As the study of Palaeolithic technologies moves towards a more analytical approach, it is necessary to determine a consistent procedural framework. The contributions to this timely and comprehensive volume do just that. This volume incorporates a broad chronological and geographical range of Palaeolithic material from the Lower to Upper Palaeolithic. The focus of this volume is to provide an analysis of Palaeolithic technologies from a quantitative, empirical perspective. As new techniques, particularly quantitative methods, for analyzing Palaeolithic technologies gain popularity, this work provides case studies showcasing these new techniques. Employing diverse case studies, and utilizing multivariate approaches, morphometrics, model-based approaches, phylogenetics, cultural transmission studies, and experimentation, this volume provides insights from international contributors at the forefront of recent methodological advances.

Finely decorated ceramic vessels made for cooking, storage, and serving were a hallmark of Native Caddo cultures. The tradition began as many as 3,000 years ago among Woodland-period ancestors, thrived between c. 800 and 1800, and continues today in the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. In Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Traditions, eighteen experts offer a comprehensive assessment of recent findings about the manufacture and use of Caddo pottery, touching on craft technology, artistic and stylistic variation, and links between ancestral production and modern artistic expression. Part I discusses the evolution of ceramic design and morphology in the Caddo Archaeological Area by geographic region: southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, southeastern Oklahoma, and East Texas. It also gives focused study to the salt-making industry and its associated pottery. Part II features ceramic studies employing state-of-the-art techniques such as geochemical analysis, fine-grained analysis of stylistic elements, iconography, and network analysis. These essays yield increased understanding of specialized craft production and long-distance exchange; decorative variation at community and regional scales to reveal past communities of practice and identity; ancient Caddo cosmological and religious beliefs; and geographical variation in vessel forms. In Part III, two contemporary Caddos furnish an important Native perspective. Drawing on personal experience, they explore meaning and inspiration behind modern pottery productions as a cultural strategy for the persistence of community and identity. The first volume of its kind for Caddo archaeology, Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Traditions is also a valuable reference on ceramic practices across the broader southeastern archaeological region.

In the fourteenth century, a culture arose in and around the Edwards Plateau of Central Texas that represents the last prehistoric peoples before the cultural upheaval introduced by European explorers. This culture has been labeled the Toyah phase, characterized by a distinctive tool kit and a bone-tempered pottery tradition. ?Spanish documents, some translated decades ago, offer glimpses of these mobile people. Archaeological excavations, some quite recent, offer other views of this culture, whose homeland covered much of Central and South Texas. For the first time in a single volume, this book brings together a number of perspectives and interpretations of these hunter-gatherers and how they interacted with each other, the pueblos in southeastern New Mexico, the mobile groups in northern Mexico, and newcomers from the northern plains such as the Apache and Comanche.? Assembling eight studies and interpretive essays to look at social boundaries from the perspective of migration, hunter-farmer interactions, subsistence, and other issues significant to anthropologists and archaeologists, The Toyah Phase of Central Texas: Late Prehistoric Economic and Social Processes demonstrates that these prehistoric societies were never isolated from the world around them. Rather, these societies were keenly aware of changes happening on the plains to their north, among the Caddoan groups east of them, in the Puebloan groups in what is now New Mexico, and among their neighbors to the south in Mexico.