The Amerind Foundation, Inc. spent the first three weeks of December, 1948, excavating a ball court at the archaeological site of Arizona:BB:15:3, which is located in Cochise County, Sec. 20, T15S, R20E. The actual village area is located on the west bank of the San Pedro River twenty-two miles north of the city of Benson at an approximate elevation of 3300 feet.

The ball court was located in the north half of the village on a terrace some forty feet above the river channel. It appeared as a shallow but conspicuous oval depression which was overgrown with mesquite trees and other desert flora of the Sonoran plateau type. Fortunately the court had not been disturbed by any previous excavations nor by erosion (Fig. 86, a).

This paper presents a method called column-wise seriation, which is founded on inherent properties of the sequencing problem. Although nearly all previous approaches have focused on the permutation of units, hypothetical examples illustrate that certain relationships between types must likewise exist to achieve an ideal arrangement. Further examination and exploitation of these relationships furnish a new perspective on the seriation process, and lead to a strategy which is simple in concept and practice. A computer implementation of column-wise seriation is applied to archaeological data.

The proveniences (locations) of artifacts have long been critically important to archaeological interpretation. Although of major importance to site formation studies, positional attributes of artifacts (e.g., orientation, dip, which side is up) are seldom mentioned. When discovered in 1927, the in situ association of a Folsom projectile point with two ribs of a Pleistocene form of bison was interpreted as indicative of the contemporaneity of the three items, and thus was taken as evidence for the Pleistocene age of humans in North America. The locational and positional attributes of the two ribs and the point relative to one another suggest it is improbable that the point was deposited simultaneously with the two ribs as a result of it being embedded in the animal's flank, which is not to say the three items are not depositionally and temporally associated. Previously unmentioned positional attributes of the items making up the original Folsom association exemplify the importance of such attributes. New understanding of the original association underscores that actualistic research is required to identify the kinds of positional attributes important to questions regarding site formation and site structure.

Because of the interest in the mural paintings from Kuaua pueblo, it is felt advisable to present a complete report on the field and laboratory processing of these. Although two articles were published in El Palacio in 1935 and 1936 on the removing and processing of the murals, the detailed procedure has not been published as a unit in a scientific report. The processing of the Kuaua murals had no precedent to follow. As it is possible that similar finds will occur in future excavations, the processes developed for coping with the problem at Kuaua may be of aid. These processes may be varied to meet conditions involving other types of paintings.

The Kuaua ruins, now known as the Coronado State Monument, are situated on the western side of the Rio Grande two air miles northwest of the business section of Bernalillo, New Mexico. They lie in the Tiguex province of the central Rio Grande.

It is suggested that the portrayal of a Maya ruler as lame represents a transformation to the god Tezcatlipoca, sometimes known as "one leg." God K of the manikin scepter is a continued reference to this transformation in Late Classic times.

I explain my "failure" to familiarize myself with Carneiro's more recent attempts to arrive at "laws" of cultural evolution, and go on to critically evaluate his 1968 paper. I attempt to demonstrate that Carneiro's "law" is not applicable to cultural development in general, and that it is neither quantitative in application nor a law.

Despite the remarkable progress manifest in the archaeology of the Southeast, there remains an appreciable gap in our historical perspective between ethnological horizons and late period archaeological material. Pottery is one highly important time-indicator that persisted into historic times, yet for one of the major Southeastern tribes— the Creeks—pottery in ethnological museum collections is rare. For this reason, the authors here describe the single Creek pot in the Southeastern ethnological collection of the Chicago Natural History Museum. To our knowledge, this piece of pottery has not been described in print before.

The specimen shown in Figures 82 and 83 was received by the museum from the Department of Ethnology, World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. I t forms part of a small accession of ethnological material collected among the Creeks in 1892 by George T. Shurtleff in, or in the immediate vicinity of, Muskogee, Creek Nation, Indian Territory. Although the documentation is scanty, the writers believe that the pot is of bona fide Creek manufacture.

In Dr. Philip Phillips' recent paper, “Middle American Influences on the Archaeology of the Southeastern United States,” there appears the following statement concerning the architecture of late cultures associated with the Mississippi pattern:

The Hofmann site is in the Ballardvale section of Andover, Massachusetts. It covers the top of a small kame extending, between a small brook and a swamp, from higher land to the northeast (Fig. 12). This brook empties into a larger stream connecting Foster's Pond and the Shawsheen River. A large swamp, between Foster's and Martin's Ponds, connects these tributaries of the Shawsheen and Ipswich Rivers, forming an inland all-water route from the Merrimack River to the clam-bearing coastal flats of Ipswich and Essex. The Saugus or Mystic Rivers may be reached by a short portage, bringing Boston Bay into the system. The Hofmann site is well located to take advantage of such a route, and the association of artifacts found there seems most easily explained on the basis of trade or the seasonal migration of a few families.

Shafts of human femurs from burials on Washington Island, Wisconsin dated ca. A.D. 200 were in good enough condition to allow decalcification, microscopic sectioning and routine staining. Many histological features of the bone are retained. Such procedures are less laborious than grinding undecalcified sections, allow three-dimensional observation of serial sections, and offer possible uses in age determinations of skeletons and paleopathology. The specimens give initial evidence that prompt burial prevents the formation of weathering cracks in bone.

Kirk Bryan and A. P. Butler, Jr., reported finding, in 1938, artifacts of glassy andesite on the northwestern part of the Taos Plateau in New Mexico. They concluded: “non-Pueblo peoples having Great Plains affinities appear to have used the material.” Knowing that we were to be in New Mexico, Bryan suggested that we investigate a small cave at Tres Piedras where, in 1940, he had found flakes of the andesite in association with coal. The week of July 7, 1941, was spent at the site.

Tres Piedras is located in the extreme north central part of New Mexico, about twenty-five miles south of the Colorado state line. The site is about two miles south of the town on land owned by Mr. Claire Hawkins, who very kindly gave us permission to excavate.

The Old Fort (23SA104), an earthwork enclosure and mound complex on a high ridge near the Missouri River in central Missouri, has long been considered a Middle Woodland or Hopewell construction. Excavations in 1970 cross-trenched prehistoric ditches and embankments on the north end of the enclosure. A well-developed soil profile containing predominantly Middle Woodland pottery was exposed, into which aboriginal ditches had been cut. Oneota pottery lay on the floors of these ditches, embedded in a thin laminated horizon of alluvium. Oneota and Middle Woodland pottery are mixed in ditch fills. Field data, although limited, thus support the identification of the enclosure as Oneota, aboriginally constructed on a Middle Woodland habitation site.