Over the past two decades, the oil sands region of northeastern Alberta has been the site of unprecedented levels of development. Alberta's Lower Athabasca Basin tells a fascinating story of how a catastrophic ice age flood left behind a unique landscape in the Lower Athabasca Basin, one that made deposits of bitumen available for surface mining. Less well known is the discovery that this flood also produced an environment that supported perhaps the most intensive use of boreal forest resources by prehistoric Native people yet recognized in Canada. Studies undertaken to meet the conservation requirements of the Alberta Historical Resources Act have yielded a rich and varied record of prehistoric habitation and activity in the oil sands area. Evidence from between 9,500 and 5,000 years ago—the result of several major excavations—has confirmed extensive human use of the region’s resources, while important contextual information provided by key geological and palaeoenvironmental studies has deepened our understanding of how the region’s early inhabitants interacted with the landscape. Touching on various elements of this rich environmental and archaeological record, the contributors to this volume use the evidence gained through research and compliance studies to offer new insights into human and natural history. They also examine the challenges of managing this irreplaceable heritage resource in the face of ongoing development. Contributors: Alwynne Beaudoin, Angela Younie, Brian O.K. Reeves, Duane Froese, Elizabeth Roberston, Eugene Gryba, Gloria Fedirchuk, Grant Clarke, John W. Ives, Janet Blakey, Jennifer Tischer, Jim Burns, Laura Roskowski, Luc Bouchet, Murray Lobb, Nancy Saxberg, Raymond LeBlanc, Robert R. Young, Robin Woywitka, Thomas V. Lowell, and Timothy Fisher

Stretching from Canada to Texas and the foothills of the Rockies to the Mississippi River, the North American Great Plains have a complex and ancient history. The region has been home to Native peoples for at least 16,000 years. This volume is a synthesis of what is known about the Great Plains from an archaeological perspective, but it also highlights Indigenous knowledge, viewpoints, and concerns for a more holistic understanding of both ancient and more recent pasts. Written for readers unfamiliar with archaeology in the region, the book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series emphasizes connections between past peoples and contemporary Indigenous nations, highlighting not only the history of the area but also new theoretical understandings that move beyond culture history. This overview illustrates the importance of the Plains in studies of exchange, migration, conflict, and sacred landscapes, as well as contact and colonialism in North America. In addition, the volume includes considerations of federal policies and legislation, as well as Indigenous social movements and protests over the last hundred years so that archaeologists can better situate Indigenous heritage, contemporary Indigenous concerns, and lasting legacies of colonialism today.

Documentation, analysis, and explanation of culture change have long been goals of archaeology. Scientific graphs facilitate the visual thinking that allow archaeologists to determine the relationship between variables, and, if well designed, comprehend the processes implied by the relationship. Different graph types suggest different ontologies and theories of change, and particular techniques of parsing temporally continuous morphological variation of artefacts into types influence graph form. North American archaeologists have grappled with finding a graph that effectively and efficiently displays culture change over time. Line graphs, bar graphs, and numerous one-off graph types were used between 1910 and 1950, after which spindle graphs displaying temporal frequency distributions of specimens within each of multiple artefact types emerged as the most readily deciphered diagram. The variety of graph types used over the twentieth century indicate archaeologists often mixed elements of both Darwinian variational evolutionary change and Midas-touch like transformational change. Today, there is minimal discussion of graph theory or graph grammar in introductory archaeology textbooks or advanced texts, and elements of the two theories of evolution are still mixed. Culture has changed, and archaeology provides unique access to the totality of humankind's cultural past. It is therefore crucial that graph theory, construction, and decipherment are revived in archaeological discussion.

The Great Plains has been central to academic and popular visions of Native American warfare, largely because the region’s well-documented violence was so central to the expansion of Euroamerican settlement. However, social violence has deep roots on the Plains beyond this post-Contact perception, and these roots have not been systematically examined through archaeology before. War was part, and perhaps an important part, of the process of ethnogenesis that helped to define tribal societies in the region, and it affected many other aspects of human lives there. In Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, anthropologists who study sites across the Plains critically examine regional themes of warfare from pre-Contact and post-Contact periods and assess how war shaped human societies of the region. Contributors to this volume offer a bird’s-eye view of warfare on the Great Plains, consider artistic evidence of the role of war in the lives of indigenous hunter-gatherers on the Plains prior to and during the period of Euroamerican expansion, provide archaeological discussions of fortification design and its implications, and offer archaeological and other information on the larger implications of war in human history. Bringing together research from across the region, this volume provides unprecedented evidence of the effects of war on tribal societies. Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains is a valuable primer for regional warfare studies and the archaeology of the Great Plains as a whole. Contributors: Peter Bleed, Richard R. Drass, David H. Dye, John Greer, Mavis Greer, Eric Hollinger, Ashley Kendell, James D. Keyser, Albert M. LeBeau III, Mark D. Mitchell, Stephen M. Perkins, Bryon Schroeder, Douglas Scott, Linea Sundstrom, Susan C. Vehik

This collection of essays brings together several different evolutionary perspectives to demonstrate how lithic technological systems are a byproduct of human behavior. The essays cover a range of topics, including human behavioral ecology, cultural transmission, phylogenetic analysis, macroevolution, and various applications of evolutionary ecology.

This monograph summarizes findings from nine seasons of excavation at Barger Gulch Locality B, a Folsom campsite in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Archaeologist Todd A. Surovell explains the spatial organization of the camp and the social organization of the people who lived there.