Palynology is a long established and respected branch of environmental science that has been applied to criminal investigation in a meaningful way only in recent years. It has proved to be remarkably versatile in many kinds of criminal enquiry. It is not, however, an absolute science; palynological data are on a par with the suites of symptoms which allow medical practitioners to make diagnoses...

The Mexica Empire reached an outstanding social, economic and politic organization among Mesoamerican civilizations. Even though archaeology and history provide substantial information about their past, their biological origin and the demographic consequences of their settlement in the Central Valley of Mexico remain unsolved. Two main hypotheses compete to explain the Mexica origin: a social r...

ALFRED L. ROSENBERGER,* GREGG F. GUNNELL, AND RUSSELL L. CIOCHON Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, New York Department of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate Center, New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP), New York, New York Department of Mammalogy, American Museum of Natural History, New York, Ne...

■ Abstract During the Mississippian period (A.D. 1000–1500) the southeastern United States witnessed a broadscale fluorescence of polities characterized by impressive earthwork construction, rich mortuary offerings, and intensified agriculture. Research on the nature of complexity in these so-called chiefdoms has been an enduring issue in North American archaeology, even as this research has un...

– Geophysical survey in Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. Ground-Penetrating Radar and electrostatic for urban archaeology. archaeology a complex polluted environment.

The foundations of archaeology are both conceptual and methodological. Key concepts are associated with several “structures of inquiry” and with constructions used to define and organize archaeological data. The methodological foundations of archaeology are found in fieldwork and other ways of gathering archaeological data and in the approaches used to analyze and interpret archaeological data ...

*Received 7 February 2005; accepted 12 May 2005. †Corresponding author: Dr Salvatore Siano, Istituto di Fisica Applicata ‘Nello Carrara’—CNR, Sede: Elettronica Quantistica, Via Madonna del Piano snc, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy. Tel. +39-055-5225310; fax +39-055-5225305; email [email protected] © University of Oxford, 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK ARCH rchaeometry 0003-813X © Uni...

Archaeologists wishing to interpret the meanings of artifacts, both symbolic and functional, have increasingly drawn from Saussureinspired linguistic models as a way to ‘read’ the archaeological record. Such models, however, may not be appropriate for a number of reasons, and should be discarded in favor of a discourse-centered approach, which investigates meaning through practice, currently ga...

The hegemonic-type empires of ancient Mesoamerica are difficult to study archaeologically because they left fewer material traces than more territorially organized empires such as the Inka or Roman cases. We present a material culture model for the identification of such empires using archaeological data. The model, based upon Michael Doyle’s analytical approach to imperialism, is developed fro...