This chapter presents a worldwide summary of island colonization by preindustrial peoples and a history of who colonized what and when. It describes three geometrical properties of islands that affect the probability of settlement: (1) island distance, (2) configuration, and (3) area. This leads to the question of whether islands were reached accidentally or on purpose and to the theory of autocatalysis as a suggested key to waves of island colonization. Island distributions in the world's various oceans affected the degree to which the people living around those oceans developed maritime skills. The chapter then explores some consequences of competition between human populations occupying islands. It also discusses three phenomena that may develop as an island is colonized: (1) niche shifts, (2) beachhead bottlenecks, and (3) degradation of island environments.

This chapter discusses some of the principles behind archaeobotanical analysis. Archaeobotany is the art and science of recovering, identifying, and interpreting plant remains from archaeological sites. Some authors prefer to call the discipline paleoethnobotany, stressing the relationships between past cultures and the plant kingdom. The chapter focuses on the preserved traces of ancient food plants and also describes other types of botanical remains, including fibers, wood, charcoal, pollen, and plant crystals. The formal study of plant remains from archaeological sites can be traced back to at least 1826 when Kunth published an analysis of mummified cereals, fruits, and seeds from dry Egyptian tombs (Kunth 1826). Other pioneering efforts in archaeobotany also focused on sites with exceptional organic preservation. Archaeobatany has undergone a methodological revolution with the adoption of flotation as a tool for recovering small charred plant remains. Concurrent with the wider application of flotation, archaeobotany is also undergoing a theoretical revolution.

This chapter discusses those methodological and theoretical problems that are of greatest concern to shell midden archaeologists. Archaeologists dealing with problems posed by shell middens often seem oblivious of substantial contributions made in previous work—understandably so, because the published literature of this subdiscipline is voluminous and has never been adequately synthesized. As a consequence, many archaeologists have busied themselves with reinventing the wheel, rediscovering useful methods or cogent explanations originally developed years before. While shell middens offer exceptional opportunities to study certain aspects of food gathering, they are by no means exclusively the product of hunting and gathering societies. The chapter reviews ethnographic and ethnohistoric data on shellfish gathering by members of many types of societies, whether primarily dependent on food gathering or food production, to the extent possible given the often incomplete nature of such sources. The chapter presents a comparison of the salient characteristics of different molluscan exploitative strategies and presents some hypotheses relating to the origins, maintenance, and decline of intensive molluscan exploitation.

This chapter discusses the use and misuse of 19th century English and American ceramics in archaeological analysis. It also discusses several topics that should interest archaeologists who have not had much experience in analyzing historical period pottery and porcelain. These include (1) published sources useful for background information, (2) the concept of ware and problems in using the concept, (3) how pottery was decorated and the dates for different methods of decoration, and (4) sources for the identification of various backmarks. Without adequate knowledge of the ceramic materials, that is, knowledge that permits correct identification, analytical results obviously will be seriously flawed. This is not an infrequent occurrence in historical archaeology, and it has hampered otherwise well-thought-out studies of time-and-space systematics, studies of formation processes, and at the highest level, studies of human behavior. There are several temporal and spatial limits to this study. The chapter discuses ceramic materials manufactured in the Great Britain and the United States between approximately 1800 and 1900, because these are arbitrary limits that crosscut several important trends in ceramic manufacturing and marketing.

This chapter reviews the strategies for paleoenvironmental reconstruction in archaeology. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction in archaeology is the description of change in the physical and biological contexts of human existence. It is an aspect of, and an essential precursor to, paleoecology, the study of environmental relationships in the past. A productive archaeological approach to the reconstruction of paleoenvironments requires fundamentally an understanding that environmental determinism is neither the inspiration nor the goal. Once past that barrier, there need be no apology for undertaking environmental studies within a framework of ecological theory. Ecological hypotheses are not intrinsically better than other hypotheses, but they certainly are extraordinarily useful in providing the understanding of the past. It is the scientific productivity of the ecological perspective on human lives that has fascinated archaeologists and that should continue to challenge them to explore the past with imagination tempered with rigor and impartiality. The goal is knowledge of fully human responses to environmental stressors and opportunities, which cannot be achieved unless those are understood in their diversity.

This chapter describes weathering to mean any alteration that occurs to the surface of a material as a consequence of chemical interactions with its atmospheric, aquatic, or soil environment. The resulting surface is often referred to as patina. The international emphasis on the safe disposal of nuclear waste materials has provided the funds and interest required to develop a scientific understanding of weathering. Future problems of chemical waste disposal and acid rain promise to maintain the momentum in this important area of research. The understanding of weathering has been significantly enhanced by the availability of routine surface-analytical equipment capable of submicrometer spatial resolution. New instrumentation can provide assistance in the interpretation of materials from archaeological sites, including how they are transformed through time. One must also keep in mind that the interpretation of data obtained from these techniques relies heavily on the understanding obtained from a variety of archaeological analyses. Previous knowledge on the part of the archaeologist about prehistoric contexts is important in the ability to interpret intelligently the data that result from the application of instrumental techniques. The collaboration of archaeologists, materials scientists, and surface scientists has provided the necessary cross-fertilization to produce a fundamental understanding of the weathering problem. Archaeologists, although interested in weathering for different reasons, have helped to confirm the findings of the materials scientists.

This chapter reviews the two major goals of butchery analysis within an historic context of several decades ago. It focuses on analytic techniques that have been and are being used to identify the hominid taphonomic agent in butchery analyses. It presents a brief description of how butchering patterns are infer. It also presents an explicitly taphonomic approach to the analysis of butchery in an attempt to integrate analytical techniques and goals into a coherent whole. The chapter also presents an example of butchery analysis that illustrates the explicitly taphonomic approach. It also explores the more recent attempts aimed specifically at identifying the taphonomic agents involved in faunal processing.

Museums around the world hold countless ethnographic and archaeological artifacts, objects that have been analyzed and are waiting to be reanalyzed in light of recent theoretical advances. Several scholars, including Kroeber (1954), Collier and Fenton (1965), Fenton (1974), and Ford (1977), have pointed out that although museum collections are invaluable for anthropological research, the anthropological community has not been making effective use of these resources since the 1930s. Reasons for this lack of use are many and varied. This chapter describes another reason for the lack of use of museum collections—most researchers have understood neither the procedures employed in making the collections nor the assumptions and decisions that surrounded and informed their construction. The chapter describes some basic principles of museum collecting and of the use of objects in museums. It also explores the collecting activities of one institution in a particular time and place—collecting by the Smithsonian Institution in the American Southwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries— to document the processes of museum collection, to illustrate that no ethnographic collection contains a random sample of objects, and to show that the collections that resulted are better for some research problems than others.

This chapter presents an approach to decipher depositional histories. A useful approach to decipher depositional histories would be to treat the record (in its entirety) as a sedimentological deposit. All components could then be described in sedimentological terms (attributes) and according to the rules established in the geological code of stratigraphic nomenclature, which would allow the archaeologist to determine the contribution of biological (cultural) agents and natural agents in archaeological deposits. A sedimentological deposit is a single sedimentation unit formed under essentially constant physical conditions with constant delivery of the same material during deposition. The material contained in the deposit is called sediment. Each individual sedimentary particle can have a unique depositional history related to its source, transport agent, environment of deposition, and postdepositional alteration. Attributes of the sedimentary particles that can be used to interpret depositional history are texture, composition, and structures. Sedimentary particles are grouped in deposits because the sources, agents of transport, and depositional environments were constant for a sufficiently long period of time to allow them to accumulate.

This chapter discusses the use and abuse of the world systems theory. Fried's concept of a pristine social formation or society considered almost in isolation from other societies has been criticized as never operative or too ideal and misleading a type to be useful. Whether one prefers to refer to peer polity, cluster, or some other form of intersocietal interaction, the basic fact remains that the development or cultural evolution of any society is dependent upon its relations with other societies; that cultures are open, not closed, systems; and that studies, be they based on excavations of a site or settlement data from surveys of precisely defined, well-demarcated, but bounded areas, that fail to consider broader patterns of interaction are necessarily incomplete and partial. The modern world system is distinguished by primarily economic as opposed to political, cultural, or presumably even ideological linkages among its constituent parts. Political diversity, primacy of the economic sphere, and control and development of a technology capable of supporting and expanding such a system are the critical variables, according to Wallerstein, that distinguish the modern era from ancient and medieval times. The modern world system is also characterized by a highly complex global division of labor that results in major regional differences; some areas become exporters of primary resources, while others produce and successfully market.