An important radiocarbon date of 9130 ± 250 years (W-345) was recently received from Washington, courtesy of M. Rubin, United States Geological Survey. That it pertains to an archaeological site in an area commonly supposed to have been under Valders (Mankato) ice at that time is of significance in our studies of prehistory in Ontario. A few notes on the occurrence of the sample may be of interest.

The Sheguiandah site, in the northeast corner of Manitoulin Island, has produced strong indications that man was present before the last ice sheet advanced over the area. Unfortunately, no satisfactory charcoal sample was obtained from the older deposits in 4 years of excavating.

The Churchill area of Manitoba is a meeting place of Eskimos and Chipewyans. It is also the boundary of the northern forest and the barren grounds. My field trip in the summer of 1953 to this part of the western margin of Hudson Bay had to do with both of these facts, for I intended to collect samples of timberline spruce for treering dating, and I hoped to find flint sites comparable to those of northern Alaska. The archaeological site that did turn up on the North Knife River was gratifying beyond expectations, because its flints fall into a very precise relationship with artifacts of early Alaskan and early Greenland sites.

Upon first reaching Churchill by rail on the ninth of July, I inquired of several people as to their knowledge of arrowheads or other flints. Two or three reports of flint finds pointed either to remote places in the interior or to Dorset-culture sites in the northern part of Hudson Bay.

The ceramic assemblage which characterizes the enigmatic Tlatilco burials is duplicated in the stratigraphy of the El Terror phase at Iglesia Vieja, Morelos, where two components have been isolated and defined. The earlier of the two is found to be regional, pre-eminent, and pre-Olmec, rather than Olmec-inspired as previously thought. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal associated with Olmec figurines and vessels are as early as those from the Olmec heartland.

The need to coat obsidian artifacts for photographic purposes can be eliminated through the use of a light polarizing filter attached to the camera lens.

Ninety-six percent of the obsidians in the valley of Guatemala originate in either the El Chayal or the Chimaltenango source systems. To an established hydration rate for El Chayal obsidian, one for Chimaltenango is added, thus expanding chronometric control to most of the central highlands of Guatemala.

The Ikat technique, that of producing designs in a fabric by means of a resistdyeing process in which the yarns of the warp, of the weft, or of both the warp and the weft, are pattern-dyed prior to weaving, was believed, until recently, to have been unknown in pre-Columbian Peru (Crawford 1916: 154; Dixon 1928: 201–9; Means 1931: 490). To date only a few examples of archaeological Peruvian textiles patterned by this method have been reported. Dressen (1930: 67) and Bird (1947: 73–4; 1952: 359; Bennett and Bird 1949: 285) mention some of these and Kroeber has spoken of ikats from Supe being present in the University of California Museum of Anthropology (personal communication, September, 1949).

Deep-basined metates are frequently found in early sites on the southern California coast, but the faces of the accompanying manos usually are only moderately convex. Mano faces examined by the writer never have been sufficiently excurvate to make contact with the grinding surfaces of the deeply ground metates. This presents an interesting problem: how were the manos manipulated on the metates?

An examination of specimens from Oak Grove sites 7, 21, and 79 (Rogers, 1929) and the Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys’ sites 4SBa477 and 4SBa485 in Santa Barbara County, California, reveals the following associations and characteristics. Slab, shallow-basined, and deep-basined metates are found in association. The first two types exhibit an unbroken grinding area, but specimens of the latter almost invariably have a slight shoulder running at least a part of the way around the basin, the transition between a slightly concave ground area and the deeply ground cavity.

Broken canines from two caves on the Porcupine River, Alaska are analyzed with respect to size, development, morphology, breakage pattern, and stratigraphic placement. These analyses indicate that they are deciduous bear teeth exfoliated in these caves through noncultural processes associated with dental development. Similarity of these teeth to the canines recovered from various stratigraphic levels at Trail Creek Caves 2 and 9, on the Seward Peninsula, Alaska (Larsen 1968:58), indicates that the Trail Creek specimens (including specimens from levels dating to the late Pleistocene) are also naturally exfoliated bear teeth and not dog canines (Canis familiaris) broken out by human beings, as originally suggested.

The area around Cody in northwestern Wyoming is extremely rich in archaeological sites. One of these, the Horner or Sage Creek site, is now well known as the locus of the Cody complex, a varied group of “Yuma” implements dated about 5000 B.C. (Wormington 1957: 127-8). Extensive tipi-ring sites have been found on the tributaries of the South Fork of the Shoshone River and in other locations near Cody. These so-called tipi rings are perhaps related to those of the Boysen Reservoir in west central Wyoming (Mulloy 1954a). There are also indications of hunting camps of the Crow, Shoshone, and Ogalalla Sioux whose trails met here in protohistoric and early historic times.

Explorations on the Ocmulgee River, near Macon, Georgia, carried out over a period of four years under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service, and under the auspices of the successive relief agencies of CWA, FERA, WPA, and CCC, have uncovered many remarkable finds and discoveries, many of which will be permanently restored or exhibited in the development of Ocmulgee National Monument, established by Act of Congress in 1934.

Bogucki's review deals with theoretical directions in current archaeological research in Europe, and Kohl's covers recent fieldwork and analysis in central Asia. It should be emphasized that these reviews are written specifically for the readers of this journal. Their purpose is to provide brief overviews of the topics and to introduce the readers to some of the literature in the field. The authors emphasize issues most likely to be of direct interest to readers working in the Americas and in literature published in English. PSW

Boyd (2004) questions the cultural association that we (Dunham et al. 2003:113) draw between burial mounds in central Virginia and the colonial era Monacan Indian people. We respond to Boyd's points, agree that any such interpretation be open to further discussion, but defend our cultural and historical interpretation as the most logical and parsimonious given the available data.

The senior author has for a number of years worked on the problem of the numerous and virtually unknown burial sites on the bluffs bordering the valley of the Republican River in Geary and Clay Counties, Kansas. This work has been a matter of some urgency, owing to the prevalence of unsystematic amateur excavation on the more prominent stone cairns found in the area. Fortunately, the complete excavation of the larger cairns involves too much labor for the merely curious, and it has often been possible to salvage material and information despite disturbance.

Three peculiar carved stone objects from eastern Montana merit mention, because carved biomorphic forms are otherwise almost entirely absent from this area (Fig. 27).

One was found on the surface about twenty miles south of Glendive, Montana. It is a vaguely trapezoidal piece of rather hard pumice 4.7 inches high, 5.1 inches wide, and 3.5 inches thick, which had been smoothed throughout, apparently with a rubbing stone, though on the back and sides many irregularities remain. A large, flat area has been smoothed on the bottom, apparently to provide a base. On one side an excellent representation of a bison head has been carved in bas-relief. The background has been so reduced that the head is elevated .3 inch above it. The whole has been well smoothed and rounded and only a few striations remain which suggest that the work was probably done with a stone chip or similar tool. Each eye has been accentuated with a daub of what appears to be pitch.

The National Register of Historic Places is important to the preservation of prehistoric sites in ways that are not fully appreciated by archaeologists. The advantages of having a site on the Register are discussed. Archaeologists have a responsibility toward site preservation, and the use of the Register is one means to fulfill that responsibility.

John M. Longyear, in his excellent presentation of the ceramics of Copan (1952), describes a vessel which he tentatively labels an incense burner. The vessel in question belongs to his Archaic period (?-A.D. 300). He considers it to be the only vessel from this period with possible ceremonial connotations. Quoting Longyear (p. 24): “It is a thick-walled, rough-finished vase, set on three solid cylinder legs (fig. 42 a [reproduced here as Fig. 86, a]). The body is pierced by a number of large, horseshoe-shaped holes. This may very well have been an incensario of some sort.” Longyear gives more details about the same vessel (p. 92). “Other thickwalled, coarsely finished sherds appear to come from incensarios of jar type, only two of which could be reconstructed. One is a large jar, of ‘hourglass” silhouette, supported on three long solid cylinder legs. The walls are pierced by an undetermined number of horseshoe-shaped windows, and the basal angle bears indentations made by the fingertip (fig. 42a).

The Middle Mississippian component at Aztalan was a mixed, Late Woodland / Mississippian occupation sited within a heavily fortified habitation and mound center that is located on a tributary of the Rock River in Wisconsin. It represents the northernmost large Cahokian-related village recorded. The Oneota Lake Koshkonong Locality of the Rock River drainage is located approximately 20 km south of Aztalan, and it consists of a 25 km2 area along the northwest shore with a small cluster of habitation settlements. Sixty-eight radiocarbon measurements have been obtained from Aztalan, and 52 from Oneota settlements in the Lake Koshkonong Locality. We discuss how to best interpret this dataset, and we use Bayesian chronological modeling to analyze these dates. The results suggest that (1) Aztalan's Late Woodland (Kekoskee phase) occupation began in the AD 900s or early AD 1000s, (2) Aztalan's Mississippian occupation ceased in the AD 1200s, (3) Oneota occupations at Lake Koshkonong began after AD 1050 and were established by the AD 1200s, and (4) Oneota occupations at Lake Koshkonong continued after Aztalan's Mississippian abandonment until at least the late AD 1300s. Additionally, the results demonstrate that Aztalan was fortified with a palisade with bastions for much of the Mississippian occupation, suggesting a contested presence in a multiethnic landscape.