White Painted Wares, while not found in great numbers in any excavation, are the hallmark of the Middle Bronze Age on Cyprus. This makes them a critical marker for chronology. Paul Åström created the typology used today as his PhD thesis which was published in 1957. Åström examined material that came mainly from tomb groups, created a seriation of types based on both shape and decoration. This typology is used today to assign new finds to established types, but recently there have been some questions raised about the accuracy of Åström's work and its usefulness with newly excavated material, especially from settlement sites. The results of a preliminary petrographic analysis of the fabric of sherds from two sites on Cyprus raises the possibility that some of the types listed by Åström may be due to regional differences rather than chronological ones.

The Quoddy Region, in southwestern NB, was a nexus of toolstone trade and transport between Maine and the Maritimes. Watercraft played an integral role in the procurement and trade of both local and exotic toolstones from their original source(s) to where these artifacts were later deposited and recovered from the archaeological record. This paper will focus on the varied lithic materials recovered from the Deer Island Point site (BfDr5). The discussion will illustrate how watercraft enabled the relatively rapid transport of large amounts of lithic materials with less overall effort than land-based travel.

The use of caves as ritual and sacred landscapes has been well-explored in New World archaeology, especially in regards to Mesoamerican civilizations. Recent evidence has shed light on the importance of caves in the Caribbean, specifically the Classic Taino Chiefdoms of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. This poster will show that Taino cave use reflects a highly developed and relatively wide-spread religion with direct implications for Taino social structure. Taino cave art demonstrates the alternative use of caves as a ritual area and the possible location of the axis mundi – the connecting element to the various realms of the cosmos. The importance of Taino religion has been documented with ethnohistoric sources, but as the indigenous population was completely erased with the arrival of Columbus, material remains are all we have to create a picture of the importance of religion to a developing Chiefdom-type society.

Stone tools are typically represented by a photograph or drawing and measurements of length, width and thickness. However, lithic artifacts are also a record of knapping sequences, representing the specific mental processes that result in the object's final form. Refitting is one way of examining past decisions, but in cases where refitting is not possible, flake scars can provide evidence of past actions. Using a collection of handaxes from Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa, this paper examines how flake scars can be used to describe a handaxe in terms of the series of actions that created it, constructing schematic representations that link process and final shape, quantifying the human action in tool production and providing information about past mental processes.

Located on the south shore of Cootes Paradise the Princess Point promontory is ideally situated to attract human activity. Starting in the Middle Woodland period, the promontory may have served a variety of purposes. Archaeological investigations have been conducted intermittently in various locations around the promontory since the late 1960's revealing some interesting questions about the history of its use. Additionally, the Royal Botanical Gardens has conducted significant environmental research in Cootes Paradise that impacts directly on our understanding of the human activity in this area. This presentation summarizes both of these research areas with the aim of creating a framework of human activity at the site into which future, more focused studies, may be situated.

Differential use of lithic raw materials is thought to represent one of the cultural changes distinguishing the early and late Palaeo-Eskimo periods in the Canadian Arctic. The interior of southern Baffin Island represents an ideal location to test this premise given the abundance of chert there. Moreover, Milne has identified several sites that indicate the Palaeo-Eskimos consistently traveled to the area over a 2400-year period to procure it. However, this chert is highly variable in colour and cannot be reliably sourced using observational methods alone. In this paper, we present a new technique that draws on petrographic, trace element, and isotopic analyses to accurately source chert from the island's interior. Our goal is to isolate inter- and intra-source variability through the identification of distinct geochemical fingerprints. This will allow us to determine how many sources exist in the interior, and to assess how they were being exploited by the Palaeo-Eskimos throughout the cultural continuum.

The Spiegel site, also known as Killarney Bay I, is a Middle Woodland habitation and burial area located on the northern shore of Georgian Bay at Killarney. A team from the University of Michigan directed by E. Greenman excavated the burial area between 1939 and 1953, while faculty and students from Laurentian University conducted excavations in the habitation area starting during the 1980s and ending in 2002. In this paper I will compare the technological characteristics of pottery from the habitation area with a description of the pottery from the burial area made by D. Brose. According to Brose, pottery from the burial area falls into one of three general groups: thick-walled early Middle Woodland, thin-walled late Middle Woodland, and small amounts of Late Woodland pottery. In my characterization of the pottery from the habitation area, I use thin-sections to investigate temper type and density, and visual examination to evaluate how pots were built and whether they bear carbon encrustation. For comparative purposes, I also document the hardness of pots. Examination of the decoration from the habitation area shows that it is similar to other Middle Woodland ceramic material in being characterized by a high degree of variability, and thick-walled pottery appears relatively uncommon. Does the pottery from the two areas represent different chaînes opératoires focussed on producing pottery to be used in different social contexts? Does chronological variation explain well the differences within the assemblage from the habitation area?

Laser ablation as a research tool is quickly becoming common in the archaeological literature. Its minimally destructive properties make it a highly desirable method for use on rare and valuable objects and artifacts. To date however, the use of high intensity Femtosecond lasers has been restricted primarily to the fields of engineering, medicine, geology and marine biology. This paper presents the preliminary results of a recent study designed to test the use of Fs-LA-MC-ICP-MS on bone and enamel samples as a means of investigating questions surrounding human mobility in ancient Peru.

The potential of geophysical prospection techniques has long been recognized in archaeology, though they are more routinely used as part of mainstream archaeological practice in Europe than in North America. These techniques are better at identifying large archaeological features (e.g. ditches, building foundations etc.), and their limited use in North America may relate to the predominance of more ephemeral hunter-gatherer sites in the region's archaeological record. However, advances in both survey instruments and computer technology now allow the identification of less substantial features. Recent fluxgate gradiometer surveys of Arctic-adapted hunter-gatherer sites have produced promising results, and suggest that the technique may provide a useful complement to excavation in this context. Examples from Newfoundland and the southern Keewatin District of Nunavut illustrate both the potential of the technique and the need for further research to help interpret gradiometer results from such applications.

Lamanai is a large Maya ceremonial centre located in northern Belize, one of a few regions that did not experience the political disintegration and depopulation typical of 9th-11th century Classic period collapse. The ability of this community to survive during the Postclassic period, and up until and beyond the arrival of the Spanish in the area in the 16th century, appears to have been related, at least in part, to its favourable subsistence and commercial location. In this paper we explore the relationship between biological and material markers of identity and status differences as evidenced in mortuary contexts. The focus is on the potential contribution of detailed integrated scientific studies of ceramics and their associated skeletal remains in the reconstruction of Lamanai's relationships with other surviving city centres, and the consequent status accrued to the site.

Ethnicity is an integral attribution in James V. Wright's taxonomic construct of the culture history of southern Ontario, the `Ontario Iroquois Tradition'. On the basis of presumed northern Iroquoian traits identified using the direct historical approach and ceramic seriation, Wright (1966) designated two independent cultural developments – Glen Meyer and Pickering – as representative of the tradition's initial stage. Subsequently, he extended Iroquoian ethnicity to the earlier Princess Point culture (Wright 1984:287). Following revised ethnic designation, he eventually removed both Princess Point and Glen Meyer from the `Ontario Iroquois Tradition' (Wright 2004:1309-1310). Wright's ethnic attributions continue to have considerable currency within Ontario archaeology even though recent critical examination shows that the taxonomy and its modifications are subjectively based and that the observed distributions of traits used to identify the Ontario Iroquois are less bounded than Wright imagined. Although the 'Ontario Iroquois Tradition' has an important contributory history to Ontario archaeology as a taxonomic device, it cannot be supported either theoretically or empirically.