Studies of ancient Maya water management tend to emphasize consideration of features related either to agriculture or to the provision of communal water supplies in water-poor settings. Ceramic-lined wells in eighth-century Quiriguá, however, constituted household facilities of standardized form, distributed widely in a community where water supplies were always readily available. These wells both expand our knowledge of specialized Maya hydraulic technology and remind us that such inventions are not always the result of threats to survival.

The validity of the association of extinct faunal remains with the artifact assemblage of the Sulphur Spring horizon of the Cochise culture has recently been questioned. Charred bones, bone articulation, the stratigraphic position of some of the bones above the culture bearing layer, and the frequency of association are cited as convincing evidence that the people of the Sulphur Spring horizon knew and hunted animals now extinct.

A review of previous systems for describing the disposal of the dead reveals basic inconsistencies in terminology and logic. A new classification is proposed that not only utilizes concepts and terminology wherever possible but also attempts to eliminate non-mutually exclusive categories and ambiguous terminology. The system is summarized in outline form to facilitate the use of the scheme as a field checklist during the excavation of burials.

Late prehistoric sites on the Central Plains contain both grit/grog- (mineral-) tempered pottery and shell-tempered pottery. This appearance of shell-tempered pottery around cal A.D. 1000 has traditionally been explained as a colonization from the Mississippi River valley with further dispersal via trade. As a result, very little is known about the role of this material in the region. We report the results of a provenance analysis of shell-tempered pottery from seven sites extending from the Missouri River valley to north-central Kansas. We use petrography and oxidation analysis to compare the shell-tempered pottery across these localities and the shell-tempered to the mineral-tempered pottery from each locality, and we compare mineral inclusions and clay characteristics in all pottery with published geological and pedological information for each locality. The results demonstrate that shell-tempered pottery was locally produced throughout at least a portion of the Central Plains. Differences in firing technology are apparent across the study area and may play a role in the distribution of shell-tempered pottery. Two other results are the identification of composite temper in a notable proportion of the sherds studied, and indications of from where on the landscape Central Plains potters were procuring their raw materials.

The Grand Canyon in northwestern Arizona has long been a favorite area of study for geologists from all parts of the world, but until recently little intensive archaeological work has been done within the canyon itself. In 1953 the senior author began to investigate Cataract Creek Canyon, the only major drainage leading from the Coconino Plateau on the south to the Colorado River. Also in this year Walter W. Taylor (1954) made a quick survey of the lower reaches of the Grand Canyon by boat, but due to high and fast water he was unable to locate many sites. The present project was the first major excavation to be carried on in the main canyon area and it revealed material that should stimulate further work in the region.

This ethnoarchaeological study of an Inupiat Eskimo fish camp examines the formation of activity areas through time-motion studies and the analyses of activity episodes. These observations on two adults using the site during the summer of 1982 are used as examples of how spatially discrete activity areas are shaped by behavioral processes. In this case, activity-area formation is tied to the adaptive strategies of the Inupiat Eskimo cultural system. Specific subsistence-related activities such as food processing, animal butchering, and equipment maintenance leave material residues after tasks are completed. Cognitive and adaptive aspects of the Inupiat cultural system contribute to the spatial organization of this fish camp.

Considerations of markets in Precolumbian Mexico have failed to analyze the significance of periodicity for Precolumbian market systems. This essay examines periodicity and argues that the several types of recorded Precolumbian markets are qualitatively different; the 5-day market was basic, while 9-, 13-, and 20-day markets were ritual in nature, tied to specific and infrequent days, and played little or no part in market articulation.

Dietary and paleoecological data from the Clydes Cavern site has provided information concerning man's adaptations in a desert environment. Moreover, this information reveals certain of the processes involved in the Archaic-Fremont transition in Utah, especially as this transition relates to the utilization of wild grass seeds and the introduction and development of maize horticulture. Although horticulture and wild plant collecting were practiced during the Archaic inhabitation of the site, the coprolite sequence and the alluvial chronology suggest that a greater dependence upon these subsystems developed in a Fremont context, possibly in association with a period of improving alluvial conditions. During the Fremont occupation, the site seems to have functioned as a farming and collecting station within a larger system of regional adaptation.

Two recent papers, one by Arthur Woodward, the other by J. Alden Mason, have called attention to the transportation of artifacts by the process of animal migrations. The impulse for both of these works derived from the finding of an Eskimo arrowhead imbedded in the breast of a duck shot at Bakersfield, California. Similar cases from the states of Indiana, North Carolina, and Nebraska are on record in these reports. Undoubtedly there are other known instances, but these four should serve to illustrate the fact that sizeable migrating birds may import projectiles of outland origin from tremendous distances.

I should like to present some additional instances which have come to my attention. These deal chiefly with transport of artifacts by migrating sea mammals and fish. The larger sea mammals are peculiarly suited,to carrying weapon points, since they have a thick protective fat covering in which a projectile could remain imbedded without having a harmful or hindering effect on the animal's health or movement.

Corruccini et al. apply our method of fertility estimation to a Barbados slave population, find that it yields contradictory and erratic estimates of the crude birth rate (CBR), examine its theoretical basis, and conclude that a pessimistic view of paleodemography in general is warranted. We argue that the sample utilized by Corruccini et al. is not well suited for methodological testing. Misestimates of fertility more likely were caused by the peculiarities of this particular sample than by flaws in our method or weaknesses in its theoretical foundation. Deterministic simulations also demonstrate that our method is theoretically well founded. We cannot, therefore, share Corruccini et al.'s pessimism concerning the feasibility of paleodemographic research.

Holland suggests we have erred by providing a "unicausal" model for increased fertility in prehistoric west-central Illinois. He argues that a fuller multicausal model including coevolutionary effects provides a more accurate depiction of the prehistoric events contributing to increased fertility. We appreciate Holland's call for more elaborate models of prehistoric behaviors and evolutionary interactions between humans and other organisms. Unfortunately, his model is untestable because it includes a feedback loop with no exogenous variables. Because of a lack of outside input, Holland's model is immobile and cannot be used in itself to explain changes in organismal biology or behavior.

The traditional architectural styles of the Apalachee of northern Florida and Spanish colonists in the New World represent distinct approaches to the organization of domestic and community space and reflect different attitudes toward public and private activities. To the degree that the Apalachee became Hispanicized or that the Spaniards in Apalachee adopted aspects of aboriginal lifestyles during the seventeenth-century mission period, we might expect to see changes in architecture and community organization. Archaeological and ethnohistorical data from Apalachee Province indicate that the shapes and spatial arrangement of native and European domestic structures changed very little as a result of contact. This suggests that each group maintained a distinct identity in the realm of residential organization, despite the profound changes that both the Apalachee and Spaniards made in other aspects of their lives as a result of European colonization in La Florida.

Recently, advocates of an “older -than- Clovis” occupation of eastern North America have suggested that bi-pointed leaf-shaped lanceolate stone bifaces provide definitive evidence of human culture on the eastern seaboard prior to the Late Glacial Maximum. This argument hinges on two suppositions : first, that points of this form are exceedingly rare in the East and second, that all known occurrences of these point forms are from landforms or depositionaI environments dating to some time before the late Pleistocene. Neither of these suppositions is supported by the archaeological record. Bi-pointed leaf shaped blades have been recoveredfrom throughout the Middle Atlantic and Northeast, where they have been repeatedly dated, either radiometrically or by association with diagnostic artifacts, to between the Late Archaic and the Early Woodland. Statistical analysis of supposed “older-than-Clovis” leaf-shaped blades demonstrates that there are no significant differences in morphology between them and unequivocally Middle Holocene leaf-shaped blades. Until such time as evidence demonstrates otherwise, there is no reason to accept that these leaf-shaped bifaces are diagnostic of a Pleistocene, much less pre-Late Glacial Maximum, occupation in eastern North America.

Data from a mid-eighteenth century Native American cemetery (the Fletcher Site) are used in conjunction with ethnohistoric documents to draw sociological conclusions about the society represented at the site. Methodological tools employed toward this end include the calculation of the actual wealth represented in the graves, as well as a spatial analysis of the cemetery. It is demonstrated that the cemetery was the product of an incipiently ranked society.

In recent years a new approach in archaeology, the "processual school," has been developed. The processualists suggest that method and theory in archaeology be in various important ways altered and reoriented. A number of the school's basic axioms are defined, illustrated, and discussed. Included is a consideration of such notions as "adaptation," "system," and "explanation." It is argued that various of the components of the processualist position themselves require some modification.

This study is a comparison of the results of a variety of clustering methods and 2 multidimensional scaling techniques on data from sites in northern Chile. While differences do occur, the similarities among the results are strong in spite of differing inputs. In general, results of relative frequency analysis appear to be superior to those of presence/absence, and the techniques used seem to be viable additions to existing archaeological tools.

In a recent paper in American Antiquity, Steward and Setzler have pointed out that appreciation and use of certain ethnological concepts would serve to direct archaeologists and to enrich archaeology. I would like to shake hands with them on this and as an ethnologist add a word or two about the interdependence of these two branches of anthropology, particularly among Pueblo cultures.

It is hardly necessary to make a general brief for the kind of interdependence that prevails in our Southwest, where extant cultures are historically related to cultures under archaeological research. There is no dispute that the living culture has light to throw upon the buried one. Theoretically no dispute; practically we are constantly surprised to find Southwestern archaeologists, even seasoned students, unfamiliar with the ethnological record and having to leave to the ethnologist interpretation of their data: plums for the ethnologist but a loss to the man who has been doing the work.

Holmes states that steatite was widely used by the Indian tribes north of Mexico for the manufacture of implements, ornaments and utensils. The manufacture of stone vessels predominated on the Pacific coast, especially in the Santa Barbara region where sites have stone vessel fragments in all strata, and along the Atlantic coast, where this trait was especially associated with the Old Algonkian culture of the North Atlantic. The use of stone vessels in the areas in which pottery was used, both in the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast, although much less common, is indicated by occasional references to vessels or fragments on various sites and by the presence of quarries such as those described by Jones3 in the Tallapoosa River region of Alabama. The comparative infrequency of these artifacts on sites in the lower Mississippi Valley inspired the preparation of this report of a large cache of fragments of stone vessels found on a site in West Carroll Parish in northeastern Louisiana.

This paper reports the first set of isotopic data relating to human diet from the Samoan Archipelago. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope data measured on bone collagen were used to assess dietary patterns of prehistoric communities on Tutuila Island, American Samoa. We examined 14 human bones from three sites dated to three distinct periods: ~1,000 years ago (N = 5); -500 years ago (N = 8) and -150 years ago (N = 1). The isotopie data suggest that the human diet on Tutuila over the last 1,000 years was composed mainly of terrestrial resources with some consumption of coastal reef products. These data suggest a possible dietary change over time, with a higher dependence on marine resources in the earlier period shifting to a more terrestrial diet in the later period. Several possibilities for this dietary shift are suggested including: change in community specialization; marine resource depression; disintensification of marine procurement; intensification of horticultural production; and cultural or social changes in resource allocation.