The effects of differential recovery have been documented and discussed for almost a century. Screening experiments using comparative collections are one avenue for understanding recovery bias because they develop expectations about what is likely to be recovered. In this study, modern reference specimens of Pacific Island fish were screened through 1/4 inch (6.4 mm) and 1/8 inch (3.2 mm) mesh....

Archaeological data collection is based on the description of archaeological contexts. An archaeological excavation demolishes the original matrix within which the cultural material is found and special care is taken to record spatial context. Each artifact is described in terms of its physical and spatial properties as well as its relation to the matrix (for example soil composition). As sever...

Unlike Egypt, Iraq accommodated not one but two provincial identities, the Assyrian and the Babylonian. Both cultures had of course suffered violent destruction on their fall a thousand years before the Arab conquests as Nabopolassar and the Medes turned Assyria into ' heaps and ruins' in 612 B.C. so Xerxes razed the walls of Babylon, expropriated its citizens and turned its god into bullion af...

Measuring trends in the size of prehistoric populations is fundamental to our understanding of the demography of ancient people and their responses to environmental change. Archaeologists commonly use the temporal distribution of radiocarbon dates to reconstruct population trends, but this can give a false picture of population growth because of the loss of evidence from older sites. We demonst...

Recent discourse in archaeological theory has highlighted that the discipline’s approach to existence and materiality is firmly entrenched in traditions of modern thought (Thomas 1996, 2004; Tilley 2004). It has also been shown that archaeological methodology has a tendency to be used as an interpretative metaphor by other modern disciplines in the description of their own methodologies (Miller...

The impact of changing climate on terrestrial and underwater archaeological sites, historic buildings, and cultural landscapes can be examined through quantitatively-based analyses encompassing large data samples and broad geographic and temporal scales. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is a multi-institutional collaboration that allows researchers online access to linked...