An attempt is made to correlate the finds recently published in this journal by Doris Stone and Carlos Balser with the Coe-Baudez sequence in northwestern Costa Rica. The 25 tombs at La Fortuna cover the whole Linear Decorated period, with one tomb belonging to the preceding and another one to the succeeding period. The material listed from Guácimo is tentatively dated to the Middle Polychrome period corresponding to the Mesoamerican Postclassic. It is shown that these finds do not contradict the Coe-Baudez sequence, but rather confirm it. A few remarks are added about the condition of Costa Rican archaeology.

Excavations at the site of Pottery Mound, 40 mi. south and west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, give evidence that the first structure at the site was a large, flat-topped pyramid built in two terraces. Four Pueblo IV architectural levels are superimposed on top of this structure. Sixteen painted kivas in association with the Pueblo IV room tiers retained on their walls a number of multi-layered fresco paintings. These paintings show macaws, other varieties of parrots, jaguars, and possibly Mexican Indians. The flat-topped mound and the ceremonial implications of the frescoes seem Mexican-inspired. The mound may date in the late Pueblo III period. The superimposed architectural levels and the frescoes date in the early Pueblo IV period.

This historically oriented description of the development of archaeological research and conceptualization in the area of Grand Canyon National Park begins with the contributions of the earliest Spanish explorers of the area and proceeds to research completed in 1964. Three periods of research are identified: discovery and exploration, 1540 to 1900; general investigation, 1900 to 1950; and concentrated analysis, 1951 to 1964. By the end of the first period the historic tribes and the presence of Pueblo ruins in the Grand Canyon area had been recognized. During the next 50 years many details were added to the understanding of the Pueblo material, including a sound temporal framework, the postulation of a second prehistoric group in the area, the Cohonina, and additional information on the ethnographic groups of the area accumulated. In the years between 1951 and 1964 there developed an increasingly complete description of the Cohonina branch, an analysis of Havasupai culture history, an examination of the Anasazi occupation within the depths of the Canyon, and the discovery of a Canyon occupancy some 2000 years earlier than had been known previously. Finally, a summary of the current conception of the area's culture history is presented, along with an indication of possible directions for future research.

Pollen deposited on the ground surface is carried down into the soil by percolating groundwater. Such postdepositional pollen transport preserves the record of historical vegetation and land use in slowly or nonaggrading sediment profiles by separating the pollen spectra of successive ground covers. This is demonstrated at Great Meadows, Pennsylvania, where pollen spectra in hillside cores indicating a preagricultural-era forest are succeeded during the clearance and agricultural period by weed and cereal pollen during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are, in turn, replaced by grass during the park period of the last 65 years. The preagricultural pollen spectra indicate that differences in historical ground cover across relatively short horizontal distances and elevations can be reconstructed with pollen analysis.

Suggestions that archaeologists cease their dalliance with inconsequential minutiae and concern themselves to some extent with conceptualization and problem have appeared a number of times in recent anthropological literature. This injunction is probably justified, and if archaeology is to contribute to our knowledge of the processes of culture and the historical interrelations of peoples it must broaden its scope of understanding and sharpen its tools of analysis. This is not as simple as might be hoped.

New evidence concerning the origin of maize — a question which has puzzled botanists for more than a century — has made it possible to reach several rather definite conclusions:

1. (1) Maize is undoubtedly an American plant.

2. (2) Maize undoubtedly had at least one center of origin in Middle America.

3. (3) The ancestor of maize is maize.

4. (4) The ancestor of maize is a form of pod corn, hut perhaps not the extreme type of pod corn known today. The ancestor was certainly a popcorn.

5. (5) Sometime in its history maize hybridized with Tripsacum or teosinte or both to produce radically new types which comprise the majority of modern maize varieties of North America.

The evidence on which these rather sweeping conclusions rest comes from three fields —botany, archaeology, and genetics.

Substantially conclusive evidence of the American origin of maize was obtained from fossil pollen grains discovered at a depth of more than 200 feet below Mexico City.

Evidences of prehistoric textiles are sporadically encountered in the course of archaeological investigations in the Mississippi drainage area. Because of their paucity, they have been given little or no place in the consideration of the archaeological problems of this region. Distinctions in weaving techniques have already proven of value in indicating the cultural connections of ethnic groups. Enough scattered textile materials have been accumulated to merit a study of their distinctive value in the complexes of traits of which they are a part. With this the major objective of the study, the development of terminology becomes a basic necessity, making the function of this work twofold.

The rock art of Writing-On-Stone has been the focus of detailed interpretation relying on concepts of group migration. Indeed, results of previous research at Writing-On-Stone have been pivotal in reconstructions of northwestern Plains group distributions. It is apparent that many anthropomorphic petroglyphs and pictographs contain elements and co-associations that allow chronological ordering from prehistoric through protohistoric and historic times. Cluster analyses described in this paper offer a more objective means of assessing changes in anthropomorph depictions through time, leading to a critical evaluation of prior concepts concerning stylistic changes and Native group distributions. In particular, the analyses demonstrate that rock-art anthropomorphs at Writing-On-Stone are more strongly interrelated than previously thought. We believe there is no need to invoke a Shoshonean presence in this area to account for differences in late prehistoric and historical-period rock-art anthropomorph styles.

Mason contends that we (Howey and O'Shea 2006) created a "chimera" of the Missaukee Earthworks site as a regional ceremonial center in Late Prehistoric Michigan (A.D. 1200-1600) by misinterpreting archaeological and ethnohistoric data. In considering Mason's critique, we re-emphasize the value, and methods, of studying ritual via material remains and show that Mason’s arguments simply serve to exemplify why the culture-historic approach has failed in its effort to understand the pre-contact Native cultures of the Great Lakes. Whitley contends we are misguided about the aims of archaeological studies of ritual and the place of "meaning" in these studies. In considering the "meaning" archaeologists seek in our studies of past ritual, we emphasize the problems we see in quests for what is ultimately immaterial and unrecoverable, the internal or emotive "meaning" of past ritual.

A series of Paleo-Indian and Archaic projectile points with burin facets at either the proximal or distal end is described. Most of the points come from Texas. The burin facets appear to be intentional products of the burin technique, used either for the production of burins and burin spalls, or for modifying the shape of the point itself. Paleo-Indian point types with burin facets include Clovis, Cumberland, Folsom, Plainview, Meserve, Angostura, and a number of variant forms. The data suggest that the burin or the burin technique may have been widespread throughout North America during early fluted-point times.

The maritime fur trade caused the extirpation of sea otters from southeast Alaska. In the 1960s, sea otters were reintroduced, and their numbers have increased. Now, sea otters are competing with people for what have become commercially important invertebrates. After having been absent for more than a century, the reentry of this keystone species has unsettled people. Although some communities perceive sea otters as a threat to their livelihoods, others view their return as restoration of the marine ecosystem. The federal Marine Mammal Protection Act authorizes any Alaska Native to harvest sea otters for subsistence provided that the harvest is not wasteful. Some people are seeking to define “traditional” Tlingit use of sea otters as not only using their pelts but consuming them as food, but some Tlingit maintain they never ate sea otters. This project analyzes the largest precontact archaeological assemblage of sea otter bones in southeast Alaska, with the benefit of insights gained from observing a Tlingit hunter skin a sea otter to infer that Tlingit ancestors hunted sea otters primarily for pelts. The extent to which other Indigenous peoples of the North Pacific consumed sea otters as food deserves investigation, especially as sea otters recolonize their historic range.

Radiocarbon dates are essential to the understanding of chronological frameworks in many fields, but are particularly important in archaeology. An International Radiocarbon Data Base (IRDB) has been proposed to update and maintain a computerized, centralized, and standardized record of 14C data, on a global and inter-disciplinary scale, from which researchers may retrieve and utilize valuable data. Since 1985, planning conferences and workshops continue to address the issues of establishing the IRDB. The primary focus of these discussions has been the data-entry format and how to obtain continuing financial support.

Previous research on agriculture in the American Southwest focuses overwhelmingly on archaeological survey methods to discern surface agricultural features, which, in combination with climatological, geological, and geographical variables, are used to create models about agricultural productivity in the past. However, with few exceptions, the role of floodplain irrigation and floodwater farming in ancestral Pueblo agriculture is generally downplayed in scholarly discourse. Using a variety of methods, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), satellite imagery, pedestrian survey, and supervised classification of remotely sensed imagery, we examine this issue through a consideration of how ancestral Ohkay Owingeh (Tewa) people solved the challenges of arid land farming in the lower Rio Chama watershed of New Mexico during the Classic period (A.D. 1350–1598). Based on acreage estimates, our results indicate that runoff and rainwater fields in terrace environments would have been insufficient to supply the nutritional needs of an ancestral Tewa population exceeding 10,000 individuals. Based on these observations, we present a case for the substantial role of subsistence agriculture in the floodplain of the Rio Chama and its associated tributaries.

The analysis of more than 1,300 flotation samples from thousands of excavated cultural features dating to the San Pedro phase (1220–730 BC) at the Las Capas site in southern Arizona provides evidence of long-term continuity and change in plant cultivation and collection practices in response to environmental disturbances during the Late Archaic period (2100 BC–AD 50). Although preceramic foodways in the region are widely considered to have been stable for roughly 2,500 years following the introduction of maize prior to 2100 BC, analyses of macrobotanical data reveal that moderate-intensity flood events during the Middle San Pedro phase (930–800 BC) preceded the greatest richness and diversity of harvested plants, while reliance on maize was reduced. In contrast, in periods with little environmental disturbance maize was more dominant, with less diversity in other cultivated and foraged plants. Novel cultivation, processing, and foraging practices were initiated in response to disturbance but persisted after floodplain conditions stabilized. It is argued that the reciprocal relationship between disturbance and botanical diversity is integral for understanding the long-term resilience of Late Archaic foodways and that this relationship is best modeled using ecological theories termed the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis and the Intermediate Productivity Hypothesis.

This paper describes the results of an investigation of internal Nahua lexical diversity and speculates on the possible implications for Mesoamerican culture-history. Data for glottochronological calculations were obtained from 25 different Nahua communilects ranging in location from Sinaloa in western Mexico to El Salvador. The absolute chronology derived from this lexicostatistical technique proved highly sensitive to a number of discontinuities in the Mesoamerican sequence. Nahua linguistic divergences correlated with such significant events as the demise of the "Classic civilizations," Toltec and Aztec expansionist periods, and the Spanish conquest. Although the correlation between absolute and glottochronological years remains theoretically controversial, the results of this and other similar studies indicate a high potential for the practical applications of this technique in holistic anthropological research.

This early Pueblo III site in the Little Rincon of the Colorado River, about 17 river miles downstream from Hite, Utah, is the first site with an irrigation system of any kind to be noted in the upper Glen Canyon. It is most closely linked to the Kayenta branch of the Anasazi culture. It is unusual because of its distance from any center of cultural development and because of the complexity of the irrigation system. This system consists of a large masonry reservoir filled by an internal spring and drained by a metering gate and a slab-lined tunnel into a canal or ditch which was traced for 30 feet. Two possible gates were noted on the downslope side of the canal. Many notched slabs, which were possibly used as canal gates, were located in the reservoir area, but were not definitely associated with other features. Only two dwellings were located. Post-occupational erosion has changed surface contours and erased the possible connection between the reservoir and canal and the fields. The water supply is probably more limited now than at the time of occupation.

Lanceolate points, formerly called “Yuma,” but now designated by specific type names such as Plainview, Milnesand, Eden, Browns Valley, and others, seem to have been various expressions of a common pattern or tradition that has been called "Piano" by Jennings (Griffin 1957: 23). The Piano tradition in the West represents an ancient hunting stage of culture that followed an earlier stage manifested by the paleo-Indians who used fluted points and hunted elephants of types now extinct.

San Nicolas is a small island located off the coast of southern California some 75 miles southwest of Los Angeles and 55 miles from the nearest point of the mainland. It is the most distant from the mainland of eight islands referred to collectively as the Channel Islands. San Nicolas is about 8 miles long by 4 miles wide and is 32.2 square miles in area. According to Norris (n.d., pp. 67-74), San Nicolas Island is a faulted asymmetric anticline composed of Pleistocene sediments lying unconformably on Eocene sandstone and shale. Original deposition during the Eocene was followed by anticline development and faulting in Eocene-Oligocene times. Miocene volcanic activity probably accounts for the several small diabase dikes on the island and for rhyolitic Begg Rock 7 miles northwest. The Pleistocene sediments were laid down during the first half of that period when the island was nearly or entirely submerged.