The role of shellfish in the diet of hunter-gatherers in North America is poorly understood. Specifically, the interpretation of freshwater gastropods from archaeological sites as food remains has been a subject of professional debate. Data from the Hayes site (40ML139), a stratified Archaic midden on the Duck River in Tennessee, suggest that freshwater gastropods were procured in considerable quantities and utilized as a food resource. Evidence supporting this interpretation includes (1) quantities of gastropods in the midden, (2) stratigraphic relationship between shell-bearing strata and shell-free strata, and (3) pH analysis of associated sediments. Although gastropods provide relatively little meat and are a poor source of food energy compared to other animal species such as deer, they contain relatively high concentrations of several important vitamins and minerals. Thus, their primary value may have been nutrient content rather than food energy. This consideration, coupled with seasonal variation in their availability, suggests summer and/or fall as most likely periods of gastropod procurement.

Excavations by the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School in the summer of 1962 indicate that this small site in the Sulphur Spring valley was occupied from A.D. 1250 to 1325. Architectural remains consist of the two adobe-walled room-plaza complexes. Burials were extended inhumations and primary cremations. The artifact inventory is characterized by its simplicity and lack of elaboration. Locally made pottery was primarily plain red and brown with both smudging and texturing. Most of the painted pottery was traded into the site from the surrounding Chihuahua, White Mountain, Tonto Basin, and Tucson areas. The site apparently represents an essentially Mogollon complex with strong contacts with the Babicora phase in Chihuahua and additions from the general Western Pueblo sphere of influence. A Ringo phase, A.D. 1250-1350, is tentatively defined.

The major problem in studying Early Man in northwestern America would appear to be the definition of adequate criteria for the identification of cultures. What is needed is recognition of cultures rather than technological tool-making traditions. A useful approach is to establish a model of relationships between environments and cultures. A basic assumption is that both environment and culture are continuous and that present environments permit recognition of past cultures. The identification of multiple environments in northwestern America permits the deduction that there were also multiple early cultures. Some proof of the models is to be seen in the presence of archaeological continuums rather than in layer-cake sequences. In the Northwest the layer-cake sequences should be expressive of intercultural relationships, and such relationships should occur on the margins of environmental areas. As a consequence of the models, three basic early cultures have been defined, with one potential culture as yet undefined. These are: (1) Old Cordilleran culture, (2) Mountain-Plains culture, and (3) Bitterroot culture, which may have been antecedent to the Desert culture. All three cultures are virtually equal in geologic time, though not necessarily in absolute time. A number of problems remain, but the approach is suggested as a means of recognizing that there are cultures probably equivalent in time to any previously recognized elsewhere in the New World.

Following a recent recrudescence of interest in the archaeology of Athabascan-speaking peoples in the Southwest, and in Navaho archaeology in particular, numerous students have entered upon various projects in this field. North central New Mexico has seemed to offer the most fertile center for such studies, inasmuch as early historic records place the Navahos in this area and the archaeological remains seem to corroborate this testimony.

Yerkes's comments fail to place my article in its context of other research on the lower Ohio Valley. He reacts more to what he thinks I believe than to what I actually wrote. Yerkes seems to want to identify Mississippian specialization on the basis of artifact traits rather than on the basis of actual organization of production. Moreover, he does not present any additional significant evidence to support the idea that true specialization was present in Mississippian society, in the American Bottom or elsewhere. The need to reject lower-level explanations of data before proposing higher-level explanations is not sufficiently appreciated. Finally, there is not sufficient appreciation of the degree of importance of the concept of specialization to the investigation of the social evolution of hierarchical systems.

Hildebrandt and King (2012) propose a new method for distinguishing between archaeologically obtained atlatl darts and arrow points, suggesting their dart-arrow index identifies specimens more accurately than previously developed multivariate approaches. They assert that use of their index supports conclusions that the bow was a superior technology and replaced the atlatl quickly. I use their index, as well as Shott’s (1997) equations, to analyze southern Saskatchewan archaeological point specimens. My results suggest that the proposed dart-arrow index performs poorly for Canadian Plains specimens and that atlatl and bow technology coexisted for an extended period of time.

Protohistoric Ancestral Apache Dismal River groups (A.D. 1600–1750) participated in large exchange networks linking them to other peoples on the Plains and U.S. Southwest. Ceramic vessels made from micaceous materials appear at many Dismal River sites, and micaceous pottery recovered from the Central High Plains is typically seen as evidence for interaction with northern Rio Grande pueblos. However, few mineral or chemical characterization analyses have been conducted on these ceramics, and the term “micaceous” has been applied to a broad range of vessel types regardless of the form, size, or amount of mica in their pastes. Our recent analyses, including macroscopic evaluation combined with petrography and neutron activation analyses (NAA), indicate that only a small subset of Dismal River sherds are derived from New Mexico clays. The rest were likely manufactured using materials from Colorado and Wyoming. Seasonal mobility patterns may have given Dismal River potters the opportunity to collect mica raw materials as they traveled between the Central Plains and Front Range, and this has implications for the importance of internal Plains social networks during the Protohistoric and Historic periods.

Two prehispanic South American animal domesticates, the cavy Cavia porcellus and muscovy duck Cairina moschata, are identified from the later prehistoric occupations of Salango, Manabi province, Ecuador. Possible implications, raised by their presence in an area that is known to have participated in an ancient and widespread trade network, are briefly discussed.

A living-site including human bones, bone midden, and artifacts has been discovered in sediments of mid-Pinedale age at the Marmes Rockshelter archaeological site in southeastern Washington. Radiocarbon dates, from sediments overlying the buried flood-plain surface on which these bones occur, show them to be older than 11,000 years. Geomorphic relationships suggest that the site may be younger than about 13,000 years.

Three palynological cores from the coastal plain of Georgia and Alabama were analyzed for paleobotanical remains. Results show that the Indians of southeastern North America increased forest fires used in hunting as a response to the demand for deer hides during the early eighteenth century. Palynological data are consistent with known anthropogenic changes in the region. Charcoal abundance increased significantly between A.D. 1715 and 1770, which is the period of the most intensive hunting by the Indians. This study shows that forest fires from hunting had a significant and measurable effect on the evolution of the biophysical environment.

The author argues that these critiques are based primarily on mistaken readings of his original article. He contends that Indigenous archaeology is a social project without a demonstrated intellectual foundation.

In a recent paper, Marcus (1983) provides a timely synthesis of the rapidly accumulating body of data from various projects in the Maya Lowlands. One of the specific problems discussed by Marcus is that of temporal and cultural definition of the Swasey phase at the sites of Cuello and Colha, and its relationship to other early components. Our comment presents new data from Colha that were not available to Marcus. These data have significantly expanded our understanding of the earliest occupations at the site and have important implications for intersite comparisons.

Compositional analysis of copper is used to explore interaction between the Late Archaic occupants of the Northern Lakes region and their contemporaries in eastern and east-central Wisconsin. Copper artifacts from Burnt Rollways phase sites in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula are compared with the Middle Archaic Reigh and Late Archaic Riverside sites. Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry analysis of copper demonstrates differential acquisition of resources between Burnt Rollways and their contemporaries and suggests barriers to social interaction between the Northern Lakes and societies in the Lake Winnebago and western Lake Michigan regions.

The application of extremely complex multivariate models of classification to subjective inspectional methods of categorization is analyzed in detail, with the widely used Texas system of dart point typology as a case study. The history of the development of the Texas dart point typological system is sketched. An attempt by Gunn and Prewitt (1975) to objectify the classificatory system by multivariate methods is criticized. The techniques applied were too idiosyncratic to the particular data set used to be of predictive value. Discriminant function and multivariate classification analysis are discussed in detail, emphasizing simple geometrical examples by which the major principles may be grasped. Suggestions for improvement are offered for those who wish to follow Gunn and Prewitt in constructing automatic classification schemes.

The analysis of the bone from a bison drive in north-central Montana corroborates the implications of White's analyses of bison bone from Plains villages: the heaviest non-meaty bone was left at the kill site, the bones rich in marrow were chopped up for marrow-extraction; even when many animals were available all were thoroughly utilized by the hunters. This excavation also confirms ethnographic data on season of drives, methods of butchering, and use of arrows for killing.

Plains archaeologists have usually devoted little attention to the bird remains that normally comprise a relatively minor portion of the yield from their excavations. Bird bones from several archaeological sites on the Missouri River are shown to have been purposefully and selectively modified by man. They exhibit a remarkable similarity to prepared bird skins and other ceremonial objects found in Omaha, Osage, Arikara, and other Plains Indian medicine bundles in various museum collections. The ethnographic specimens are believed to identify the archaeological remains as to function; conversely, the archaeological materials add important time perspectives to native use of the ritual items in museum collections and in the documentary record.

Early in the nineteenth century, geologist Charles Lyell reasoned that successively older faunas would contain progressively more extinct species and younger faunas relatively more extant species. The present, with one-hundred percent extant species, was the chronological anchor. In archaeology a similar notion underpins the direct historical approach: Successively older cultures will contain progressively fewer of the cultural traits found in extant cultures and relatively more prehistoric traits. As in Lyell’s scheme, the chronological anchor is the present. When A. L. Kroeber invented frequency seriation in the second decade of the twentieth century, he retained the present as a chronological anchor but reasoned that the oldest cultural manifestation would contain the highest percentage of a variant, or what came to be known as a "style," of an ancient trait, and successively younger cultural manifestations would have progressively lower percentages of that variant. The principle of overlapping permitted building sequences of fossils and artifacts, but differences in the units that allowed the chronometers to be operationalized reveal significant epistemological variation in how historical research is undertaken. This variation should be of considerable interest to paleobiologists and archaeologists alike, especially given recent archaeological interest in creating and explaining historical lineages of artifacts.

Following a brief reference, in Science to a paper presented by the writer at the Denver Meeting of the A. A. A. S., wherein the occurrence of Woodland-like vessel shapes in a Puebloan pottery complex was reported, a number of requests for further information have been received. In consequence of the apparent interest shown, the following preliminary report is offered.

During the progress of an archaeological survey of north central New Mexico in 1932, particularly in that section drained by the western tributaries of the upper Chama and southeasternmost affluents of the San Juan rivers, a large number of sites were recorded which, in architectural forms and pottery content, appeared to differ somewhat from more usual Pueblo patterns.

Anthony F. C. Wallace's concepts of cognitive maps and of culture as primarily the organization of diversity are utilized to discuss the significance of a Wisconsin burial mound group, the Hilgen Spring Park site.

A sample of 48 burials from the Tayasal Peninsula area, El Peten, Guatemala, is used to tentatively suggest a dietary shift sometime around Middle Classic times among the Maya. This conclusion is reached through an observed variation in the amount of calculus, or tooth tartar, deposited through time.