This forum engages an emerging discourse around historical reckoning, truth, and reconciliation, asking how these frameworks inform American archaeology and its future. A growing number of archaeologists are now demanding systemic disciplinary transformations that directly address how white supremacy and settler colonialism enact Indigenous dispossession and erasure as well as anti-Blackness, gender discrimination, and ableism. This forum, featuring 10 archaeologists—including a mixture of junior- and senior-level scholars—is organized into thematic dialogues that highlight their different perspectives and experiences within North American cultural heritage management. First, the dialogue interrogates American archaeology’s embeddedness in ethnocentrism and racism. It then looks at different forms of collaboration that actualize anti-colonial critiques and corrections. Next, it compares collaborative methods with broader calls for “un-disciplining” through incorporating non-Western expertise, sensibilities, needs, and interests. In response to systemic forms of racism, colonialism, and neoliberalism within archaeology, the authors discuss how individuals and institutions can work for and with Indigenous and descendant communities to achieve “reclamation,” defined as the assertion of community control over their significant places, ancestors, belongings, and historical narratives. The article concludes with a consideration of how archaeology can be used by communities to ensure their collective futures.

Archaeologists have long investigated the rise of inequality in prehistoric Europe. I argue that images of steadily increasing inequality are usually based on cherry-picking outstanding cases and selectively interpreting the results. Based on a large-scale qualitative assessment of the Central Mediterranean, I make two claims. First, a broad review of evidence suggests that social inequality was not a major organizing principle of most prehistoric societies. Instead, throughout prehistory, inequality formed part of a heterogeneous, heterarchical social order. Second, this was not simply due to historical chance or stagnation. As my outline of the “people’s history” of prehistoric Europe suggests, many of the archaeologically most visible developments in every period were actively aimed at undermining, encapsulating, or directing the potential development of hierarchy. In this sense, Europe’s long prehistory of limited and ambiguous hierarchy does not represent a failure of social evolution but rather widespread success in developing tactics for maintaining equality.

In this article, we explore transformations and continuities in cosmology and cultural landscape structure across Pueblo history in the US Southwest. Many researchers have directly compared the archaeology of the society centered at Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 850–1140) in northwestern New Mexico with ethnographic documentation of Pueblo communities from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This approach makes it difficult to understand how cultural transformation played out in the intervening centuries. Here, we investigate this history by comparing Kin Nizhoni, a Chaco-era Great House community in the Red Mesa Valley, with Wiyo’owingeh, a post-Chacoan community in the Rio Grande Valley. We find that the built environments of both sites expressed similar cosmological principles, but architectural expressions of these concepts became less explicitly marked over time. We also find that this similar cosmology was mapped onto different social structures, with a focus on elite architecture in the Chaco era as opposed to communal dwellings with spatially separated shrines in later Pueblo contexts. We close by proposing a connection between the functions of Chacoan Great Houses and later Pueblo World Quarter Shrines. Overall, our findings underscore the utility of cultural landscape studies for tracing relationships between religion and society across North American Indigenous histories.

The plaza is one of the most important elements of the built environment for bringing people together in the Pueblo World of the US Southwest. Yet, the myriad ways in which plazas were designed and used vary greatly through time. Although plazas have been significant components of Ancestral Pueblo site layouts for hundreds of years, nearly every research study has been based on the enclosed plazas of the Pueblo IV period. In this article, we evaluate variation in 861 plazas from the Pueblo World dating from AD 800 to 1550. Our analysis of settlement size, plaza area, and degrees of plaza accessibility demonstrates that the spacious plazas emblematic of the Pueblo IV period were built to accommodate more people than the resident population, suggesting the origins of the feast-day-type ceremonialism seen in contemporary Pueblo communities. Our analysis suggests that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, because plazas in earlier Chaco great house communities were built to be more exclusionary, and thus activities held within them were more restricted.

The first Coronado expedition site discovered south of Zuni, in Arizona, represents the first European settlement in the American Southwest—a place called Suya (San Geronimo III). Investigations have revealed an impressive assortment of early sixteenth-century artifacts and features. The structured layout is reflected in concentrations of both household- and battle-related artifacts. Artifacts and substantial adobe-and-stone structures indicate a diversity of residential activities and the presence of a sizable and varied group of people who expected to stay. They brought a range of household goods that are not appropriate for a traveling expedition but that are of the type expected in a settled context where social maneuvering and status display characterized daily life. Suya’s occupants had access to a range of European household goods and weaponry, including the most expensive guns (matchlocks, wheel locks, crossbows, bronze cannon). Weapons and ammunition provide evidence of a battle, as do their fragmentary nature and clustered distribution. Documents convey that this was the first successful Native American uprising in the continental United States. This site exhibited attributes characteristic of a Coronado expedition settlement, so viable alternative explanations were sought, including other entradas. Work has proceeded for five years, revealing the richness, extent, and complexity of the site.

Here, we explore variation in a new record of archaeological house-floor sizes from the southwestern United States relative to spatially explicit time series estimates of local precipitation. Our results show that inequality becomes more severe during periods of high precipitation. This supports the theory suggesting that inequality may emerge where resources are dense, predictable, and clumped within heterogenous and circumscribed environments. Our findings indicate that wealth inequality may emerge among populations with similar subsistence adaptations as a result of local socioenvironmental variation.

This paper explores a new direction for archaeological historiography by applying the Yale approach in deconstruction to a selection of archaeological texts discussing the Neolithization process in Norway. Focus is on the cultural-historical research paradigm and publications from the period 1906–38. The analysis discovers that scholars from this period did not consider foragers and farmers to be essential social identities in the past; foragers could become farmers, and farmers could turn back to foraging. Some scholars argued that farming was practiced before the Neolithic period, while others promoted a sense of care and awe towards prehistoric foragers. On the basis of these readings, it is argued that previous accounts of the cultural-historical research paradigm in Norway focused too narrowly on the social contexts of older research. A change of focus from contexts to the texts themselves and how they present the world can explore further the complexity of this research period.

The production and circulation of common wares during the late antique period in North Africa has been largely overlooked by past scholarship, despite their potential to shed light on late antique production, workshop organisation and regional ceramic economies. This paper provides the first detailed study of a distinctive type of late antique, wheelmade common ware, the so-called African ‘painted ware’ (APW). It first presents a critical overview of the distribution of painted wares and their typology, decoration and chronology based on existing publications. It then develops a typology of vessel shapes, but also decoration patterns based on a large, well-preserved assemblage of painted ceramics recently excavated by the DAI, INP and UCL at the archaeological sites of Bulla Regia and Chimtou in the Medjerda valley, Tunisia. To understand the composition, technology and provenance of the wares, petrographic and chemical analysis was conducted on 57 painted sherds from the two sites. The results suggest the existence of a production centre in the Medjerda Valley, with potters using local calcareous clay tempered with sand, while the decoration was obtained using iron-based pigments. Comparison with published painted wares at other sites contributes to an initial insight into regional distribution patterns of the painted ware.