In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

If there are still scholars who think that archaeological data do not add signi¤cantly to our understanding of the process of cultural change over the course of the Contact period in North America, the papers in this volume should change their minds. From documenting patterns of change that occurred beyond the reach of literate Europeans to focusing our attention on telling details of wellknown periods in recent post-Contact history that the documentary record overlooks, the authors here show clearly how archaeology can expand traditional reconstructions of post-Contact changes in Native-American ways of life. Like any collection of technically and geographically diverse archaeological analyses, this one has implications for a wide range of issues. I focus here on two of these: ¤rst, on a technical issue that these papers share with lithic analysis in general and, second, on the ways in which the papers here illustrate the complexity of the factors that in®uence technological change. ONE TECHNICAL ISSUE: LITHIC TAPHONOMY The majority of the papers here focus on Contact-period ®aked-stone technology , and they draw on and highlight the technical sophistication of that domain of research in archaeology in general. However, they also demonstrate the lack of attention to taphonomic process by that domain of archaeology. Most of these papers report on one component of larger research projects that must focus on many classes of material culture, and a volume on, for example, the faunal analyses that parallel the studies included here would have considered taphonomy in detail. I make this point not because there are well-understood taphonomic processes that fundamentally alter the arguments made here but because all aspects of the archaeological record in all times and places re®ect both the processes of human behavior that archaeologists want to understand and a 11 Discussion Douglas B. Bamforth variety of other processes as well. Lithic analysis has developed powerful ways of dealing with the ¤rst of these but has devoted remarkably little attention to the second, and it is time, and past time, for us to account for these processes in our work. A multitude of processes, including use, intentional retouch, accidental technological effects, trampling, subsurface sediment movements, and careless handling during excavation and in the laboratory can damage the edges of ®akes and other stone artifacts. On one hand, it is clear that the widespread argument that nonhuman processes produce random patterns of retouch (e.g., Tringham et al. 1974) is not correct—such processes unquestionably can produce patterns that mimic the results of intentional human action, readily producing pieces that can easily be classi¤ed as used or retouched (Bamforth 1998; McBrearty et al. 1998). On the other hand, although archaeologists have recognized such processes for over a century (e.g., Johnson 1978; Spurrell 1883; Warren 1923), it is equally clear that we lack widely used standards for distinguishing between the human processes we want to understand and the natural processes that can mimic these, particularly in the case of “utilized ®akes” (Young and Bamforth 1990). The fairly short period of time since the artifacts considered here were used limits the severity of the processes that might have operated on them, although the shallow burial of these sites suggests that they were likely vulnerable to trampling and agriculture in at least some cases. Nevertheless, unless we take these problems into account in our research designs and control for them in our analyses , we will not be able to understand how they affect our conclusions. This is an essential area for future work, and such work needs to address complex issues. To take only one example, trampling soon after discard may modify artifacts, and the likelihood that artifacts will be trampled depends, in part, on the intensity of human use of their discard location: other things being equal, artifacts recovered from intensively used locations (such as permanent communities that remained in the same location for centuries) will be more likely to bear traces of trampling than artifacts excavated from single- or short-term use locations. LITHIC TECHNOLOGY AND CONTACT-PERIOD TRANSFORMATION Regardless of how lithic analysis develops in the future, these papers have important implications for the present. Contact-period studies are clearly focused on transformation, with the end result of this transformation being catastrophic population loss, cultural disintegration, the removal of tribes from their traditional lands, and their forced incorporation into Euro-American society, albeit at the margins of that society. For many years, the clarity of the end result of...

Share