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.

Speculations concerning the origin of the American Indian began almost as soon as it became known that America Septentrional was inhabited. Most current theories favor an Asiatic origin, with migration through northern Kamchatka and Alaska. This is supported by rather plentiful evidence. A few anthropologists postulate an island-hopping trans-Pacific migration at relatively low latitudes. This theory is supported by conclusive modern proof that such voyages are possible. Other proposed origins include Palestine (“The Lost Tribes of Israel”), Argentina (Ameghino's “Hombre Terciaro”), various lost continents (such as James Churchward's Mu), and other planets, some no longer extant. These latter theories are based either on misinterpreted evidence (such as the Hombre Terciaro), or overactive imagination (such as Mu), and merit no further consideration here.

Although the theory of Asiatic origin of the American Indian is the most widely accepted today, its first proposal seems quite difficult to locate, particularly as Columbus and his crewmen believed that the inhabitants of the New World were Asiatics.

A small bifacial foliate from the Solutrean of France suggests that fluted points, whether made accidentally or otherwise, may occur occasionally in the Old World. However, there seems to be no historic relationship with those of the New World.

In a recent article J. Alden Mason (1951) called attention to 2 small Chinese figurines found in local archaeological collections in Mesoamerica. One was from Azqueltan, Jalisco, Mexico and is now in the University Museum, Philadelphia (catalog number NA- 11808), and the other was in the Vitalino Robles collection of Quezaltenango, Guatemala. Both are of a soft stone and were described as “crawling infants.” While browsing through a collection of archaeological objects in an antique shop in Guatemala City I came across another small Chinese figurine similar in most respects to the ones described by Mason. The shop owner, unaware of the Oriental origin of this specimen, was sure that it must have come in with the other artifacts from Kaminaljuyu, a large archaeological site on the outskirts of the city. The figurine has been presented to the University Museum (catalog number 54-4-1).

Like the Quezaltenango specimen (Mason 1951 Fig. 1, a), the stone figurine from Guatemala City is an opaque yellowish-amber color with reddish veins and has a very soft, soapy texture (Mohr scale 2.8).

As W. H. Holmes pointed out in 1905, our archaeological investigations need to be “supplemented by the rich materials derived from the study of the living peoples.“1 In accordance with this line of thought, I have tried to correlate some findings of archaeology and ethnology in relation to the small but controversial archaeological problem of fetishes and toys. The clay figurines and miniature pots illustrated in Plate XII were made as toys by contemporary Navaho children living in the region between the Chaco and Blanco Canyons, New Mexico. The toys represent two women with the characteristic Navaho skirts and headdresses, three miniature vessels (a handled mug, round-bottomed cooking vessel, and crude dish), and thirteen animals, including two dogs, a sheep, ram, mare, donkey, two horses, a cow, chicken, buck, and two goats. The faces of the women have been pinched to suggest a nose but otherwise they are featureless. One dog, the sheep, cow, two horses, and one of the goats have black glass beads for eyes.

In the field it is often difficult to distinguish black manganese dioxide from specks of charcoal or other organic materials. Misinterpretations can be avoided by testing the earth material with a small amount of potassium periodate which will oxidize any manganese to the highly colored permanganate ion.

Major migrations into the West Indies emanated out of South America. For the most part, tropical forest traditions were transplanted, but it is obvious that these traditions were influenced by a markedly different environment. People who had previously known a river-tropical forest habitat now encountered the sea with its currents, winds, swells, and expansive transportation potential. Islands, sometimes with limited fresh-water conditions, also presented new problems as well as new opportunities for settlement. Recent work in the Virgin Islands points to the strong influence of environment on the settlement patterns of pre-Columbian peoples. With the advent of extensive archaeological research in the Antillean area, new and valued interpretations must be sought in the cultural-environmental complex.

A small collection of stone artifacts from an esker-ridge site at the edge of the Barren Lands, which includes an Agate Basin point and two Lerma points, but apparently no microblades, may be the earliest so far recognized in the Canadian tundra.

In their comment, Challis et al. (this issue) find fault with several aspects of my earlier paper on rock paintings in the Didima Gorge, South Africa (McCall 2010). In this reply, I acknowledge that they may be correct in certain assertions concerning rock shelter altitudes. I argue, however, that the significance of these “altitude adjustments” for my broader arguments concerning variability in San rock art site use patterns is minor. I close by considering more substantive challenges for the use of quantitative analytical methods in the examination rock art assemblage composition and landscape-scale variation.

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.

Bacheeishdíio (“Place Where Men Pack Meat”), now called Grapevine Creek in English, is the subject of Crow oral traditions that document the cultural significance of the landscape and celebrate centuries of bison hunting in the drainage. We report an ongoing, community-based project that integrates archaeological field training and research goals into a collaborative indigenous archaeology project supporting the expressed goal of the Crow Tribal Historic Preservation Office to prepare a district-level nomination for the Grapevine Creek drainage basin. This paper describes findings from field investigations that document buffalo jump locales, a previously unreported bison bonebed, and associated archaeological features in the drainage, grounding Crow oral traditions that document buffalo jumps and large-scale bison hunts firmly into the landscape. We take a holistic approach that incorporates multiple lines of evidence to assess the archaeological record associated with bison jumps and bison hunting on the Crow Reservation in southern Montana. Results of this project include an enriched understanding of the Grapevine Creek archaeological record, greater awareness of buffalo hunting strategies on the northwest Plains, and, through field training, enhanced cultural resource management capabilities for the Crow Tribal Historic Preservation Office.

Ties between northeastern Asia and northwestern America are frequently postulated but have never been satisfactorily worked out in detail. Forms of subterranean or semi-subterranean houses and of large plank buildings were known in both regions and this fact has been used to suggest northern Asiatic-American relationships. It seems clear that some prehistoric ties did exist between the two regions but their exact nature remains unknown. Fuller data and more careful comparisons are needed and one segment of the American distribution is therefore given below.

In October, 1937, Mr. Frank M. Harvin, Jr., of Columbia, South Carolina, presented me with sixty-three stone artifacts that he had collected on various visits to a plowed field overlooking the Congaree River near West Columbia, South Carolina. In Mr. Harvin's collection were two fluted points of the type known as “Folsom.” Later I looked through the Babcock Collection of Indian artifacts from Chester, South Carolina (now in the University of South Carolina Library), and found another fluted Folsom point among the hundreds of chipped implements in that exhibit. Inspection of my own collection and the Simpson Collection in Rock Hill, South Carolina, failed to reveal any other examples of this type, which has a wide distribution in the East and South, although I do not remember having seen any reported from South Carolina.

In some instances it is very difficult to distinguish between cord-impressed and fabric-impressed surfaces on aboriginal pottery. This problem is discussed with particular reference to a protohistoric Woodland jar from western Michigan. It is suggested that fabric impressing and cord marking are closely related techniques which stem from the same cultural tradition.