The historic Maya habit of abandoning a hut after the occupant's death, and the tendency to move communal sites, may be responses to population decimation and foreign political domination following breakup of the Mayapan hegemony. If so, it is doubtful that they should be projected back to the Classic Maya.

The problem of the antiquity of man in early America has rapidly divided itself into a series of detailed researches, each one dealing with special facets of the matter. To date the greatest progress in the relationship between the various cultures of the paleo-Indian has been made with geologic methods by which the rhythm of climatic changes of the late Pleistocene and recent times has been tied in with deposits involving human materials. The radiocarbon method has now appeared to bolster and refine the time scale. From all of these activities there is rapidly emerging a clearing picture of early times in the Americas.

The reinterpretation of the Mabaruma phase, British Guiana, by Lathrap does not introduce new evidence that requires abandonment of the original estimate of about A.D. 500 for its introduction from the Orinoco delta.

When a synthesis such as Stephenson's appears, those concerned with it had better speak up, lest silence be mistaken for approval. Synthesis can only be helpful to the rest of the profession if done as accurately as available information permits. “Culture Chronology in Texas” is not entirely accurate. A line-for-line criticism of this article would require a good deal of explanation and documentation; hence I will confine my remarks to what seem to me the principal faults – those which may mislead those not well acquainted with Texas archaeology.

A revision of Great Lakes geologic history involving the temporal position of Glacial Lake Algonquin and some post-Algonquin lake stages requires corresponding revision of certain archaeological interpretations. Indications are that the Paleo-Indian occupations of the upper Great Lakes area are somewhat earlier than heretofore supposed.

Archaeological research organizations are a challenge to management since their output-research-is inherently difficult to measure and not subject to evaluation in the marketplace. The integration of business management theory and analytic techniques into the organization can assist those responsible to plan, organize, direct, and control the organization so as to improve effectiveness. Among these techniques are Gantt charts, the critical path method, and zero-base budgeting.

Seven tree-ring specimens from two Navajo archaeological sites in Arizona, reported by Gila Pueblo in 1941 to date from 1758 to 1770, have recently been reported by the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research to date from 1794 to 1864. These new dates are more compatible with the structural remains at one of the sites.

Mark Mitchell’s (Mitchell 2006) assessment of the theoretical legacy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Missouri Basin Project does not show that research in the Great Plains has made a particularly small contribution to archeological theory. The sparse population, dispersed professional community, and paucity of graduate archeology programs in the region contribute to its archeological research patterns.

The residents of Otstonwakin, an eighteenth-century multinational Native American village in Pennsylvania, were involved in extensive trade networks that resulted in the incorporation, modification, and selective adoption of a variety of European-manufactured goods and technologies. Although Native Americans in the fur trade era like those at Otstonwakin negotiated the exchange of a wide array of commodities including alcohol, firearms, iron tools, and brass kettles, the most commonly traded commodity was cloth. Despite its role as a cornerstone commodity, colonial trade cloth has received considerably less scholarly attention than more durable objects largely because very few textiles have survived into the twenty-first century. This article reports on a rare find, a preserved European textile from Otstonwakin's burial ground recovered in the 1930s and hitherto unanalyzed. By analyzing the fabric fragments, sewing thread, and lace with metallic thread, I explore the material and social negotiation of colonial identity on the Pennsylvania frontier.

Genetic and linguistic evidence suggests that, after living in the Subarctic for thousands of years, Northern Athabascans began migrating to the American Southwest around 1,000 years ago. Anthropologists have proposed that this partial out-migration and several associated in situ behavioral changes were the result of a massive volcanic eruption that decimated regional caribou herds. However, regional populations appear to increase around the time of these changes, a demographic shift that may have led to increased territoriality, resource stress, and specialization. Building on existing syntheses of cultural dynamics in the region, analyses of excavated materials, and landscape data from Alaska and Yukon, this research shows that the Athabascan transition represented a gradual shift toward resource specialization in both salmon and caribou with an overall increase in diet breadth, indicating a behavioral transition that is more consistent with gradual demographic change. Further, this behavioral shift was already in motion at the time of the volcanic eruption circa 1150 cal BP and suggests that the ultimate migration from the area was the result of demographic pressures. In sum, this research elaborates on the complex dynamics of resilience and adaptation in hunter-gatherer groups and provides a testable model for explaining past migrations.

A consideration of the Siberian data by anyone acquainted, albeit summarily, with the major themes of North American prehistory, cannot fail to lead to the formulation of a number of specific problems relating to prehistoric contacts between the Old World and the New and their effect on culture development on both continents. The limitations of available data, time, space, and competence alike set limits to the degree to which they may be fruitfully explored here. Yet it seems worthwhile at least to list the more obvious ones and to comment on them briefly, thereby suggesting directions for future investigation.

Snow's thesis that shellfish were not eaten by archaic peoples of North America until A.D. 1 is questioned.

In the October issue of this publication, Mr. Frank Bryan, geologist of the Seaboard Oil Corporation of Dallas, Texas, gives a new interpretation of the age of the associated archaeological and paleontological discoveries made at the gravel pit, between Clovis and Portales, New Mexico. In doing this he takes pointed exception to the interpretations already published. There cannot be the slightest objection to such a difference of opinion, but it can be sincerely questioned whether he is justified in making such a statement as the following, which appears in the opening paragraphs of his article: “We have, as a matter of fact, conservative archaeological field work being explained by a slipshod attempt at geological radicalism.”

A worked wolf cranium discovered in burial association at a Glacial Kame site near Russells Point, Ohio, is interpreted as part of an animal mask-headdress. This is the first record of the use of such paraphernalia by the Glacial Kame People, and probably one of earliest evidences of ceremonialism in the Ohio Valley.