An archaeological survey of the areas along the river and the side canyons in upper Grand Canyon led to the location of 18 sites, five isolated and 13 in four clusters. The age of these sites is consistent with others found in the Grand Canyon north of the Colorado River and ranges generally around the period A.D. 1050-1150. It would appear that the occupants of these sites were struggling agriculturalists of the Anasazi pattern who were unable to adjust to this rigorous environment and abandoned the area. Evidence for a more or less continuous use of the Grand Canyon was found in the Little Colorado River Canyon, where the original Hopi sipapu was located. While prehistoric occupation may once have occurred to a minor degree near the mouth of the Little Colorado, its major function has been as a passage-way between the Hopi pueblos and the Hopi salt mine, with an intermediate stop at the sipapu (a geological formation). This paper is one of a series that attempts to outline archaeological developments in the Grand Canyon region.

Ethnoarchaeological research has made valuable contributions towards our understanding of the functional variation of specific artifacts and features. The use of spiked vessel-forms among modern Maya groups, as well as the depictions of spiked vessels in the surviving Maya codices, suggest that spiked vessels have served a relatively wider range of functions (although invariably in a ritual context) than most Mesoamericanists have suspected. A critical review of the spiked vessel phenomenon, using the codices, the archaeological literature, and recent ethnographic data is presented as a guide for future archaeological interpretation.

Bettinger attempted to find out if change occurred in prehistoric land-use patterns in the Owens Valley, California, by comparing artifact and site distributions with those expected given Steward's ethnographic model for this area. Bettinger's conclusions are found to be faulty because they are contradictory, ignore other potential determinants of archaeological variability, and are based, in some instances, on erroneous interpretation of poorly conceived or inadequate data. We discuss additional factors that should be considered and possible interpretation of Bettinger's results.

The small embossed ornaments of sheet copper found in Southeastern sites have usually been identified as “pendants” or “symbol badges,” and have been considered part of the ritual equipment of the Southern Cult. Four graves of the Wilbanks period at Etowah contained such objects. They had apparently been mounted with feathers and slender wooden rods to form elaborate headdresses. Observers from the 16th century onwards describe “crowns” worn by the Coosa, Creek, and Natchez nobility that would have been very similar.

During parts of the seasons of 1937 and 1938, parties from the Montana Archaeological Survey excavated at a campsite exposed by one of the many cave-ins in abandoned tunnels of the Red Lodge Coal Mines, near Red Lodge, Montana. The first season's work was under the direction of the late H. Melville Sayre, then Director of the Survey, while Raymond Thompson was leader of the 1938 party. Laboratory analysis and interpretation were completed by the writer, who is indebted to Paul Reiter, of the University of New Mexico for critical comment.

Archaeological investigation in the Northern Periphery, in its present status, has revealed and formulated many perplexing problems. Not the least of these is the problem of the ethnic prehistory of its Puebloid peoples.

Apparently, because of the striking resemblances between the Northern Periphery cultures -and the San Juan Puebloan cultures, Judd, in his expeditions of 1915-1920, tacitly assumed Northern Periphery peoples to be Puebloan in physical characteristics. The crania found by him in the southern part of this area exhibit both occipital deformation and normality. This phenomenon was interpreted by Judd as the most significant observation to be made. He felt that it indicated the use of the Puebloan cradleboard when the trait was either in an incipient form or in a period of decline.1 Equally plausible, of course, is the possibility of two distinct periods, a pre-cradleboard period and a period after the introduction of the cradleboard.

Five new radiocarbon dates from an Archaic midden at the Palmer site on the Florida Gulf coast confirm the previous estimate of 2000 B.C. for the beginning of pottery making in the Southeast. Correlations over hundreds of miles give extremely close results between archaeological subperiods and radiocarbon dates.

As an introduction to the problem of pre-pottery culture in Illinois, it seems best to review briefly discoveries made previous to the excavation at the Faulkner site. The first such manifestation was reported by Langford at the Fisher site. The burials in the gravel deposits, lower level, were noted by him to have been without pottery and of a physical type different than that in pottery-bearing sites. In 1931 it was mentioned that Kelly had unearthed fire basins of considerable geological antiquity at Plum Island. Simpson and Shoenbeck have excavated similar fire basins in a shell mound in Woodford County. Both finds are considered to be earlier than the use of pottery. The Folsom points found in Illinois are also thought to be of considerable age. In a surface survey of the Carbondale area, Moreau Maxwell located sites which produced large flint knives, bannerstones, straight-stemmed points, quantities of flint chips, but no pottery.

During the summer of 1939, Dr. D. D. Brand led a party of graduate students in anthropology into Mexico with the purpose of studying the archaeology of the state of Michoacán and adjacent areas. After preliminary examination of the better known ruins in the northern part of this state, the party broke up and each individual went into a previously determined area in southern Michoacán or neighboring Guerrero or Mexico. The several resulting manuscripts are available in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.

Loney's (2000) recent paper in American Antiquity contains a critique of evolutionary archaeology that is based on fundamental misconceptions. Perhaps most seriously, she confounds the evolutionary archaeologist's conception of culture as an inheritance system based on social learning with an extreme claim about genetic control over cultural traits.

Studies have long noted the influence of stone package size and reduction intensity on lithic assemblage composition, particularly in the form of flake size distributions. However, it remains difficult to distinguish objectively the effect of either factor in archaeological contexts without controlling for the variation in one of the two variables. Here we report on an experimental study designed to test the null hypotheses that original stone size and reduction intensity have no impact on the size distribution of lithic flake debris produced during core reduction. Results indicate statistically significant influence from original stone size but not reduction intensity, although the effects from the former are low enough to be considered trivial. In reviewing a sequence of archaeological assemblages from a Middle Paleolithic site, all exhibit an excess of smallsized materials in comparison to the experimental data. When exceptionally high frequencies of the smaller size classes occur, taphonomic processes are clearly responsible.

Tracking broad-scale behavioral patterns using both lithics and faunal remains offers one line of evidence for investigating both prehistoric subsistence activities and the consequences of aggregation and increases in population size. Accumulation research, which examines the ratio of projectile points to cooking pottery sherds from the same context, shows a higher ratio of projectile points in areas with lower population densities. This pattern holds true when examining faunal assemblages and large-game procurement practices from A.D. 900 to 1300 in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. This research demonstrates that social processes such as aggregation and increases in population density influence human hunting strategies as much as changes in natural environment, which lead to changes in a group’s dietary regime.

Three Mixtec human sacrificial knives of the late Postclassic period were found in 1957 at the Cuicatec village of San Andres Papalo in northern Oaxaca, Mexico. They were being used to sacrifice chickens and turkeys as offerings in curing ceremonies at a ruined prehistoric site on top of the mountain which rises above the village. Offerings of food and drink are made to the spirit of thunder who lives on the mountain top and who has power to control longevity and cure the sick. The three knives and a conch trumpet were stored in a ceremonial cave near the village. One wooden handle is plain; the others are carved to represent a human hand and the head of a serpent. The handles lack the elaborate mosaic decoration which distinguishes the few prehistoric sacrificial knives in museum collections. These three knives constitute material evidence for the survival of a prehistoric ritual system which involved the making of blood sacrifice to rain gods on mountain tops. The shift from human to animal sacrificial victims is probably the major change in the prehistoric pattern.

Until recently Panamanian archaeology has been essentially descriptive with little attempt at chronological ordering. Outstanding monographs and writings of this nature are those by Holmes (1888), MacCurdy (1911), and Osgood (1935), on the Province of Chiriquí, and Linné (1929) on Darien. In the 1930's the Peabody Museum (Harvard) excavations at Sitio Conte in Coclée Province, central Panama, were devoted largely to the careful uncovering of graves and their contents; but analyses of these collections were not made with an eye to cultural sequence (Lothrop 1937, 1942).

It has become almost an archaeological maxim that each new culture should be followed up with some dispersal studies. Most of these take the form of tabulations of typical cultural items that may be recognized out of context. If these are sufficiently distinctive, dispersion of the particular traits or characteristics may be traced with fair facility. Inherent in this supposition are some outstanding difficulties, nowhere better illustrated than in the case of the Folsom point. After the discovery of the Folsom site at Folsom, New Mexico, and the relatively quick realization that the Folsom point was distinctive and had a characteristic outline and peculiarities of chipping which could be recognized out of context, a fervent search was initiated to discover the dispersal of this element.

Traditions have an incalculable appeal to the human mind. Often tenuous, remote, impossible to prove, they are occasionally startling. The frustrated researcher upon some fascinating problem of human history which fails, otherwise, of solution comes again and again to the consideration of floating tales which seem to hold a kernel of truth, a hint—just a faint hint—of veracity masked in the trappings of legend. Such material may be used, but on the whole it is ghostly, disembodied, and unverifiable. Lacking corroboration, it fails to bring conviction. Often the tale has been borne by some single native who, long since disappeared into forest anonymity, is no longer available for questioning. His story may, however, have passed through several intermediate hands and be quoted in old books whose scholarship is naive. The result is that, use these sources as we may, we turn seriously to other more tangible means of establishing truth. Then, if the search languishes, we are prone to return, still captivated, to the tale spun long ago.