Early in 1954 the author and his wife were stationed by the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología at Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. This provided the opportunity to continue their program of archaeological research on the Colombian coastal area which, at an earlier date, had already led to the formulation of a tentative time and space framework (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1954). While during most of 1954 a survey of the area surrounding Cartagena was made (Dussán de Reichel 1954; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1955), the dry season of 1954–1955 was spent in making a reconnaissance of the Sinú Valley, southwest of Cartagena. During a 4-month trip excavations were carried out at 2 major sites and extensive surface collections were gathered from some 20 others.

Recent investigations still yield no sign of preceramic or of Arawak occupation of Jamaica before early Period III in the Rouse chronology. Jamaican sites indicate a characteristically Arawakan culture, but they lack the ceremonial elaboration developed in Haiti. Jamaican pottery shows relatively little change through time and only minor local variation. Four distinct styles are present: (1) Little River from early Period III; (2) White Marl, the dominant style of the island; (3) Montego Bay, probably the latest in time; and (4) a little-known Red Ware whose chronological position is not clear. The closest stylistic affiliations are with Bani of Cuba and Meillac of Haiti. The late Carrier style of Haiti did not diffuse to Jamaica. Certain distinctive burial practices and features of village construction have been revealed by recent excavations at White Marl and other southern coast sites.

A cache of 12 soapstone vessels from the Claiborne site in Mississippi was recently repatriated to the state after being excavated in 1968 and removed to Ohio. As a locus of Poverty Point affiliation, Claiborne was positioned along a Gulf Coast route for the influx of soapstone into the lower Mississippi valley from quarries in the southern Appalachians, hundreds of kilometers to the east. Although residents of Claiborne were likely to have been active traders during the heyday of Poverty Point exchange, ca. 3600–3400 cal BP, new AMS assays on carbon deposits from seven of the soapstone vessels show that the cache was emplaced ~200 years later, during or shortly before the abandonment of Poverty Point. Reported here are the results of AMS assays, observations on vessel form and function, and preliminary inferences about the significance of the cache in the context of environmental and cultural change after 3200 cal BP.

The Late prehistoric cultural manifestations of Minnesota are so dominantly of the Woodland pattern that manifestations of the Mississippi pattern have not received much attention in published reports. Prior to 1940, components of the Orr and Blue Earth foci of the Oneota aspect had been recognized in Minnesota, and some sites of each focus had been studied. Since that time, two additional complexes, which I am ascribing to the Mississippi pattern and have named the Cambria aspect and the Great Oasis aspect, respectively, have been discovered. The Minnesota sites, together with the Brandon site in southeastern South Dakota reported by Over and Meleen8 and the Mill Creek sites in northwestern Iowa studied by Charles R. Keyes, make an important contribution to our knowledge of the Mississippi pattern in the area near the meeting point of these three states.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, critics suggested that warfare profoundly shaped cultural change in the prehistoric Southwest/Northwest. This challenge was part of a much larger debate concerning violence and warfare before civilization. It has become clear that scholars need to consider violence and warfare to understand the aboriginal history of the Southwest/ Northwest. Increasingly, archaeologists are asking: How did indigenous peoples practice war? How did warfare relate to social organization, adaptation, and religion? How did these relations change over time? Many authors have argued that we best answer these questions in well researched and carefully considered case studies. In Sonora, México, prehispanic peoples constructed terraces on isolated volcanic hills and built rooms, compounds, and other edifices on their summits to create cerros de trincheras. The Cerros de Trincheras and Defense Project mapped and collected Trincheras Tradition cerros de trincheras in Sonora. We used Geographic Information Systems analysis to demonstrate how these cerros de trincheras were defensive, what defenses protected, and how these relationships changed over time. This article compares Trincheras Tradition cerros de trincheras to general models of “primitive “ war, Yuman warfare, Andean Colla pukaras, and New Zealand Maori pas in order to infer a Trinchereño way of war.

The Wallace site is a thirteenth-century hamlet of rectangular lodges, situated on a bluff near Pueblo, Colorado. Commonly attributed to the Apishapa phase, it is more likely affiliated to the Upper Republican cluster, and so the people most likely spoke Northern Caddoan. Because of this identity, we use Pawnee ethnography to interpret the organization of space and spatial distribution of artifacts, including a rock art chamber below the bluff. This chamber followed the spatial layout of a lodge with a double entrance: a West Unit contained shield-bearing warriors associated with dreams and visions that provided supernatural power for low-level warfare, while the East Unit emphasized geometric images that most likely referred to the cosmológical origins of humanity. The art and artifacts show that the ideology of the domestic economy emphasized bison hunting and maize farming, and was associated respectively with doctors and priests.

Severe, occasionally disastrous, erosion of the bases of adobe walls in the arid and semiarid regions of the Southwest is a phenomenon which has long been observed and commented upon. In historic times, erosion of this type has caused collapse of adobe buildings in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico; about Tucson, Arizona, it is serious, as it is in the Salt River Valley. Evidence of similar erosion has been noticed in excavations of prehistoric massive adobe or caliche walls of Hohokam and Salado structures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D. in the Salt and Gila River valleys of Arizona. Repair to check erosion and prevent collapse of walls was the primary purpose of Cosmos Mindeleff's stay at Casa Grande in the 1890's. Fewkes noticed similar cutting of standing walls at the nearby Adamsville site.

Some of the first recorded archaeology done in North America was accomplished by John Rowzéé Peyton in 1774. With two companions, Peyton escaped from jail in Santa Fe. Using a compass and a copy of the Delisle map of 1703, he made his way to an Osage camp on the Missouri River and thence to St. Louis. En route, he stopped to excavate in a burial mound. His interpretation of the mounds he saw is one of the first recorded instances of the Mound Builder myth. There is reason to suspect that Peyton may have been responsible for the origin of the myth, as an oral tradition among the educated elite of the American colonies.

Since the publication, in 1891, of Mindeleff's maps and descriptions of five ruined pueblos along the rim of Antelope Mesa, the Jeddito Valley in the Hopi Reservation, northeastern Arizona, has been known as an interesting archaeological area. Subsequent short field trips by Fewkes, Russell, Hough, Kidder, the Cosgroves, Gladwin, Morris, and Hargrave have furnished further information about the large sites, called attention to the great number of small sites, and emphasized the archaeological importance of the region as a melting pot in which were blended elements of cultures and probably peoples from many directions. San Juan, Little Colorado, and Puerco met here; the San Francisco Mountains are within sight to the west, and a Rio Grande tongue is still to be heard on the Hopi mesas.

The two large mounds at the Poverty Point and Motley sites in West Carrol Parish, Louisiana, were first adequately described by C. B. Moore (1913, Fig. 29), and for a long while these structures and the cultural remains scattered about them remained one of the principal puzzles in the archaeology of the lower Mississippi Valley. Clarence Webb has made extensive surface collections from this locality for a number of years and his three articles in American Antiquity, the last written with Haag, form the bulk of the information which we have on the culture (Webb, 1944, 1948; Haag and Webb, 1953). The purpose of the present brief note is to report some newly discovered facets of the Poverty Point cultural complex.

The writer was able to work a few weeks at the site in the spring of 1952 and again in 1953. However, the most remarkable discovery was not made in the field but in the Cartographic Laboratory of the Mississippi River Commission in Vicksburg.

When William Henry Holmes of the U. S. National Museum explored the Potomac River Valley in 1890, he studied and described most of the major village sites and cultures to be found in the area known as "Tidewater."1 The Marcey Creek site is located at the head of Tidewater, overlooking the Little Falls of the Potomac, but was not reported by Holmes.

The “South Appalachian Province,” an area defined by the occurrence of the complicated stamp as a major mode of pottery decoration, was outlined by Holmes (1903). Almost nothing can be added to the area definition propounded by Holmes. Actually the area varied in size as it expanded and contracted through time (the temporal factor was necessarily omitted in 1898). Although the province varied in size, it should perhaps be reduced in size to include only the core area–the present state of Georgia with the addition of northern Florida. Areas outside this used complicated stamping only at certain time periods, and in all cases these usages appear to be stylistic imports from Georgia, not local developments.

Analysis of a series of negative impressions in fired clay recovered during the 1975 excavations at Icehouse Bottom (40MR23), Tennessee, indicates the production and/or use of both single element textiles and basketry at that site. One type of single element textile, knotted looping, is represented by a single specimen while one of the three major subclasses of basketry is also present. The latter includes 19 samples of a single structural type of twining. The technical characteristics of this, the oldest well dated "perishable" assemblage from east of the Mississippi River, are discussed and the assemblage is briefly compared to others in eastern and western North America.

Our knowledge of the prehistory of interior Alaska is still very limited. Nearly all archaeological work in the territory has been in the Eskimo and Aleut regions. In the interior planned, systematic surveys have been conducted by Froelich Rainey, Frederica de Laguna, and Frederick Johnson, but most of these deal with relatively recent Athapascan sites. The only definitely pre-Athapascan site is the “Campus site” on the University of Alaska campus.

From time to time random specimens are found in connection with road work, farming, and mining. Artifacts discovered in the Tanana Valley muck deposits, often at great depths, suggest, but do not prove, that man was contemporaneous with mammoth and other now extinct animals of the Pleistocene. One specimen found in association with a mastodon jaw, but not actually embedded in the bone, adds to the circumstantial evidence that man was here in the late Pleistocene, if not earlier.

Shifting from shellfish collecting to fishing as a primary coastal foraging strategy can allow hunter-gatherers to obtain more food and settle in larger populations. On California's northern Channel Islands (NCI), after the development of the single-piece shell fishhook around 2500 cal BP, diet expanded from primarily shellfish to include nearshore fishes in greater numbers. During the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (1150–600 cal BP), settlement on the islands condensed to a small number of large coastal villages with high population densities supported largely by nearshore fish species including rockfishes, surfperches, and señoritas. Faunal data from five sites on western Santa Rosa Island (CA-SRI-15, -31, -97, -313, and -333) demonstrate an increase in nearshore fishing through time. We argue that demographic changes that occurred on the northern Channel Islands were accompanied by changes in subsistence strategies that were related in part to risk of failure when attempting to acquire different resources. As population density increased, the low-risk strategy of shellfish harvesting declined in relative importance as a higher-risk strategy of nearshore fishing increased. While multiple simultaneous subsistence strategies are frequently noted among individual hunter-gatherer communities in the ethnographic record, this study provides a framework to observe similar patterns in the archaeological record.

The foot-turned parador or mobile pottery support used at Acatlán is very similar to the kabal used at the Maya village of Mama, Yucatán. It is viewed as an extension of the Maya kabal technique into the mold-technique area of central Mexico. It is suggested that the principle of the Maya kabal and its Acatlán counterpart may have been known and used by the Olmec of La Venta. Several vessels from La Venta which resemble the Mama type of kabal offer evidence for the possible antiquity of the kabal-parador technique of pottery making.

Excavations of protohistoric Arikara sites in South Dakota have produced native manufactured blue-glass pendants in association with burials. On the basis of archaeological and laboratory evidence, it is conjectured that the Arikara produced these pendants by first grinding blue-glass seed beads to form a powder. They then moistened the powder to form a paste and shaped and fired the paste to the desired form on a copper plate which often was a rifle butt plate. In addition, it is shown that, through time, the Arikara gradually refined their techniques to produce better made pendants and ornaments of different shapes.

Six types of rock features have been identified in a northwestern California mountain range. The features, including cairns, alignments, hearth rings, stone circles, rock stacks, and semicircular enclosures (tsektsels) form a complex in association with traditional trails and mountain high points. Combined ethnographic and archaeological research reveals this complex to be associated with patterns of traditional religious activity involving power quests, ritual and medicinal training, and individual prayer among the Yurok and their neighbors. The complex can be traced from prehistoric beginnings to the present time, indicating the persistence of this ideological pattern through a period of severe cultural change associated with Euro-American settlement of northwestern California. It is not known yet whether the complex is unique to northwestern California or is manifested over a wider region.

Unlike many goods in the eighteenth century, which were wholly imported, utilitarian coarse earthenwares were also produced locally within the American colonies. In the Chesapeake region, it has been suggested that these local wares were primarily reserved for those unable to directly participate in the transatlantic credit economy fostered by the tobacco consignment system. Rather than relying on ambiguous visual attributes to identify these wares, this study utilized elemental analysis via LA-ICP-MS. Coarse earthenwares from domestic plantation contexts of varying social status were assigned to production zones based on shared elemental composition with a reference dataset. This reference dataset incorporated sherds from historic earthenware production sites across the mid-Atlantic and in Great Britain, representing 12 geologically distinct production zones. The results emphasize the diversity of coarse earthenware sources that Chesapeake residents accessed, both local and imported. There was a steady decrease in the use of imported wares in favor of domestically made products over time. There were no sharp differences among plantation households of different statuses, suggesting that these everyday wares were equally accessible to all, perhaps via plantation provisioning strategies. The omnipresence of local wares is evidence for the pragmatic and political strengths of local production.