explain the demographic, economic, and political processes that undergird the cultural materialization of space. Although much remains to be learned about intra-settlement organization at post-Archaic, precolonial sites along the Georgia Coast, this investigation provides new information about the local, community-level spatial response to the fourteenth-century immigration event.

This study applies Bayesian chronological modeling to 16 new AMS radiocarbon dates on short-lived botanical remains and wood-charcoal recovered from the archaeological site Ahatsistari, a seventeenth-century Huron-Wendat village located in Simcoe County in Ontario, Canada. The modeled radiocarbon dates provide an independent time frame for understanding site phase and sequence, compatibility with historically documented events of a known date, and assessment of the socioeconomic and political influences affecting the composition of European trade good assemblages from different sites. We argue that Ahatsistari is likely Carhagouha, the principal village of the northern Attignawantan who were members of the Huron-Wendat Confederacy, and home to Samuel de Champlain and Joseph Le Caron from 1615 to 1616. In addition, Ahatsistari is contemporary with the archaeological site Warminster, which is believed to be Champlain’s Cahiagué. Radiocarbon dates from the archaeological sites of Ahatsistari, Warminster, and Ball are consistent with earlier suppositions for the beginning and end of Glass Bead Period 2 (AD 1600–1625), whereas differences in the composition of the glass trade bead assemblages speak to the prominent role of Ahatsistari in trade with the French and to variable trade relations among other early seventeenth-century Huron-Wendat villages.

Earth oven baking pits are common occurrences within the Indigenous archaeological record of North America, yet archaeologists have paid minimal attention to evaluating how earth oven technology varies over the long term. The extensively sampled record of thermal features from Wyoming represents a unique opportunity to evaluate changes in earth oven technology through time and consider how earth ovens relate to other facets of Indigenous land use and subsistence strategies. This article is based on a sample of nearly 1,300 radiocarbon-dated features dating from 11,000 to 4000 cal BP. It evaluates diachronic shifts in feature morphology from the Early through Middle Holocene. Major changes in earth ovens include increasing size and the use of cook stone, first after 10,000 cal BP and then after 7500 cal BP. The observed variation indicates that Indigenous peoples adapted their cooking technology to address changes in types and quantities of resources processed, as well as changing requirements of the overall adaptive system. Recognizing how the diversity of thermal features and earth ovens change through time and across space allows researchers to ask more specific questions about Indigenous cooking technology, subsistence resources, and the role(s) these features played within broader lifeways.

The transformation of the Birnirk culture into the Thule culture is essential in reconstructing the emergence of modern Inuit across Alaska and the larger Bering Strait. To this end, two adjacent semi-subterranean houses of late Birnirk and early Thule affiliation, respectively, at the Rising Whale (KTZ-304) site at Cape Espenberg were recently excavated and dated by radiocarbon and tree-ring measurements. We present the Bayesian analysis of the resulting large series of dates, demonstrating the lack of contemporaneity between the two features: the Birnirk house was occupied in the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries AD, whereas the occupation of the Thule house occurred in the second half of the thirteenth into the early fourteenth century. With the increased precision made possible by coupling dendrochronology with radiocarbon, our results place the Birnirk-Thule transition more that 200 years later than the generally accepted date of AD 1000. A transition in the second half of the thirteenth century has major implications for the timing of Thule presence along the coast of Alaska and for their migration into the Alaska interior. It aligns with a thirteenth-century migration into the western Canadian Arctic and farther east and a brief early or “initial” Thule period.

In the American Southwest and northern Mexico, it has long been argued that ceramic vessels with exterior surfaces that are covered with small nodes are Datura seed pod effigies. Datura is a genus of flowering plants containing psychoactive alkaloids that, when consumed, can induce hallucinations. Scholars have argued that these noded vessels were part of a ritual complex originating in Mexico and spreading throughout the Southwest. In his 2012 article, Lankford hypothesized that this ritual complex made its way into the southeastern United States based on the presence of the ceramic type Fortune Noded in the Mississippi River Valley. In this article, we evaluate three hypotheses suggested by Lankford. Our absorbed residue study did not support his first hypothesis that Fortune Noded vessels were directly related to Datura consumption. However, existing archaeological data do support the idea that a ritual complex including noded vessels moved through the Caddoan region to the Central Mississippi Valley. Those data also confirm Lankford’s final hypothesis that Datura was used in Mississippian period contexts in the Central Mississippi Valley. We conclude that Lankford’s hypothesis has merit and suggest that noded vessels and other ritual equipment be considered inalienable objects that moved through a network of ritual practitioners.

Despite recent advances in the scholarship of history and architectural history, the practice of urban slavery is distinctly understudied in North American archaeology in contrast to plantation archaeologies. This is due largely to the fundamental challenge of investigating urban households, where many individuals of differing social and economic status (free and unfree, Black and white) occupy the same limited space and dispose of their refuse in shared locations, thereby contributing to a highly mixed archaeological record that is difficult—if not impossible—to parse. However, when the researcher pivots to imagining individual entanglements within a shared material world, new interpretations emerge in the noise and dissonance of urban life. This article considers the narratives of three enslaved individuals (two men and one woman) who lived and labored at 87 Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, during the eighteenth century. Although this is an illuminating approach, traversing archival (archaeological) silences and highlighting individual lives and worlds in the archaeological record demands considerable interpretive caution and care.