Least cost path studies in archaeological GIS continue to rely on cost-functions based on pedestrian mobility, overlooking archaeological and historic contexts in which animal-aided mobilities were important. Equine-mounted mobility was important for 18th-century Genizaro communities in the extreme northern limits of colonial New Mexico, who protected and built new alliances across the Spanish frontier. This history and heritage, as memorialized by direct descendants, prompted an actualistic study in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This study followed a professional team of wranglers with pack animals, capturing spatial data parameterized by movement fully-loaded through challenging terrain. Analysis of speed and movement illuminated biomechanical constraints and wrangler decisions over different trail surfaces and slopes. This study highlights the importance of actualistic studies and empirical data for least cost path studies in archaeological GIS and context-specific understanding of movement beyond pedestrian mobility, incorporating the diverse ways human-non-human relationships constituted lived experiences in traversing landscapes.

Using a large assemblage of objects of personal adornment, we explore the internal variation in identity in one Ancestral Puebloan community of great houses – the Lakeview Community in southwestern Colorado. Ornaments vary in distance to source of the materials used and in the colors selected and worn. This community, like others in the region, is often discussed in relationship to Chaco Canyon. Within each great house, we see patterns that are similar to ornament use in distant Chaco Canyon, such as large proportions of nonlocal ornaments at Wallace and use of ornaments as votive architectural deposits at Ida Jean. Conversely, we also see some patterns at each site that are similar to those used by local neighbors in the region. Overall, the residents of the Lakeview Community use ornaments in complex ways to reflect a variety of facets of their identity with both local and distant elements.

Researchers are increasingly interested in the social nature of faunal deposition as it relates to social organization and religion. It is often assumed that fauna used for ritual purposes will primarily occur in ceremonial contexts, while subsistence fauna will occur in secular contexts. Using syntheses of Pueblo ethnography, this paper evaluates the relationship between the ritual or subsistence animals and the room types in which they were recovered at Homol’ovi I, a Pueblo IV village located alongside the Little Colorado River. Analysis shows there is little association between room type and the types of fauna deposited within them. Next, I explore the Homol’ovi I assemblage through the distribution of lagomorphs across the village to illustrate how the most abundant of fauna played an important role in the formation of room fill deposits at the site.

Modern bison (Bison bison) populations have experienced dramatic shifts in the last millennium, resulting from climatic fluctuations, human settlement growth, and overhunting. While bison populations are rebounding in some parts of the Southwest, the original extent of their range in this region is not clear. In west central New Mexico, the presence of bison bones at Prehispanic sites could indicate the presence of local herds, but they could also have been items that were exchanged or brought from the east, including the Great Plains. This pilot study uses strontium (87Sr/86Sr) and lead (206Pb/204Pb, 207Pb/204Pb, and 208Pb/204Pb) isotope analysis to determine whether the bison remains found at five sites in the vicinity of the Plains of San Agustin may have originated from that area. While no wild bison exist on the plains or in western New Mexico today, combined zooarchaeological and preliminary isotopic data indicate they had lived alongside communities in the region for centuries, and possibly millennia, before European contact.

Armas de la tierra, mentioned in the muster roll for the Coronado expedition, have remained an enigma. Coronado expedition sites in southern Arizona have yielded considerable evidence to address this research issue at three locales. These newly defined unconventional metal point types are thought to be the southern equivalent of sheet and short block copper points found in New Mexico and Texas, where these southern types are absent, and all represent armas de la tierra. The frequency, condition, and spatial distribution of these points indicate that battles occurred at the 1539–1540 Chichilticale encampment and the 1541 San Geronimo III townsite at Suya. They co-occur with other diagnostic Coronado period artifacts, such as crossbow boltheads, stone arrowheads, copper bells, medieval horseshoes, gable-headed nails, lace aglets, and more. Their consistent occurrence and clustering make them another reliable index of the Coronado expedition and provide unexpected details about first contacts between Europeans and the Sobaipuri O’odham.

Beyond the knowledge derived from archeological research on pre-Hispanic societies, one of the most important experiences of the binational project at Cerro de Trincheras in northwest Sonora, Mexico has been the relationship developed with the local community over more than three decades; formative to archaeologists and trinchereños. There is no doubt that my personal experience is reflected in this article, but it also summarizes the link that has been woven in multiple ways with research, training, management, and museography with community to reinterpret an element of the landscape as their cultural heritage. I present the activities that we have carried out together with the community, since the opening of the site for public visit at the end of 2011. Cerro de Trincheras is one of the few places in northern Mexico where members of a community experience public archaeology.

Archaeologists acknowledge that contemporary nation state boundaries were irrelevant to precolonial populations. Notwithstanding, the boundary between the United States and México both physically and ideologically impacts language, where archaeologists are trained, how knowledge is disseminated, and what research questions are asked. Sonora's archaeology is generally classified within the Southwest/Northwest culture area; however, English publications are rare when compared to literature from north of the international border. This has created misconceptions that Sonora is an unexplored landscape and undermines decades of diverse binational collaborations and internal research conducted by Centro INAH Sonora. It also stifles our understanding of cultural connectivity across the Southwest/Northwest. The articles within this special issue showcase diverse topics in Sonoran archaeology. They range from identifying Archaic and Early Agricultural occupations to exploring contemporary community-based archaeologies. In all cases, authors reframe Sonora within larger academic discourses and to expand our current knowledge of the region's diverse culture histories.

A recent obsidian provenance study in three sites in the Valle de Altar region of northern Sonora has greatly expanded our understanding of the prehistoric relationship between the southern and northern Sonoran Desert. Based on obsidian source provenance, archaeological sites in the Valle de Altar indicate that contact with the region as far north as west-central and northern Arizona, the northern portion of the Papaquería, the Sierra Pinacate, the Sierra Madre Occidental, and the Basin and Range of Chihuahua was potentially frequent. However, the vast majority of artifacts produced from obsidian were procured apparently locally from an, as yet, unlocated source called here “SON Valle de Altar Unknown.” The purpose here is to discuss the relevant regional geology, the source provenance of the obsidian artifact assemblage, and relationships throughout the greater Sonoran Desert. This project also adds significant data to the Southwest Archaeological Obsidian Project (http://swxrflab.net/).