The Phipps site (13CK21) in northwest Iowa contains evidence of interaction between Middle Mississippian and Middle Missouri peoples. Excavations in 1994 uncovered eight features and recovered more than 21,000 sherds and nearly 10,000 faunal elements. The assemblage from one feature includes more than 260 broken and splintered raptor tarsometatarsi, approximately 100 raptor phalanges, and more than 80 raptor talons, plus shell beads, red ocher-stained manos and mussel shell, a bison scapula hoe, and a large quantity of red-slipped sherds. The raptor elements may be the discarded remains from the preparation of a shipment of trade goods destined for Middle Mississippian peoples of western Illinois.

Samples of charcoal recovered from excavated sites were treated with strong acid, followed by strong base. This process removes most of the inorganic carbonates and organic compounds, leaving highly condensed or elementary carbon. The fixed carbon content of the specimens from four sites varied widely and indicated different sources of organic matter. Each charcoal, therefore, has a characteristic chemical composition.

Archaeologists have devised various methods to estimate the number of past site occupants. These techniques fall into a number of categories, but I will focus on two common approaches based on (1) the amount of roofed space each individual needs, and (2) the total site area and the number of persons per hectare. This report suggests that neither of these methods is fully appropriate for ancient military installations. Population estimates derived by the traditional techniques for the Byzantine fortress at Isthmia, Greece, are compared with numbers obtained by factors specific to a military camp. Through the examination of historical sources and contemporary military regulations, this paper presents a more appropriate coefficient for ancient fortresses, which had much denser populations than habitation sites. The use of such analogies, which are specific to the problem at hand, greatly increase the reliability of inferences.

In the lower American Southeast, regional scale social interactions burgeoned alongside the growth of nucleated villages, widespread mound-building projects, and conspicuous mortuary ceremonialism during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. A.D. 100–800). A premier material for understanding the scale and significance of social interactions across the southern landscape comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, a ubiquitous class of material culture that provides direct evidence of connections between specific sites at a multitude of scales and in myriad contexts. By combining design data and determinations of vessel provenance through Neutron Activation Analysis of a total of 825 sherds and 130 clay samples, this research ascertains types of social interaction and their predominant directions and levels of intensity across multiple ecological, social, and cultural contexts. The results indicate two main patterns: first, that vessels were frequently transported from habitation sites and civic-ceremonial centers to distant burial mounds; and second, that people traveled to ceremonial centers from outlying villages for events that included the exchange of wooden paddles. These patterns reveal a high level of social coordination within integrated networks that were inextricable from the region-wide trends toward population aggregation and heightened monumentality and rituality.

A fossilized bone projectile point has recently been recognized in the collections of the National Museum of Canada. The point was found at a depth of 8 ft. in a waterhole in southeastern Saskatchewan, immediately south of an ice frontal position dated at about 10,000 years ago. The implement is described on the basis of microscopic and macroscopic examination, and similarities to other specimens with early associations are noted.

Early Holocene cultural material at Gerstle River, central Alaska, provides excellent contextual controls for examining variability in radiocarbon dating. Over 4,000 bone and teeth fragments are directly associated with over 7,000 lithic artifacts and 10 discrete charcoal-rich hearths in a thin occupation layer (∼10 cm vertical thickness) within well-stratified loess deposits. Radiocarbon dating of the hearth features indicates overlapping ages at 2σ, suggesting contemporaneity. This study uses the high level of resolution at Gerstle River to evaluate systematic radiocarbon variation due to different materials (collagen and charcoal), different pretreatments of collagen (regular and ultrafiltered), and interlaboratory variation through paired bone and hearth charcoal dates, split samples, and cross-checks. Accurately dating bone collagen is important given the closer association of dated samples with human activities (e.g., butchering) compared with charcoal fragments in certain contexts (e.g., driftwood, paleosols, or alluvial deposits). This study demonstrates the efficacy of bone collagen dating with ultrafiltration to counter potential site-specific contamination. These results also indicate that even in high-resolution situations with little evidence for old-wood effect and contamination, considerable variability can exist among cross-check and even split samples from single pieces of charcoal from short-lived species.

The geographic and chronological distribution of eyed bone needles in North American Paleoindian sites led Osborn (2014) to propose that these distinctive artifacts date primarily to the Terminal Pleistocene Younger Dryas Cold Event and were essential to making close-fitting clothes needed to survive frigid winter conditions. Our study of a museum collection from Tule Lake Rock Shelter (CA-SIS-218A) in the high Klamath Basin area supports Osborn’s argument. We present nine high-precision accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon assays from a 2.5 m deep cultural sequence, demonstrating that Paleoindians occupied the site primarily during the Younger Dryas. Although only about .5 m3 of the Paleoindian deposits at CA-SIS-218A were excavated, fragments of four small bone needles were recovered, three of which contain whole or partial eyes. Two fragments of large mammal cortical bone from the same levels contain remnants of “groove and snap” fractures that may be related to the production of needle blanks. The bone needles from Tule Lake Rock Shelter extend the geographic range of these distinctive Paleoindian artifacts into the high desert region of Northern California.

Evidence of systematic secondary lithic recycling at the Katie Griffith site and Church Rocksheiter No. 2 in the mountains of western North Carolina is presented. It is proposed that recycling and reuse of found stone artifacts in the Early Woodland period of the Appalachian Summit region of the southeastern United States was a regular lithic procurement option. It is concluded that systematic secondary lithic recycling was widespread in prehistory, provides an avenue for exploring economizing responses to raw material procurement challenges, and must be accounted for when using lithic artifacts in reconstructions and explanations of human mobility, exchange, and technological organization, and in archaeological constructions of lithic artifact typologies.

Kroeber's classic study of the “Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America” has been invaluable to eth' nologists and archaeologists working with cultural phenomena more recent than the beginning of the Christian era. However, it has become increasingly evident that the cultural and natural areas of the neo-Indian (the term used by Griffin, 1946, p. 38) were not necessarily those of the paleo-Indian (the term used by Roberts, 1940, pp. 51-116). It is therefore my intent here to outline briefly, and without much detail, the cultural and natural areas of the paleo-Indian.

I have focused my attention upon glaciation, because the presence of a continental glacier seems to have been a major factor of North American paleogeography in the periods here considered. Climate, which possibly is more the result of, than the cause of, glaciation, I have interpreted in terms of pollen levels, and any other phenomena that I could understand.

A fragile-pattern area is defined as any archaeological area in which man's material remains lie without depth upon an existing natural surface and thus comprise a pattern which is disturbed or broken by any form of selective artifact collecting. Such surfaces as desert pavements, degraded lake terraces, dunes, and trails are described, and it is shown why the first surveyor to visit a site should collect all available materials and information rather than sample them in the traditional manner. Suggestions are made for surveying areas that have already been damaged by collectors.

In an effort to expand the known range of early Navaho history, an area in north-central New Mexico was chosen for survey and excavation in the summer of 1940. This territory lies just south of the Colorado line, between 107° and 108° longitude, and between 36° and 37° latitude, in the northwestern part of Rio Arriba County, in the upper San Juan drainage. Reconnaissance extended over the country within a radius of from ten to fifteen miles from Gobernador. The area is about thirty-five miles east of the town of Aztec and includes the canyons of Compaftero, San Rafael, Mufioz, Gobernador, Frances, La Jara and Pueblito.

Sites from this region had been noted as early as 1912 by Kidder and Morris, who point out their seemingly Pueblo-Navaho nature. Father Berard and Van Valkenburgh report hogan remains on the slopes of Gobernador Knob, sacred in Navaho mythology, and Mera obtained pinyon specimens for dating from several small pueblo-like structures in this region.

Pottery Mound is a large Ancestral Puebloan site situated within the Middle Rio Grande (MRG) region of New Mexico. This article adds to our understanding of relationships between Pottery Mound, the Western Pueblos, and Mexico through use of biological distance analysis based on dental nonmetric traits. Extensive material and cultural influences, as well as migration events from Western Pueblos to Pottery Mound, have been proposed by several scholars, while others have highlighted parallels to Mexico, especially Paquimé. A total of 1,528 individuals from the U.S. Southwest and Mexico were used to examine relationships between Pottery Mound and these areas. We find no evidence of close biological similarity between Pottery Mound and the Western Pueblos or northern Mexico. Instead, the results indicate biological affinity between Pottery Mound and sites in the MRG region and Mogollon areas. This similarity suggests that although there is evidence for trade between Pottery Mound and other sites in the southwestern United States and Mesoamerica, trade may not have been accompanied by significant gene flow from those areas from which the trade goods originated. It is possible that neighboring regions, such as the Mogollon, served as intermediaries for trade between Pottery Mound and distant regions.

Magnetic surveys and electromagnetic conductivity surveys were conducted at several sites during the course of field work at the Richland/Chambers Reservoir in north-central Texas between 1982 and 1985. Much of this work was conducted at the Bird Point Island site (41FT201), which was used as a proving ground to test the effectiveness of various remote-sensing techniques. Two devices, a Geometrics proton precession magnetometer and a Geonics Limited EM-38 electromagnetic conductivity sensor were tested. The data produced by the EM-38, although initially successful for locating large archaeological features, were less useful for site interpretation than those yielded by the magnetometer.

Replicative experiments were conducted to test hypotheses related to feature function and to identify the sources of magnetism present in features. After an experimental hearth and a pit were created on an off-site area, a magnetic survey was conducted and the results were compared with the magnetic responses obtained from archaeological features. Remarkably similar magnetic responses were observed between the experimental features and certain classes of prehistoric archaeological features. Five-cracked rock, consisting of small fragments of iron-enriched sandstone and ironstone, was identified as the primary source of magnetism.

In addition to identifying locations of features, the magnetic data also provided information regarding whether or not features had been subjected to multiple episodes of disturbance and reuse. Episodes of recurrent use were indicated by irregular symmetry and unusual magnetic polarity. Several large pit features, which archaeological evidence indicated had been reused, exhibited anomalies with multiple peaks of strong magnetic highs surrounded in several directions by peaks of weak to moderate magnetic lows. In contrast, hearths and pits lacking archaeological evidence of major disturbance or reuse were associated with anomalies that exhibited the normal dipolar signature associated with cultural features—a strong magnetic high with a strong magnetic low immediately to the north. The results of this study demonstrate that the magnetometer has a great potential for aiding in the interpretation of archaeological features in addition to its traditional use as a tool for identifying feature locations.

The possibility of the contemporaneity of man and the mastodon in America has been a vexing one for more than a hundred years. In 1839 Albert C. Koch first reported that he had found evidence to support such a claim (Montagu 1942); and the situation today remains much as it was then, confused and without absolute certainty. It would, perhaps, be worthwhile at the outset to make explicit the distinction between the mammoth and the mastodon. Mammoths are fossil elephants, family Elephantide, which were restricted in the New World to North America.

There seems to be little doubt that major population shifts occurred in Northern Ontario and Manitoba following the Iroquois wars of the seventeenth century and the advent of the fur trade. These movements have tended to blur pre-contact ethnic boundaries. Although recent archaeological reports have provided much needed data, differing interpretations of that data have only further obscured the issue. For instance, while some scholars have argued that Blackduck Focus sites in western Northern Ontario and northern Minnesota were occupied by Algonkian-speakers (either Ojibwa or Creej, others have interpreted the materials as having an Assiniboin authorship. In support of the latter view, we analyze both the archaeological and early ethnohistorical data. From these sources we conclude that, at contact, the Ojibwa extended no further west than Michipicoten Bay, while the Cree occupied most of Northern Ontario except for a strip of about 50 mi north and south of the present International border west of Lake Superior which was Assiniboin territory. Proper determination of ethnic boundaries is of theoretical importance to studies of cultural ecology and social organization.

The Sites of the Fort Ancient aspect of the Upper Mississippi Phase are located in southern and southwestern Ohio, northern and northeastern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana. It is the purpose of this paper to present the grouping of the individual components within the larger cultural unit; to state briefly the chronological position of the Fort Ancient aspect; and to discuss the possible ethnological connections.

The existence of many of these sites has been known for years, and their cultural similarity has been recognized since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Mrn 20, the site described in this report, is one of the 5 located on Strawberry Point, a peninsula which juts out into Richardson's Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay, in southern Marin County (Fig. 22). Situated on a southwestern slope, Mrn 20 overlooks the bay and town of Marin City. It is of interest to note that most of the shellmounds on Strawberry Point are on the western side, even though this is buffeted by cold winds and rain during the fall and winter, while the less inhabited eastern side is more sheltered. The hills surrounding Mrn 20 are rather gentle and are covered with pasture grasses, with an occasional clump of scrubby, wind-blasted oaks and a few spotty buckeyes. The western face of the site is overgrown with poison oak; the remainder is clothed with a thick matting of grass. The surrounding soil is a yellow clay, which takes on a reddish appearance in some sterile areas beneath the midden.

Chemical and microscopic examination of the material from successive floors of Mound A, Las Flores, Tampico, indicates that each building unit consisted of a lime-aggregate forming a monolithic mass, with subsequent plastering, essentially as at Comalcalco, Tabasco.