Despite considerable activity during the last two decades our knowledge of the archaeology of Alaska is still rather scanty. Very few places have been thoroughly investigated, and almost all work has been confined to two areas, a northern including St. Lawrence Island and a southern including the Aleutian Islands. The intermediate area, from Wales to Port Möller, with a coast line of approximately 2000 miles, is virtually unknown from an archaeological point of view. If archaeological material from this area exists in museum collections, it is unpublished and thus useless to most students.

The need of information about the archaeology of this part of Alaska was felt very badly by the writer during his work on the analysis of the Ipiutak culture. When it became apparent that early Kachemak Bay culture must belong to the same Paleo-Eskimo complex as Ipiutak, it was natural to assume the former existence of the same complex in the intermediate area, an assumption which ethnological evidence seems to bear out.

Since Haag's article “Early Horizons in the Southeast” appeared some time ago, considerable data have accumulated which further delimit the southeastern archaeological area. Instead of covering the area south of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River, as noted by Haag, it more nearly approximates that region covered by the eastern half of the state of Tennessee; the southern half of North Carolina; all of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida; and the eastern portion of Louisiana—most of which lie in the Coastal Plain and in the northern portion of the Piedmont section. Climatic as well as physiographic and cultural conditions were determinants of the type and kind of aboriginal sites found in this geographical section of the United States.

Notwithstanding the numerous published works which have specifically or incidentally treated with the curved fishhooks of California, there is available at present no single source which draws together the accessible information and cites the relevant bibliography. The present article seeks to remedy this situation and seems justified on the grounds of making available the California data to local workers and to those who are further interested in the near identity of some of the California types with those of the Chilean coast in South America, on the one hand, and with those of the Oceanian area, on the other. Within North America the distribution of single-piece curved bone fishhooks is spotty, and a theoretical problem of historical community of these various occurrences also awaits analysis.

Curved hooks of shell and/or bone occur in California in archaeological sites on the Santa Barbara Channel islands (San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz), on the islands farther south and more distant from the mainland shore (San Nicolas, San Clemente, San Miguel), and on the coast from Point Concepcion to Santa Ana.

Following my attempt at an explanation of the function or use of Mexican stone yokes I was led on to consider, in a similar vein, two other classes of well known stone objects also common to the eastern coastal regions of Mexico, namely, the palmas or palmate stones and the thin stone heads, also known as hachas. Both of these groups of objects include some of the finest stone carvings known from the ancient cultures of Mexico, but their curious forms and possible functions have never been satisfactorily explained. Hints or suggestions as to how they may have been used appear to be singularly rare. Those I have been able to gather are equivocal enough and far from conclusive, but I believe they are worth reviewing at the present time as a beginning toward investigation of the problems involved.

Towers have long been an important and integral feature of architecture. The earliest record of towers is in Mesopotamia with the Statue of Gudea at a date of approximately 2700 B.C. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1948, p. 330). From there they may be found ranging over the entire world. They have met numerous demands, but from their very beginning towers have served two principal functions: military and religious.

A focal area of tower building was in the southwestern United States. Here towers have presented numerous problems which, despite comment and work, still remain largely unanswered. Their intriguing possibilities, however, early attracted the attention of writers. A brief history would include such men as Jackson (1876), Holmes (1879), and Morgan (1881), who first called public attention to these towers. Their accounts were descriptive and mention ruins of the Hovenweep, Mesa Verde, and McElmo areas. Moorehead, in a series of six articles entitled “In Search of a Lost Race” for Illustrated American of 1892, discussed ruins of the McElmo.

A study of the use of gold and silver by the ancient inhabitants of southern Peru and Bolivia has been made by Lothrop (1937). He found that in the region of the southern coast the available material from Paracas and Nasca was adequate, but that there was very little satisfactory material from the later periods, such as Ica. Many of the objects in museum collections that purport to be from Ica are of questionable origin, and many objects actually from Ica are thought to be from Lima, Moche, etc. This not only prevents a satisfactory investigation of the use of metals in Ica, but confuses a study of their use on the central and northern coasts.

The present study is an attempt to supply more exact information about the use of metals in the vicinity of Nasca, Ica, and Chincha. Max Uhle made very careful excavations in the Chincha and Ica valleys in 1901, and in the region of Nasca in 1903.

Birdshead Cave lies in a fault scarp on the south side of the Owl Creek Mountains about 5 miles west of the entrance to Wind River Canyon, 23 miles north and west of Shoshoni, Wyoming, and 1 mile northwest of the old Burgess ranch buildings. It contained stratified deposits representing seven, perhaps even eight or nine, periods of occupation in six occupation levels covering a wide temporal range. The cave is approached by steep talus slopes broken by limestone rock ledges. It lies about 200 feet above the source of a spring of fresh, potable water emerging near the base of the scarp. The name, Birdshead, is that of an Arapaho Indian who was living at the old Burgess ranch, now part of the Arapaho Indian Reservation.

The establishment of ceramic type categories for the pre-Iroquoian horizons of New York state, exclusive of the Tidewater area, was undertaken for a number of reasons. Primarily, it was believed that such an analysis, breaking down the existing ware divisions into finer type inventories, would prove useful in obtaining a more minute chronological differentiation of the Owasco and Point Peninsula cultures than would be possible on any other basis, and in so doing, would aid in clarifying their possible relationships as well as their conceivable affinities with other major ceramic manifestations in the New York area. It was also hoped that our survey might reveal significant areal subdivisions which eventually might be referred to historic tribal units. Finally, the achievement of a pottery typology for New York would elucidate problems of prehistoric culture diffusion and development over the Northeastern area and might, indeed, contribute to broader interpretations of cultural dynamics and processes of acculturation involved in the complex interconnections of sequential archaeological components.

Peabody Museum, Harvard University, contains two collections of archaeological materials from Far Fan Beach, Panama Canal Zone. The first was given to Mr. Frederick Johnson in 1931 by an army engineer, without any stratigraphic or other data. The collection comprises some ten sherds picked up while excavating a gun position, and correlates exactly with the collection of some thousand specimens obtained by Dr. David B. Stout of Syracuse University during his work with the San Bias Indians in 1941. This second series was discovered in much the same fashion as the first, though fortunately Dr. Stout was able to get to the site while a few pieces remained in situ.

Excavation of the site in the midst of war-hastened construction did not permit the detailed work desired by Dr. Stout, but the results are felt to be a step toward piecing together the background of Panamanian archaeology. Present trends of thought see the Isthmus of Panama as the scene of fluctuating migrations of peoples in the past, and an understanding of the archaeology will aid materially in establishing the course of American prehistory.

The potter's art of pre–Columbian Peru has long received high acclaim, and the antiquity and technical perfection of the several Andean ceramic styles is generally acknowledged. Scarcely a year passes but what new pottery types are recognized by archaeologists, and the descriptions of these fill many volumes. It is altogether incredible, therefore, that for the entire 400–year period that has elapsed since the coming of the Spaniards, there exists no detailed and systematic account of the techniques of pottery manufacture employed by any group in the Andean area. With reference to the Conquest period, Rowe states that “the chroniclers say little about Inca pottery,” while Linné, who combed the literature for data concerning Andean ceramic technology, concluded that “ … from the time of the discovery of Peru no descriptions exist as to pottery–making.“

Shortly before the last war I prepared for publication a monograph on the tumuli of Pennsylvania. War conditions prevented its immediate publication, and so it was put aside until 1948 when a few additions and changes were made. By this time it had grown to include the detailed descriptions of 63 mounds plus a fearsome array of plates. No editor would touch it.

This year the study will at last appear, published by chapter in various journals. The brief report which follows was an appendix, included for comparative purposes. It deals with five scattered burial components excavated by three students of archaeology: Dr. Lewis M. Haggerty, a dentist of Hackensack, New Jersey; Mr. Harry L. Schoff, former professional archaeologist, now of Honeoye Falls, New York; and Mr. Gerard Fowke, pioneer Smithsonian archaeologist. I am indebted to the former men for the use of their field notes and to the U. S. National Museum for photographs of the Bowman mound material.

While making an archaeological survey of the Clark Hill Reservoir area in eastern Georgia and western South Carolina, the writer located an apparently undisturbed shell deposit, the Lake Spring site (9 Cu 61), which is situated 5 miles east of Pollards Crossroads, Columbia County, Georgia, on the south bank of the Savannah River about 1.5 miles upstream from the construction area of the Clark Hill dam and just west of Lake Spring Creek. It is a fairly large site with a deep midden of shells and other occupational refuse.

This can be ranked as the major site of the Clark Hill Reservoir basin. It occupies an area roughly 400 feet long and about 150 feet wide, and has only superficially been disturbed by plowing. The cultures represented are more or less intact.

Ever since Yuma points were recognized as being particularly ancient, Yuma County, Colorado has been a logical area of interest. Nevertheless, until 1941 the county had received scant attention from professional archaeologists, with the sole exception of a partial surface survey by Dr. E. B. Renaud. On the other hand, there had been considerable collecting by local residents, most particularly by Perry and Harold Andersen of Yuma, Colorado, who have amassed a large and valuable collection including numerous Folsom and Yuma points.

In 1941 Yuma County was still liberally spotted with blowouts resulting from wind erosion of the sandy soil consequent upon the previous drought. Conditions were, for the archaeologist, optimal. Thanks to Dr. Donald Scott, who arranged that expenses be defrayed by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, my wife and I were enabled to spend part of the summer and early fall in Yuma County and adjacent portions of other counties.

The Ware site is located in the northern part of Salem County, southwestern New Jersey, on the farm of Mr. Lee Ware. It is on the south bank of Salem Creek, extending to within about 100 feet from the creek, a location which would be flooded only in times of especially high water. The total extent of the site is not known, but it occupies an area of at least 400 feet by 150 feet. It is rather thickly wooded in places, with a mixed growth of cedars, hickory, dogwood, several species of oaks, and a variety of other trees, The soil is, in general, light and sandy.

Excavation was begun in the autumn of 1947 and continued in the summer of 1948.

In 1873 the party of Capt. William A. Jones reported that “throughout the Wind River country of Wyoming many pictographs have been found, and others reported by the Shoshoni Indians.” Thus the Dinwoody petroglyphs and those in the surrounding area have been known for three-quarters of a century, and yet were not even surveyed for archaeological purposes until 1938 and 1939. This, of course, is typical of the fate of petroglyphs over most of North America. Only during the last twenty years has any attention been given by competent archaeologists to the subject of “Indian Writing.” There is no need to draw attention to the “interpretation” of these rock drawings by amateur speculators, for Steward's chastisement of them would be difficult to equal.

Archaeological research has been conducted in the Mesa Verde area of Southwestern United States since the 1880's. Because of this, many believe that the prehistory of the area is well known. Nevertheless, J. 0. Brew, in a recent summary of available information on the area, concluded that a great deal of work is still needed.

This preliminary report is submitted in the hope that it will provide more information for an archaeological interpretation of the area. It is a report on excavations conducted at the Cahone Ruin during the summer of 1947.

The Cahone Ruin is located in southwestern Colorado: Township 39 North, Range 18 West, in Dolores County, just north of the Montezuma-Dolores County line. It is found on a natural rise, about 500 yards north of the northern rim of Cahone Canyon, a tributary of Cross Canyon.

During August and September, 1948, the writer made an archaeological survey of the Lavon Reservoir area in Collin County, Texas. This was a project of the River Basin Surveys program of archaeological salvage, undertaken by the Smithsonian Institution, with the cooperation of the Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service. This reservoir is being built on the East Fork of the Trinity River near Wylie, Texas and approximately 25 miles northeast of Dallas.

Twenty-five sites were located in or near the proposed reservoir area during the course of this survey. Nineteen of these appear to be small, temporary campsites, some producing a few potsherds; others are apparently non-pottery sites. However, six of the sites appear to be permanent village locations occupied by relatively large groups of pottery-using people over a long period of time. The material from these sites is in the process of laboratory analysis at the present time and a statement of the cultural affiliations involved cannot yet be made.

The chronological picture in the Glades Area of southern Florida is based on the combined sequences for three subareas, Calusa, Okeechobee, and Tekesta (Goggin, 1947). The Tekesta sequence is perhaps most detailed, being the result of site seriation and of stratigraphic testing at Upper Matecumbe Key (Goggin and Sommer, 1949). Even in this sub-area, however, further stratigraphic work is needed to fill out the picture.

An attempt was made to supply the necessary details during three days in January and February, 1949, when archaeological tests were conducted in the Everglades National Park, specifically on the headwaters of Shark River and in the Cape Sable area at the extreme southern tip of the state. The National Park Service was represented in this work by J. C. Harrington, Regional Archaeologist; Willard Dilley, Park Naturalist; and Paul Barnes, Ranger. Dr. John W. Goggin of Miami, Ripley Bullen of the Florida Park Service Archaeological Survey, and the writer made up the balance of the personnel.

During the summer of 1948, from June 14th to September 25th, the authors made a second archaeological expedition into the area including Lakes Mistassini and Albanel in south-central Province of Quebec. The work was directed by Frederick Johnson and done under the auspices of the Peabody Foundation, which provided half of the funds necessary. The Viking Fund of New York City generously granted the remainder of the money necessary and for this both we and the Foundation wish to express our gratitude.

Traveling in the trackless interior of Quebec presents many difficulties at best, and without the generous cooperation of the Hudson's Bay Company and its personnel, travel would be virtually impossible. We are sincerely grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Fred McLeod, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Parsons, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Jeffreys, whose hospitality and genuine good will are in keeping with the best traditions of the Hudson's Bay Company.