In september, 1949, while in west central Nevada for the purpose of collecting vegetal materials from the lowermost cultural levels of Lovelock cave (Loud and Harrington, 1929) to be used for radiocarbon dating, the author revisited an open rockshelter site some six miles up the valley from Lovelock cave. The site, since named Leonard rockshelter (site 26- Pe-14) after Zenas Leonard who in 1833 traversed the Humbolt Sink area as a member of the Walker expedition (Leonard, 1904), is not referred to by Loud and Harrington. It is the same site from which, in 1936, Thomas Derby mined bat guano and recovered artifacts described in a brief article (Heizer, 1938). The bat guano formed a layer two to three feet thick lying on ancient gravels of Lake Lahontan and beneath a thick accumulation of aeolian dust and rockfall.

This report deals with the results of excavating the last intact portions of a shell heap long known to collectors as one of the richest sources of artifacts on Cape Cod. Although the primary aim is to give a factual picture of the site, some idea may also be conveyed of the general archaeology of this isolated area, which exhibits cultural shadings differing somewhat from those of the rest of eastern Massachusetts.

For the past two years Mr. and Mrs. Tully H. Thomas of Concho, Arizona have been collecting surface material from thirty or more non-pottery sites located within a twenty-mile radius of their home (see Fig. 46). Included among the points from these sites are fluted points, indistinguishable from Folsoms (Wormington, 1949, pp. 19-48), parallel flaked points, previously called Yumas (Wormington, 1949, pp. 48-68), and many others best described as similar to Pinto (Campbell, 1935) or Amargosa II (Haury, 1950, p. 193) points of the so-called Desert culture of southern Arizona and California.The importance of this Concho discovery will be immediately recognized by those familiar with the prehistory of the American Southwest.

Loma Seca (Chihuahua E7-5) was discovered July 23, 1949. It is an eroding village site located about one kilometer south of the Rio Conchos some eight kilometers southwest of Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico. The site is located at the western edge of a large draw which intersects the valley of the Rio Conchos at this point. Physiographically the site occupies an eroding saddle at the foot of a high mesa which represents an outlier of the high gravel terraces of the Conchos valley. The mesa or butte lies just north of the site and separates it from the lowlands of the Conchos valley and at the same time provides protection from northerly winds. There is a thin scattering of hearthstones, flint chips, and artifacts over the eroding surface of the draw just west of the site.

The origin of the old stone tower in Newport has been an important problem in the ancient history of American archaeology for something over a century. The argument swirls around two questions. Who built the tower? When was it built? There are two possible answers to the first of these questions; the second question can readily be answered if the first can be solved. Either the tower was built by persons unknown at some time in the pre-Colonial period; or it was erected in Colonial times shortly before it is first mentioned in the documents. And there is a shortage of the documents on this problem until the development of the nineteenth century romanticism. Either there was no interest or there was no problem. Up to about 1800, moreover, a clear line of legal documents traced the structure as well as the land on which it stood as belonging to Governor Benedict Arnold. The legal documents are supported by strong local tradition that the building was a stone mill. Specifically, in 1677, three documents, including Arnold's own will, mentioned the tower, and for the next 100 years other mention is rare. Thus, at the outset, we see that the controversy over the origin of the tower is recent.

Since my synthesis (Ritchie, 1944) additional chronological and other data (Smith, 1950; Bullen, 1949) have accumulated for the New York area from interrelated field (Ritchie, 1946; also excavations of 1950 on same site) and laboratory (Ritchie and MacNeish, 1949; MacNeish, n.d.) researches. Among the significant sites recently excavated by the writer, which have contributed to the problem of cultural continuity are the Jack's Reef site, to be further excavated and reported on in 1951; the East Sugar Island site (Ritchie, 1949, pp. 3-24); and a group of Owasco and early Mohawk sites in eastern New York, excavated in 1949-1950 (Ritchie, Lenig and Miller, n.d.; Ritchie, n.d.). The Piffard site in western New York, excavated by Robert R. Hill of Rochester, N. Y., is another site showing transitional features. The chronological data accrue from the radiocarbon analyses of Arnold and Libby (1950, p. 7) made from charcoal samples obtained from hearths and graves on certain Archaic and early Woodland period sites in central New York.

Stephenson's recent synthesis of Texas archaeology (1950) has evoked a markedly critical commentary from Krieger (1951). Krieger comments on the many inaccuracies which he finds therein. There are without question, mistakes of both omission and commission in Stephenson's paper. Nevertheless, the synthesis provides the general archaeologist with a relatively accurate, helpful and stimulating view of the aboriginal occupation of the entire State. It is my impression that a synthesis such as that of Stephenson must inevitably be inadequate or actually erroneous in detail. The significant point is that Stephenson has actually published and should be credited with a tentative and worth-while state-wide synthesis of Texas archaeology and, furthermore, has succeeded in evoking comment from both Krieger and the writer. The critical archaeologist who successively reads Stephenson's article, Krieger's criticism, and this commentary will certainly become acquainted not only with the established data of Texas archaeology but with many of the controversial points as well.

In December, 1948, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., discontinued its collection of curios and presented the lot to the United States National Museum. Among other treasures was a votive ax depicting the “tiger” or “jaguar” god of tropical America in the style peculiar to the Olmec, or La Venta, culture. There are no accompanying data; even the name of the donor has been lost. In want of data and in other respects the ax is reminiscent of the half dozen like specimens preserved in public museums.

The Crystal River site, on the west coast of Florida about 65 miles north of Tampa, presents one of the many unsolved problems of Florida archaeology. Included in the site is a curving shell ridge, shaped like a fishhook with a temple mound where the barb of the hook would be, a large sand or sand and shell burial mound surrounded by a platform to the north, another temple mound further to the north, and a large deposit of shell to the northwest (Moore, 1903, Fig. 16). Obviously, this is a large and complicated site. Practically the only archaeological work done at Crystal River is that of Moore who, during his three visits, dug all the burial mound and part of its surrounding platform (Moore, 1903; 1907; 1918). Moore did no work in the shell midden or temple mounds and our knowledge of the site is limited to its burial complex.

In February of this year, James B. Griffin, Hale G. Smith, Raymond S. Price, A. T. Ewell, MacNeil Withers, and Ralph Barbour made a surface collection of the entire Crystal River complex and dug a five foot test (B) upon the occupational area designated by Moore (1903, , Fig. 16) as B.

Test B was made 140 feet from the north corner of the large shell temple mound A, at approximately the same place marked B by Moore (ibid.). It was found that the depth of this deposit was forty-eight inches. The test was taken down in the following levels: 1 through 8, and 10 were four inch levels, while 9 and 11 were six inch levels. The sherds collected from mound A and test B were similar in many respects.

In a letter dated Jan. 12, 1951, James B. Griffin informed me of a radiocarbon date on the Davis site, received from W. F. Libby of the Institute for Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago. An age of 1553 ± 175 years was obtained on charred corn cobs from a floor pit of feature 31, a large circular house outline in the submound village. According to the published interpretation, feature 31 belongs to phase 1 of the Alto focus, had most of the pottery types of this focus on its floor, and probably did not antedate the initial temple-mound construction by many years.

When we look at modern works of art we too often talk of the aesthetic taste of the individual artist without taking into consideration his place in a national culture, or an economic group. Towards “primitive” art we take a completely opposite viewpoint. Even when considering such a highly sophisticated art as that of pre-Columbian America, we are prone to give it an archaeological label and call a work of art an “interesting specimen.”

Not long ago at Tonto National Monument, Arizona, I discussed with Erik Reed and Lloyd Pierson, National Park Service archaeologists, the grooved stone “arrowstraightener” or “arrow-smoother” and its presumed uses. At that time I held serious doubts that this well-known object had ever had any place in the making of arrows. As a fletcher of some 20 years' experience, I had taken particular note of Pima fletchers and the manner in which they worked their shafts, and was impressed by the ease with which they took rather crooked sticks and made them straight and serviceable as arrows. These sticks were always of arrow weed, or specifically Pluchea sericea. Salt River Valley had almost no reed cane (carrizo; Phragmites), and I never saw it used. I note also the fact that no grooved stone was used in straightening Pima arrows.

One of the most encouraging signs that progress is actually being made in Southwestern archaeology is the appearance of several papers in which approximately the same answers have been reached by workers approaching the problem from different angles. The specific relationships of the modern Pueblo peoples to the various groups of the prehistoric past constitute one of the oldest queries for this region. It is now indeed satisfying to find that the theory of Pueblo origins with which Fred Eggan concludes his ethnological study, Social Organisation of the Western Pueblos (1950), largely aligns itself with Erik K. Reed's hypothesis, based on a broad summary of material traits (Reed, 1946, 1948, 1949a, 1949b, 1950), and my own suggestions, which parallel Reed's in the main, based on correlations of prehistoric and modern Pueblo kiva types and uses, related social organisations and pottery (Hawley, 1937, 1950a, 1950b,, 1951). Anthropologists are learning to work both ends against the middle!

Despite a firm conviction that statistical analyses have a definite place in archaeological interpretations, I want to register a protest against the Coefficient of Agreement proposed by W. S. Robinson (American Antiquity, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 293-301, 1951). Robinson's coefficient is offered as a measure of the degree of similarity between two collections of sherd material. It is arrived at by adding the differences between the percentages of each type of sherd in the two collections and subtracting this sum from 200.