Evidence is presented for the delineation of a Paleo-Indian site in Wisconsin. Surface finds from the Kouba site in Dane County include an assemblage of fluted points, gravers, and scrapers of similar types to those from Paleo-Indian sites in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

The ceramic complex of the Middle Mississippian phase in northeast Arkansas is comparatively well known, though its origin and relationships are still obscure. Holmes and Moore described and classified this ware, but were unable to place it chronologically. Vaillant later pointed out certain striking analogies between the vessel forms from this area and those from Mexico, Central and South America, but his study was made from the standpoint of horizontal distribution.

Although the examples which he illustrates are quite suggestive of a Latin American origin, Vaillant's hypothesis is most strongly supported by specific types which have a composite silhouette. It is true that these forms are characteristic of the Arkansas Middle Mississippian complex; but they are complemented by a great number of simple vessels which are either plain or have elementary intaglio and relief designs.

Weather-stranded Norse explorer-refugees are reported in the medieval Icelandic Landnámabók to have dug into an archaeological site in eastern Greenland about A.D. 981. Enough details are given to suggest that they investigated a Dorset Culture site. This 1,000-year-old account must be the oldest known archaeological report for the New World.

In a rejoinder to Taylor's review of his Tamaulipas monograph, MacNeish restated his method of analysis and reviewed the system he used to establish his phase sequence. Taylor claims that MacNeish has defended his position by introducing new data and by presenting a point of view not expressed in the original monograph. Taylor insists that MacNeish's reply only confirms his original criticism that the Tamaulipas sequence is built on the premise that one excavation unit equals one phase.

Hafting is an important part of lithic technology that can increase our understanding of socioeconomic behavior in the past. In this article, we develop a holistic approach to studying hafting by using the concept of curation within a broader assessment of lithic technological organization in early villages. Early villages were loci of socioeconomic transformation as part of the shift from mobile foraging to more sedentary cultivation lifeways. We suggest that an examination of hafting can provide new insights into how early villagers negotiated technological requirements, economic decision making, and social interactions in these novel contexts. As a case study, we develop a curation index and apply it to an archaeological context of hafted and unhafted pointed tools from the early Neolithic village of Dhra’, Jordan. This curation index allows for a discussion of the technological, economic, and social dimensions of hafting strategies at Dhra’. The presence of multiple hafting traditions within early Neolithic villages of Southwest Asia is evidence of persistent social segmentation despite food storage and ritual practices that emphasized communal integration. Through the lens of lithic technological organization, we demonstrate that hafting and curation patterns can increase our understanding of technological, economic, and social strategies in early villages.

The historic and proto-historic archaeological sites of the Guatemala highland provide another approach to the problem of correlating the ancient Maya calendar with the European. For native annals of the highland tribes list the generations of Indian rulers from the time of the Spanish Conquest back into prehistoric phases, which one may expect the archaeologist will eventually link to remains that are associated elsewhere with dates in the Long Count.

If, for example, we can identify a certain trait complex as one brought to Guatemala by the Quiches and other tribes entering this country from the north, and if we can calculate the approximate date of their arrival by counting generations listed in the native annals, we can then assign this date to the same complex in an area where it is dated in the Maya Long Count.

Historical sources are a potentially rich and as yet almost untouched source of specific and general analogies for use in archaeological interpretation. In particular, certain unique sources, such as Diderot’s Encyclopédie, offer many specific examples, but more generally history offers the archaeologist the chance to formulate broad analogies dealing with basic questions of cultural evolution.

As far as can be learned from a study of the scientific contributions of Yoder (1950), Foshag (1945), and others who have dealt with the jade-jadeite problem, it appears that, although the presence of one or the other mineral has been reported from a considerable list of widely separated localities in both the Old and the New World, the exact conditions leading to their development have been subject to controversy, partly because occurrence in situ is extremely rare. The passing references to places from which the Mayans secured their supplies of raw material are in general vague, based on hearsay or traditional accounts, combined with inferences relating to the abundant artifacts unearthed at classical sites.

The identification of human friction prints by Chrisman et al. (1996) from Pendejo Cave, New Mexico, some dating more than 36,000 years B.P., is tenuous given the incongruence between data presented in the text and data illustrated in the figures. The identification of these structures as human friction prints hinged largely on the frequency of epidermal ridges per linear centimeter. As such, the validity of this evidence to justify the presence of humans at Pendejo Cave at this early date is questioned.

It is shown that a magnetic balance with a sensitivity of one gamma can detect storage pits and clusters of postmolds commonly found on Late Woodland aboriginal sites.

This manuscript presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary material culture using digital data. Scholars interested in the materiality of past and contemporary societies have been limited to information derived from assemblages of excavated, collected, or physically observed materials; they have yet to take full advantage of large or complex digital datasets afforded by the internet. To demonstrate the power of this approach and its potential to disrupt our understanding of the material world, we present a study of an ongoing global health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on face-mask production during the pandemic across the United States in 2020 and 2021. Scraping information on homemade face-mask characteristics at multimonth intervals—including location and materials—we analyze the production of masks and their change over time. We demonstrate that this new methodology, coupled with a sociopolitical examination of mask use according to state policies and politicization, provides an unprecedented avenue to understand the changing distributions and social significances of material culture. Our study of mask making elucidates a clear linkage between partisan politics and decreasing disease mitigation effectiveness. We further reveal how time-averaged asssemblages drown out the political meanings of artifacts otherwise visible with finer temporal resolution.

This article evaluates current models of the influence of functionality and materials properties on pottery production as practiced by potters in the Middle Balsas Region of Guerrero, Mexico, during the Classic period (A.D. 300-900). The research was designed specifically to look for evidence of the influence of materials properties on pottery production in an archaeological context. Research results suggest that a specific clay deposit was selected deliberately by ancient Middle Balsas potters only when producing a subset of restricted vessels that were used for water storage. All other domestic vessels used in the Middle Balsas Region were produced from a variety of clay sources with no apparent link to vessel size, shape, or intended purpose. These production patterns endured with little appreciable change within the region for a time span of over a thousand years, from approximately 300 B.C. to A.D. 900.

This report focuses on the morphometric and elemental analysis of glass beads collected from an adobe structure (CA-SCR-217H-T) at Mission Santa Cruz, which operated between 1791 and the 1830s in the colonial province of Alta (upper) California. Previous chemical research established a chronological framework for opacified beads collected from sites in Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the southeastern United States. Testing the viability of this chronological framework for California, we analyzed 100 white glass beads using a conventional typology and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS)—the first application of LA-ICP-MS to a California mission. We present the results of the LA-ICP-MS study and then briefly comment on the potential for LA-ICP-MS to refine chronologies associated with colonial missions and other postcontact sites.

The fiftieth anniversaries of the Society for American Archaeology and of its journal are plainly occasions for stock-takings of various kinds. My assignment is to comment on the progress of the theory underlying archaeological activities during this time with particular attention to the situation at the outset. My principal qualification for this task is the simple fact that my period of participation in American archaeology coincides closely with this fifty-year span. I began graduate study at the University of Michigan in the autumn of 1936 and immediately developed a specialized interest in eastern and northern North America. Subsequent discussion reflects this interest; my basic concern is to describe and appraise the intellectual groundwork of archaeology as it was practiced by archaeologists working in this field.