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A wide variety of materials, including lithics, manufactured goods, and food circulated within and between communities in the North American Arctic, including fish and sea-mammal oil, dried meat and fish, skins and furs, walrus ivory, and wood, as well as nephrite jade, soapstone, chert, obsidian, slate, graphite, pyrite, galena, jet, lignite coal, amber, quartz crystal, and hematite. This review considers only the inorganic materials. To establish provenance, Arctic researchers employ standard methods including trace-element characterization, geochemistry, petrography, stable isotope values, visual appearance, and geochronology. The geographic coverage extends across the North American Arctic from western Alaska to Labrador, considering each material’s precontact uses, geological source locations, and distribution patterns in time and space, concluding with the prospects and status of provenance studies.

Woven textiles were highly prized commodities in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, to the extent that they were commonly used as tribute items and even as a standard of value in commercial exchange. This article discusses ways that textile production has been approached archaeologically in terms of both its function and cultural meanings. Textile production was important both functionally and symbolically. Major female deities from throughout Mesoamerica were closely associated with this important aspect of domestic production, which was also linked metaphorically with sexual reproduction. Textile symbolism in Mixtec codices were also used to denote architectural and natural spaces, as a metaphor for the acculturation of the landscape.

This chapter provides a brief discussion of the main themes relevant to historical ecology and how it differs from cultural ecology as used in Mesoamerican archaeology. A historical ecological perspective is appropriate for the study of Aztec landscape modification during the sixteenth century in the Basin of Mexico because of its inherent focus on the dialectical relationship between human populations and their environments. The Aztec landscape was viewed as a sacred entity and intensive exploitation was mediated by complex rituals within the indigenous worldview. Chinampas are discussed as an example of a highly intensive agroecological system within the sacred prehispanic landscape that has persisted until the present, although in the modern urban environment its preservation is fraught with risks and conflicting interests.

The Aztec Empire was built on an agricultural base. However, the relationships between agriculturalists and the state and the characteristics of farming systems were not monolithic. Agricultural landscapes involved strategies in which farmers responded to demographic growth, ecological conditions, and political economy. Highlighting the processes of intensification and landesque capital, this chapter discusses how farmers cultivated a diverse assemblage of crops by responding to the ecological constraints of soil, slope, and water. These included terrace systems, irrigation systems, and raised fields. These strategies and investments were connected to the structure of the empire. Agriculturalists paid tribute to local lords and imperial officials, and farmer-merchants traded their products in market places. This relationship between production and political economy, however, was mediated by complex and nested systems of tenure that guided patterns of usufruct, labor obligations, and conveyance.

Aztec artisans produced a spectacular, sophisticated, and technically versatile metallurgy. Although they had integrated certain materials and techniques from contemporaneous and earlier Mesoamerican societies, Aztec artisans created astonishing and original gold and copper-gold castings for public display—particularly of flora and fauna from the natural and supernatural worlds. They placed these castings in their pleasure parks. They also cast hundreds of bells from tin and arsenic bronze and other copper-based alloys for dedicatory offerings at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan. The ore sources (copper, gold, tin, lead) lay outside of the Basin of Mexico but within Aztec tribute provinces; the metal itself was worked or cast in Tenochtitlan workshops.

Obsidian was the primary lithic or stone material used for cutting activities in Aztec society, including domestic food production, craft production, hunting, warfare, and ritual. The demands of millions of consumers within and outside of the Aztec Empire shaped a diversity of industries and distribution networks that operated through merchants, markets, and state taxes in goods and labor. This chapter provides an overview of the primary obsidian sources, quarry activities, artifact types, use contexts, and innovations in lithic technology during the Aztec (Middle and Late Postclassic) period. A particular focus is the Sierra de Las Navajas (or Pachuca) mine and the detailed history of quarrying and manufacturing activities that have been documented there.

This article discusses central Mexican tribute systems. Tribute in central Mexican prehistory consisted of one-way movements of goods and labor from conquered polities to their conquerors. Military conquests were frequent, especially during the Postclassic period, and repeated aggressive excursions often resulted in conquest states or, more extensively, in empires. A common goal of conquest was control over economic resources and production, and this goal was achieved through the imposition of tribute demands on conquered peoples. Tribute payments consisted of both raw materials and manufactured goods, with an emphasis on manufactured items. Conquerors demanded materials and items that were readily available to the conquered people. As the empire expanded geographically, more and more luxuries were demanded in tribute.

This chapter presents an overview of the chaîne opératoire approach and recalls its relevance as a social and transmission signal. It describes the main components of the ceramic chaînes opératoires and the principles for identifying them on the archaeological material through diagnostic attributes including both surface features and microfabrics. Next, it takes a forward look at the classification of ceramic assemblages according to the chaîne opératoire approach in order to unravel the sociological complexity behind their variability. Finally, this chapter highlights the heuristic character of the chaîne opératoire approach when studying, on the synchronic axis, the techno-economic systems, and on the diachronic axis, changes in technical traditions considered as the expression of culture histories and the factors affecting them.

This article discusses Mesoamerican ceramic technology and production. Some of the most beautiful art objects of the ancient Western Hemisphere were created by Mesoamerican potters. Meticulously painted in multiple colors (“polychrome”), sometimes with delicately rendered, lifelike human figures, this pottery was nonetheless produced by simple technologies. Prehispanic Mesoamerican ceramics are best described as terra cotta or earthenware: generally low-fired and porous, unvitrified, and unglazed. Potters formed vessels without the use of a wheel and fired them, for the most part, in the absence of formal kiln structures.

Production systems have long been an important subject of archaeological research in Mesoamerica. Studying how and why people formed particular groups and how those groups allocated labor and resources helps us to identify the social, economic, cultural, political, and even cosmological constraints and pressures that motivate people to make things. Driven, in part, by object-hungry museum directors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, early excavations in Mesoamerica often focused almost exclusively on recovering and analyzing only the most exquisite and intricately fashioned goods—“luxury items” or “prestige goods.” But by the mid-twentieth century, the zeal to acquire and study luxury items was matched by comparable efforts to collect and consider quotidian or utilitarian materials, which revealed a great deal of detail about the daily lives of ancient Mesoamericans. Recent work on both kinds of goods has made important contributions to understanding how production is organized and for what ends. This article provides a selective and critical review of this literature, summarizing important findings and suggesting future directions.

Mesoamericans mastered stone and made cutting, killing, and pounding tools capable of accomplishing all the tasks performed by hard metals in other preindustrial civilizations. The general evolution of stone use conforms to the worldwide progression from paleolithic technologies of chipped flint and quartzite implements to neolithic technologies of ground and polished tools. This technological shift corresponded to the invention of new tool types (axes, adzes) made of different kinds of stone not easily or effectively worked by simple fracture, so the new stone-working techniques effectively expanded the universe of useful rocks and their availability. This article discusses Mesoamerican stone technologies covering unmodified stone, chipped stone, ground stone, polished stone, and burned stone.

This article discusses exchange as a process of interaction between two social personae creating a social contract. This process involves the establishment, negotiation, manipulation, and maintenance of social bonds and, through their performance and associated material objects, the formulation of new links between exchange partners. Artifact distributions do not designate or reflect spheres of interaction, but these objects should be perceived as active constituents in the creation of social relations. The geographical diversity of islands in the Caribbean archipelago promotes interaction between the different groups of people inhabiting this region. From a microscale, exchange establishes a social contract between the giver and receiver. The article discusses three categories of exchange, namely spouses, material wealth, and staples. These three categories are fundamental in exchange relations cross-culturally. The discussion describes general patterns of human interaction that can facilitate understanding of the interpersonal relationships, which are established through exchange.

The investigation of the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) meat industry that was emplaced at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa reveals information about livestock production, slaughter, and consumption at the colonial entrepot in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The investigation consisted of five faunal samples including three sites from the Castle of Good Hope; the Moat, the Granary (F2), and Donkergat (DKG); Elsenburg; and the Dump (DP) from Oudespost I. The archaeological faunal remains speak to transplanted and hybridized European husbandry practices as the VOC struggled to overcome initial hardships of meeting high meat demands to become the dominant power across the landscape while dispossessing the indigenous Khoekhoe peoples of their livestock, land, and identity.

This article discusses the nature of manufacture, trade, and the economy in Egypt during the first three centuries of Roman rule. The human element of trade and manufacture is considered here, in combination with an overview of the organization of labour and production. The article also examines the markets within and beyond the province, which affected the movement of information, people, and goods.