Excavations to investigate stratigraphy at Zia Pueblo indicate that the mesa now occupied by the tribe was first settled by their ancestors during the fourteenth century, when a neighboring site also was established by others of the same people. Except for a short period in the late seventeenth century when the group moved to a refugee site, occupation was continuous. In the east dump, sterile soil was encountered on the bottom of level 36 (each level of 25 cm. thickness); above this, five sloping zones with sherd complexes differing in proportions, if not always in types, could be traced.

During the 1948 summer field session of the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School, located at Point of Pines, Arizona, two painted stone slabs were excavated in a late Pueblo ruin designated as Arizona: W:10:47.

Arizona: W: 10:47 was believed to be a small single-phase pueblo occupied during the Point of Pines horizon, ca. 1350 to 1400 A.D. It was decided during the course of the summer's work to investigate this ruin, in an attempt to locate wood specimens for dating purposes and to gather information concerning the architecture, ceramics, etc., of this late horizon. The task of sinking the te.st trenches necessary for the investigation fell to the author and to R. E. Gerald of the University of Arizona.

Recently, Hamblin and Pitcher (1980) have attempted to buttress the class conflict explanation of the Classic Maya collapse using a series of mathematical models. However, despite the exceptionally good agreement between these mathematical relations and the empirical data, the same cannot be said for the fit between the conceptual and mathematical models. The relations employed are very general, so much so as to often be isomorphic with very different processes. In one case at least, the same model appears to be consistent with several entirely distinct explanations of the collapse, and other mathematical readings of the monument data are by no means precluded. While these particular mathematical relationships fail to make a very strong case that the Classic Maya collapse was engendered primarily through peasant revolt and class conflict, which was very possibly Hamblin's and Pitcher's underlying aim, the attempt to cast explanations of the collapse into mathematical form points the way for the next generation of collapse models.

A copper-covered, wooden, human-effigy mask from a burial in a site of the Spoon River focus of Late Mississippi, about 1200-1400, probably was a rattle much like the specimen from Mound C, Etowah, Georgia.

The Marksville site lies about a mile to the east of the small town of that name, in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. Its earthworks, which were first described by Gerard Fowke (1928: 405–34), belong to several distinct components: the Nick site, the Greenhouse site, and the Marksville site proper (Ford 1951: 13–14). The latter component — the oldest of the three — consists of Fowke's “Enclosure A” (Fig. 1), a group of 5 mounds situated on the edge of a steep, eastward-facing bluff and enclosed on the west by a semicircular earthen rampart 4 to 7 feet high and more than half a mile long. Just to the south of this enclosure lies a circular embankment which may be of comparable age. Further south lies the Nick site (Fowke's “Mound 1“) which is known to be younger than the structures of Enclosure A.

Can Flecks of charcoal in soils and hearths be concentrated into a usable sample for radiocarbon dating? It is impracticable to ship large volumes of soil with low carbon content from distant sites, yet dating them may be most important. This question was informally discussed following the Wenner-Gren Conference on African Prehistory held at the University of Chicago in February, 1953, and as a result Robert J. Braidwood proposed that an experimental field laboratory be established that summer at an excavation where water and electricity were available if needed. The Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago and the Illinois State Museum were sponsoring the excavation of a rock shelter near Modoc, Illinois, and I was invited to conduct experiments there, trying out any technics that I wished. It was hoped that these experiments would result in establishing a simple procedure that could be used in many parts of the world for procuring radiocarbon samples.

The group of ruins comprising the prehistoric pueblo of Kinishba is situated in a broad valley about four miles northwest of the town of Fort Apache, Arizona, on the White River Apache Indian Reservation. Kinishba, the Apache name for this pueblo meaning “Brown House,” is derived from the color of the rock walls of the ruin. The valley is bounded on all sides by high plateaus and mesas, with the White River cutting across from east to west at the southern end. The valley floor is thickly covered with grass, cholla, and juniper, while the surrounding hills support a fairly heavy stand of pine, pinyon, and juniper.

Proponents of the “type-variety” method of ceramic analysis are criticized for mixing analytical units and the rank hierarchies appropriate to synthesis, and for semantically substituting “type-variety” for “type” without actually changing the method of analysis.

Smoking pipes discovered in archaeological contexts demonstrate that Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America have practiced smoking for over 4,500 years. Archaeometry and ancient residue metabolomics provide evidence for the association of particular plants with these artifacts. In this article, we synthesize recent research on ancient smoking and present current knowledge on the spatiotemporal distribution of smoking in the past. The presence of stone smoking pipes in the archaeological record is paired with our understanding of past plant use based on chemical residue analyses to create a picture of precontact smoking practices. Archaeological pipe data demonstrate that smoking was a widely distributed practice in the inland Northwest over the past several thousand years, but not on the coast. Distributional data—including positive and negative evidence from chemical residue studies—show that tobacco was an important smoke plant in the region as early as around 1,410 years ago and as far north as the mid-Columbia region. Ancient residue metabolomics contributes to a richer understanding of past use of specific plants through the identification of tobacco species and other indigenous plants, including Rhus glabra, Cornus sericia, and Salvia sp., as contributing to the chemical residues in ancient pipes.

Many archaeologists have ignored the complexities of preservation treatments and have proceeded alone, often with unsatisfactory results. Now that new legislation can provide conservation funding, archaeologists involved in federally funded research should have little reason to ignore professional standards in the areas of conservation, preservation, and collection interpretation and maintenance. Specific advantages of professional conservation input for the archaeologist are cited with reference to a case study in Maine.

In their recent description of Machalilla culture Meggers and Evans deny that Machalilla is related to any other known ceramic complexes. It is suggested that Machalilla may be related to Late Tutishcainyo and may have entered coastal Ecuador from the western Amazon basin.

The article, “The Typological Concept,” recently published by Alex D. Krieger1 is an encouraging sign that interest in methodology, hitherto confined largely to field work, is now turning as well to the study of specimens in the laboratory. Krieger is to be congratulated for outlining clearly his method of forming types and for a penetrating comparison of that method with other archaeological procedures of classification.

It may be questioned, however, whether the article contributes as much to an understanding of the typological concept as it does to the typological method. In emphasizing the formation of types, Krieger fails to explain what he means by the term “type.” As the present writer understands his remarks, the term “type” is used variously to refer to the categories formed by classifying artifacts (pp. 271-272), to the specimens classified within each category (bottom of pp. 277, 281), and to the pattern of characters used to define each category (pp. 278, 280).

Previous discussions of the exchange system of the prehistoric Maya have been based on the assumption that their uniform environment prevented inter-group exchange of local resources. The validity of this assumption is questioned and the stability of primitive exchange systems is examined.

Nearly sixty years ago, the wife of a territorial governor of New Mexico was among the first to recognize that ruins of the Southwest represented, not a vanished and mysterious race, but the ancestors of the living Pueblo Indians, and added: .“from the sameness of the remains I infer that no important facts are to reward the search of dreaming pilgrim or patient student.”

In the half-century since, patient students have ferreted out many facts of interest and possibly of importance, and have found that the sameness of the remains is not complete. The gradual recognition of successive periods of sequential development, their confirmation through stratigraphic studies, and the working out of temporal classification or horizontal segmentation, culminating in the Pecos-Roberts classification, is a familiar story.

In the Wyoming Basin, archaeological sites dating from the Early Archaic to Late Prehistoric are often found associated with or adjacent to dense populations of Cymopterus bulbosus (springparsley), a nutritious geophyte that would have been an important food source for prehistoric humans living in the region. Experimental data have shown that the caloric return rates of C. bulbosus were enough to support seasonal exploitation by foragers, yet there has been no direct evidence for the use of this geophyte from the archaeological record. In this study, we examine starch granules from 10 ground stone tools excavated from two stratified, multicomponent archaeological sites in the Wyoming Basin to determine if C. bulbosus was collected and consumed in the past. Taproots of C. bulbosus were collected from two populations in the immediate vicinity of the archaeological sites in order to develop a modern starch reference. Identification of Cymopterus starch granules is based on a systematic study of those reference granules. The presence of Cymopterus starch on the ground stone artifacts suggests that prehistoric foragers were collecting and consuming these geophytes. These findings support previous hypotheses about geophyte use in southern Wyoming and therefore have implications for increasing human populations as well as settlement and subsistence decisions.

This article evaluates aspects of an occupational history that was developed for the Town Creek site, a small Mississippian center in the North Carolina Piedmont that was occupied sometime between A.D. 1150–1400. Town Creek’s occupational history suggests that its Mississippian community consisted of multiple, discrete household groups, and that these groups were important throughout the center’s existence. Analyses of architectural, mortuary, and ceramic data indicate that Town Creek began as a town with a substantial domestic population, but it evolved into more of a vacant center later in time. This decline in domestic population coincided with significant evidence for site-wide ritual activity that included the construetion of a platform mound and the use of cemeteries in former house locations. Parallels between the small center at Town Creek and some of the largest Mississippian centers, especially the persistence of household-group spaces and an emphasis on ritual activities later in time, suggest that interaction among discrete social groups within a ritual context was a salient part of being Mississippian.

In its first five decades, American Antiquity has grown from a small publication with relatively limited interests to a much larger publication with wide interests. Its reputation has grown along with its change in size and look (see Figure 1), and it is now recognized internationally as a leader in the presentation of theoretical and methodological advances.

Much of the credit for this growth must be given to W. C. McKern, founding editor (see Figure 2), who devoted four years of intense effort to establish the overall quality and intellectual liveliness that are the journal's hallmarks. This commitment to excellence has been adhered to by the twelve editors who have followed McKern. The salutary growth of the journal, however, has not been without its costs. It is on one of these costs that I focus my attention here.

Cogged stones are one of the few classes of artifacts which are limited in occurrence to the “middle” period of southern California's prehistory. They are stone discs, 6⅛ inches or less in diameter, characterized by grooves or indentations in the edge. On the basis of the nature of the latter and of the presence or absence of perforation they are described in four types. Some of the variations may have historical significance, but this cannot be proven with the data at hand. Few specimens have been excavated under controlled conditions. The distribution is virtually limited to the coastal drainage south of Ventura County and appears to center along the Santa Ana River Valley. According to the interpretation of coastal chronology employed, cogged stones were made during the period 6000-3500 B.C. Their use is unknown, but the absence of any pattern of wear and the conjunctions of certain of the specimens suggest that they served some ritual function.

In 1955 an archaeological field party from the State Historical Society of North Dakota recovered 2 perforated elk teeth from a village site, 32SI4, on the Missouri River in North Dakota. The excavations at this site were directed by Alan R. Woolworth and the writer. In an attempt to determine the significance of these specimens the writer searched the literature for data on their distribution in archaeological and ethnographic contexts and hints as to their function among socio-linguistic groups.

Many archaeologists continue to assume that spear thrower adjuncts were intended to serve some practical purpose related to the performance of the weapon despite the inconclusive results of the experimental use of the “weighted” spear thrower. Contrary to popular opinion, there is little evidence to substantiate the claim that atlatl weights increase the range or velocity of projectiles to any significant degree. A new approach to the problem is suggested by referring back to the original descriptions of archaeologically recovered spear throwers from the American Southwest. The fact that Basket Maker II atlatls were described as being characteristically flat in cross-section with surprisingly flexible shafts as well as reference to the former use of flexible spear throwers by A boriginal tribes of north A ustralia suggests that spear thrower adjuncts may have been intended as a means of exploiting the potential of such a weapon.