Recent discussions of deposit formation and disturbance in archaeology ignore the possible perturbation of artifact distribution by children's play. Experimental data indicate some results of such activity, and suggest that it should be borne in mind when reconstructing behavior patterns based on depositional history.

A recent identification of ramon in Miranda's sixteenth-century relacion of Alta Verapaz more likely describes achiote. There is very little archaeological evidence to suggest that ramon was more than a famine food in ancient Maya times.

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.

Within the past 10 to 15 years human remains of great antiquity have been found in archaeological sites located in the highlands and coastal area of central Peru. The remains in this study have assigned radiocarbon dates of 6000-10,000 B.P. and consist of four naturally mummified (desiccated) human bodies and four virtually complete skeletons. They represent some of the oldest skeletal remains and certainly the oldest preserved bodies hitherto found in South America. While the paleopathological and tomographic analyses of the bodies is presently in progress, this report describes the archaeological context of the entire sample and presents a descriptive analysis of the skeletal material. Age, sex, stature, and general pathology are discussed.

Dickson's elaborate linear programming simulation of the agricultural carrying capacity of the Tikal sustaining area is flawed by an energetic miscalculation.

The use of systematically derived site location data in defining subsistence systems has increased markedly. However, the logical fallacy in the approach has never been discussed. Sites in a particular environmental setting may have been occupied for a variety of reasons at a variety of times (this is particularly true of "ecotone" sites). As a result, the assumption that a particular adaptive strategy may have been in force is, in the absence of any subsistence data, extremely questionable. Locational data may be useful in formulating hypotheses which can be tested through procurement of subsistence data, but in themselves they cannot be used to demonstrate the accuracy of a hypothetical subsistence system.

Webster's (1979) thesis that the Huron were prepared to hunt deer at a considerable energetic loss is vitiated by a serious factual error.

Webster's criticism of my linear programming simulation of the agricultural carrying capacity of the Tikal sustaining area is answered.

A simple, yet objective and replicable method for recording a number of variables of the two-dimensional morphology of artifacts is presented and described. This method permits precise quantification of variables such as artifact shape and area, retouch length along the perimeter of chipped stone tools, measures of convexity or concavity, area and location of cortex, etc. Moreover, it allows for direct comparisons among varied artifact assemblages.

Morphological similarities in bone technology between Old World and New World Pleistocene epoch assemblages are noted, and their implications are explored.

The study of faunal remains from archaeological sites has been described using a variety of terms including: zooarchaeology, archaeozoology, osteoarchaeology, and ethnozoology. With such a broad spectrum of terms in current usage, we feel that the contradictions and errors inherent in some of this nomenclature need to be corrected. We prefer the term zooarchaeology, as a contraction of the word zoologico-archaeology proposed by Lubbock in 1865, to define the study of animal remains from archaeological sites and their relationship to humans.

In a recent exchange Munday and Lincoln (1979) and Bettinger (1979a) debate the conclusions reached by Bettinger (1977) regarding diachronic variation in the prehistoric land-use patterns of Owens Valley, California. There are several related sources of error in Bettinger's quantitative and statistical operations that were not clarified or discussed in the published arguments. An evaluation of their potential effect on the analysis conducted by Bettinger (1975) lends considerable support to the basic assertion of Munday and Lincoln that Bettinger (1977) did not fully appreciate alternative explanations of the spatial and temporal variation he observed in site and artifact distributions in Owens Valley. Two of the three "adaptive shifts" in land-use patterns proposed by Bettinger are not supported by the published data.