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that at the Dunes Altas site she found Jay phase materials stratigraphically above Cody, and that in addition to differences in points there were distinctions in other artifact forms, raw materials, production technology, and the proportion of curated artifacts. For the northern Colorado Plateau, Schroedl (1991:11) tentatively hypothesized that a Paleoindian lifeway may have persisted at the higher elevations of Utah while an Archaic lifeway developed in the lower-elevation Canyonlands Section (cf. Reed and Metcalf 1999:68). The Paleoindian to Archaic transition is an intriguing research issue but perhaps is of little relevance to the much later and ultimately far more significant transition to an agricultural economy. Ending The end of the Archaic is perhaps more subject to definitional debate than when it started. Mesoamerican domesticates first appeared on the Colorado Plateau sometime around 2000 cal. BC (Gilpin 1994: Table 4; Huber 2005; Smiley 1994: Table 1; Wills and Huckell 1994: Tables 3.1-3.3), setting the stage for profound socioeconomic change. To some archaeologists, the appearance of agriculture marks the end of the Archaic (e.g., Huckell 1995:15-16, 117-118), but for others it is the appearance of pottery (e.g., Wills 1995:215), which occurred long after farming had become well established.4 An anonymous reviewer of a previous report once quipped that "Archaic farmers is an oxymoron." This highlights the deep divide in opinions on the issue. Disagreements about when the Archaic ends also may partly relate to one's conception of whether the agricultural transition was allochthonous or autochthonous (especially Berry 1982:31-33 vs. Wills 1988a:150, 1995:217), and to what extent the changes wrought by the addition of cultigens were slow and minor (accretional) or sudden and far reaching (especially Minnis 1985, 1992 vs. Wills 1988a; Wills and Huckell 1994). Ending the Archaic with the appearance of domesticates can perhaps be seen as closely following Jennings's (1956, 1957; Jennings and Norbeck 1955) conception of the Archaic (the Desert culture) as lacking agriculture. Yet, farther south in Mexico it is readily accepted that the Archaic period includes domesticates and a lengthy period of experimentation with crops. Indeed, the earliest evidence of domesticates occurred during the early portion of the Archaic period in Mexico (e.g., Flannery 1986, supported by recent direct dating and analysis of squash remains [Smith 1997]), corresponding in time with the early Archaic on the Colorado Plateau. The same is true for the eastern United States, where the Archaic period encompasses a long interval of increasing human intervention in the life cycles of plants, ending in the domestication of several local species between 4000 and 3000 BP (Smith 1992). Archaic foragers on the Colorado Plateau may have purposefully manipulated their environment to produce greater yields of wild plants, as Winter and Hogan (1986) have suggested, but as of yet there is no evidence (e.g. morphological changes in seeds/fruits) for the cultivation or domestication of indigenous species during the Archaic in the Southwest. Unlike the eastern woodlands or Mesoamerica, the Colorado Plateau may have lacked the resource patches or environmental settings necessary to support intensive and continuous forager occupation of specific locations, something that appears essential to the coevolution process (Rindos 1984; Smith 1996). Even in the Sonoran Desert this may have been impossible, although the predictable and dependable harvests in the southern Basin and Range region from mesquite, saguaro (and other cacti), and agave made it far more likely. It is important to acknowledge that as a region of primary crop acquisition (Minnis 1992), the North American Southwest differs significantly from centers of pristine domestication, so similar terms might well have different definitional criteria and implications for processes of change. There is no bright line between adaptive strategies in a region such as Mesoamerica where Archaic foragers were implicated in the process of domestication-no clear "ending" of an Archaic lifeway nor "beginning" of an agricultural lifeway. The situation was potentially very different in the Southwest, where domesticates and the practice of cultivation appeared in moderately well developed form. Indeed, in situ Archaic foragers might have had little if anything to do with the initial spread of domesticates into the Southwest; this may have occurred instead with the movement of people that were already dependent on food production. This does not negate Wills's (1988a:31-47) argument, invoking Romer's rule, that Southwestern Archaic foragers adopted maize and squash to continue with their foraging lifeways. But the scenario of foragers incorporating domesticated plants into their local economies to sustain themselves in the face of economic competition from food producers is entirely different from the gradual co-evolution of 4 In the Tucson Basin, archaeologists have recovered fired clay artifacts including small containers from San Pedro phase (ca. 1200-800 cal. BC) contexts at Las Capas (Gregonis and Heidke 2002) and Rio Nuevo (Thiel and Mabry 2006), but these are not cooking vessels or storage vessels per se, so pottery in the Formative sense still appears to date well after the introduction of domesticates, on the order of 2000 years. V.13.4