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Abstract This paper reports the results of an archaeological survey and test excavation conducted in one of the ancient megalithic stele sites in south Ethiopia, Sakaro Sodo. The Sakaro Sodo stele site is situated in Gedeo zone, which is known to have the largest number and highest concentration of megalithic stele monuments in Africa, with an estimate of more than 10,000 stelae in sixty or more sites. Prior to our work, only one absolute date was available (850 ± 40 BP) (Joussaume 2012) from a stele site in the Gedeo zone, suggesting stele sites began to be constructed in the region approximately a millennium ago. We report here new AMS dates suggesting that stelae were being emplaced about 2000 BP, pushing the creation of these monuments back at least a millennium. Additionally, we report preliminary findings from characterizing the geochemical properties of obsidian artifacts recovered from stele sites, and stone used to make stelae. While compositional analysis of obsidian suggests long-distance movement of material from sources located in northern Kenya, petrographic microscopy and electron microprobe analyses show a strong connection of stelae to local geological tuff exposures/sources.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that ancestral Pueblo people living in the central Mesa Verde region of the U.S. Southwest maintained long-distance contacts with other Pueblo peoples. Questions of Pueblo interactions through time and across space have traditionally been addressed using ceramic sourcing data. This research uses obsidian source data to argue that, from A.D. 600 to 920, residents of the central Mesa Verde region obtained obsidian from throughout the U.S. northern Southwest, but that from A.D. 1060 to 1280 they acquired obsidian almost exclusively from the Jemez Mountains area of north-central New Mexico. In addition, importation of obsidian from the Pajarito Plateau increased during the period of population decline in the Mesa Verde region, and population expansion on the Pajarito. Characteristics of the obsidian assemblage from central Mesa Verde region sites also suggest that Jemez obsidian entered the region primarily in the form of finished arrows, arrow points, and arrow-point preforms. We argue that these patterns reflect return migration by early immigrants from the Mesa Verde region to the northern Rio Grande, an early stage in the development of a migration stream between the two regions.

Two processes characterize the later precontact history (twelfth-fourteenth centuries) of the northern part of the American Southwest: aggregation of people into large towns and depopulation of large regions. These processes have been explained as the result of environmental, economic, and social factors, including drought and warfare. Using a theoretical perspective based on Pauketat’s “historical processualism,” we argue that aggregation and depopulation are partly the result of historical developments surrounding the expansion and collapse of the Chaco regional system. We present our understanding of the Chaco regional system from the perspective of historical processualism; then, historical developments in the northern San Juan and Cibola regions-northern and southern frontiers of the Chaco world-are compared. The northern San Juan\"s historically close ties with Chaco Canyon, the post-Chaco regional center at Aztec, and other factors ultimately resulted in the region’s depopulation. In the Cibola region, ties with Chaco were more tenuous and use of Chacoan ideology appears to have been strongest in the post-Chaco era, though no post-Chaco regional center emerged. Instead, large towns developed. Built on novel combinations of independent histories, ritual, and experience with Chaco, large towns enhanced stability. They were encountered by early Spanish explorers and some persist to the present day.

This paper reports the results of an archaeological survey and test excavation conducted in one of the ancient megalithic stele sites in south Ethiopia, Sakaro Sodo. The Sakaro Sodo stele site is situated in Gedeo zone, which is known to have the largest number and highest concentration of megalithic stele monuments in Africa, with an estimate of more than 10,000 stelae in sixty or more sites. Prior to our work, only one absolute date was available (850 ± 40 BP) (Joussaume 2012) from a stele site in the Gedeo zone, suggesting stele sites began to be constructed in the region approximately a millennium ago. We report here new AMS dates suggesting that stelae were being emplaced about 2000 BP, pushing the creation of these monuments back at least a millennium. Additionally, we report preliminary findings from characterizing the geochemical properties of obsidian artifacts recovered from stele sites, and stone used to make stelae. While compositional analysis of obsidian suggests longdistance movement of material from sources located in northern Kenya, petrographic microscopy and electron microprobe analyses show a strong connection of stelae to local geological tuff exposures/sources.

Largo Gap is one of several late Pueblo II (a.d. 1050-1130) Chaco-style great houses located in the southern Cibola region of west-central New Mexico. This region is at the interface of two Southwestern cultural areas: Mogollon and Pueblo. We report results of survey and excavation research at the Largo Gap great house and associated community to explore the role great houses in this region served for local populations, as well as their articulation with other great houses across the \"Chaco Sphere.\" The results identify Largo Gap as an architecturally \"Chacoan\" structure and that use of this structure incorporated both Mogollon and Puebloan material culture. The use of ceramics from both ancestral culture groups indicates that the local community was multi-ethnic, and suggests a socially-integrative role for the great house within this region.

Micro-seriation using attributes of decorated ceramics has been shown to accurately refine intrasite and intersite relative dating. Using data from Pueblo de los Muertos, a nucleated town in west-central New Mexico, this presentation demonstrates that micro-seriation of type frequencies produces equally accurate results. Typological analysis also provides substantial time savings when compared to attribute recording. Additionally, using types with established temporal ranges permits linkage of relative seriation with absolute dates. A combination of correspondence analysis and k-means cluster analysis was found to provide sound and easily interpretable results. The results of a typological seriation of Pueblo de los Muertos deposits are examined, and the utility of typological seriation for other contexts is considered.

The following archaeological studies researching the southwest of North Americca from 1200 to 1450 AD are reviewed : (1) \"Casas Grandes and its Hinterland : prehistoric regional organization in northwest Mexico,\" by Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis (University of Arizona Press, 2001); (2) \"Homol'ovi III : a pueblo hamlet in the middle Little Colorado River Valley, Arizona,\" edited by E. Charles Adams (Arizona State Museum/University of Arizona Press, 2001); and (3) \"Homol'ovi : an ancient Hopi settlement cluster,\" by Adams (University of Arizona Press, 2002).

This paper applies the method of stylistic flake analysis of to the analysis of debitage from two middens from Cox Ranch Pueblo, a late Pueblo II (ca. 1050-1130) period habitation site in west-central New Mexico. Previous research has suggested the multiethnic nature of site occupation based on the presence of two distinct methods for the manufacture of utilitarian ceramics and the site's location at the interface of two of the Southwest's traditional culture areas. This study samples debitage from two of the largest middens, each associated with a residential roomblock at the site, to determine if any of the stylistic trends found among the ceramic artifacts could be detected within the debitage from the site. Results show that there are in fact two different styles of flint knapping at the site, though both styles are present within each of the two midden assemblages. It is concluded that these two stylistic groups may relate to the two ethnic groups suggested to have co-resided at the site.