Radiocarbon (14C) activity in aquatic environments is usually different from that of the atmosphere, the result being that organisms that grow in these different environments will have different 14C ages, even though they are contemporary. This age offset in marine samples is known as the “marine reservoir effect.” The marine calibration curve takes this effect into account as a global approximation, but local variations due to ocean dynamics and other factors must be individually studied and corrected for. With a littoral of more than 11,000 km and a great interest in dating malacological marine samples, Mexico has scarce local reservoir effect studies. Most of the available data come from studies done in the 1960s and 1990s. In this study, we present new reservoir effect corrections for four sites in the Pacific Ocean with positive ΔR values as expected, and one from the Caribbean Sea with a negative average value of ΔR. The results were obtained by dating known-age shells from the malacological collection of the Natural History Museum Felipe Poey, in Havana, Cuba. This new data will be useful to do more precise reservoir effect corrections to malacological samples of the region, with special interest in contexts where it is difficult to date other kinds of organic samples, due to difficulties in their preservation.

This study advocates for shifting archaeological praxes to ones that include ecological heritage—biotic features of a landscape that hold cultural, educational, and historical significance. Historically, archaeologists have tended to overlook ecological heritage, such as “living sites,” emphasizing built heritage and manufactured tools and features over ecosystems shaped and stewarded by people. We bring together archaeological, ecological, and archival data, combined with the memories of Sts’ailes Elders and knowledge holders, to document the long-term history of one anthropogenic landscape in Sts’ailes territory of southwestern British Columbia. Our data show that people shaped and enhanced local vegetation processes over time, resulting in forest garden ecosystems that continue to grow both within and outside of other archaeological evidence of past lives lived. By tracing the historical ecology of a single locale over three millennia, we consider the extent to which ecological heritage such as forest gardens can be documented, analyzed, reimagined, and revitalized in community contexts as continuously living and used sites.

A dramatic increase of small (“arrow-sized”) points, typically beginning after about 2,000 years ago (depending on locality), has often been characterized as marking the introduction of the bow and arrow throughout the Americas, eventually replacing earlier dart-and-atlatl weaponry in most areas. We analyze a large point assemblage from sites in the central Willamette Valley of western Oregon with a 6,000-year-long cultural record. We easily sorted the assemblage into small (“arrow-sized”) and large (“dart-sized”) sets using standard metrics, but we noted extreme temporal overlap, suggesting that (1) atlatls and bows continued in regular use as companion weapons; (2) both large and small projectile tips were affixed to arrows, depending on the target; or (3) there was some combination of these factors. Given the range of point forms, it appears that some served specialized functions (e.g., social conflict, hunting conditions, prey type), suggesting that the uses of stone-tipped weaponry may be more nuanced than has generally been acknowledged. Consequently, we find that assigning points to specific weapon systems requires assumptions we cannot support.

Drinking culture. What happens in the field. It was just a joke. Don’t rock the boat. Archaeology staggers under the weight of its many “gray zones,” contexts of disciplinary culture where boundaries, relationships, ethical responsibilities, and expectations of behavior are rendered “blurry.” Gray zones rely on an ethos of silence and tacit cooperation rooted in structures of white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. In the gray zone, subtle and overt forms of abuse become coded as normal, inevitable, impossible, or the unfortunate cost of entry to the discipline. Drawing on narrative survey responses and interviews collected by the Working Group on Equity and Diversity in Canadian Archaeology in 2019 and 2020, we examine the concept of the gray zone in three intersecting contexts: the field, archaeology’s drinking culture, and relationships. The work of making archaeology more equitable relies on our ability to confront gray zones directly and collectively. We offer several practical recommendations while recognizing that bureaucratic solutions alone will not be sufficient. Change will require a shift in archaeological culture—a collective project that pulls gray zones into the open and prioritizes principles of care.