The tree-ring dating of baldcypress has been achieved in the southeastern United States, and the first 500 to 600 year long baldcypress chronologies have been developed from remnant stands of old-growth trees. An 800 year long cypress tree-ring chronology based on living trees and extended with long dead submerged logs has recently been dated, demonstrating the feasibility for very long chronology extension using progressively older sources of preserved cypress wood from old-growth trees, historic buildings, prehistoric archaeological sites, and natural deposits of submerged and buried logs and stumps. The longevity, climate sensitivity, and excellent preservation of ancient baldcypress wood make this species the only realistic prospect for millennia-long tree-ring chronologies extending to the mid-holocene in the Southeast, with important potential applications to the tree-ring dating of prehistoric archaeological sites, paleoclimatic reconstruction, and the calibration of independent dating methods.

The Society for American Archaeology officers should be commended for their efforts to celebrate the success of the Society in reaching its relative stability on the occasion of the 50th Annual Meeting to be held in Denver, Colorado in 1985. The recognized founding of the Society took place at the Hotel Roosevelt (Theodore not Franklin) in Pittsburgh, December 28, 1934 following a dinner of Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

After study of the murals recently discovered at Cacaxtla, Tlaxcala, Mexico, I conclude: (1) that the role played by the Late Classic Maya in the central Mexican highlands during the period A.D. 700—900 was much greater than previously assumed; (2) that a post-Teotihuacán art style and mythology was carried into the central Mexican highlands by conquering people from the Gulf Coast lowlands; and (3) that the term “Mexicanized Maya” can be reasonably rendered “Mayanized Mexican,” particularly in the context of later Toltec developments.

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.

Two measured and weighed assemblages of lithic debitage were subjected to human treadage, one set on a compact sandy silt (“loam”) substrate, the other on unconsolidated sand. The assemblages were excavated, plotted in three dimensions, and documented for damage. Downward migration of pieces at the loam site was minimal: fracture of small pieces was the dominant damage pattern. Most sand site pieces migrated to 3-8 cm depth; vertical distribution of pieces approximated a normal curve, and edge-damage to larger pieces was the dominant damage pattern. Vertical distribution of artifacts at the sand site approximated a pattern observed in two other trampling experiments and a number of archaeological occurrences. Factors influencing these distributions are discussed.

Richard Gould has built a substantial literature treating the subject of archaeological method with an emphasis on ethnoarchaeology. His writings have been received with mixed feelings by the field and have recently sparked an interesting “debate.” Much of Gould's criticism of the recent literature stems from his misunderstanding of that material. In similar fashion, I suspect that much misdirection in the current “debate” stems from Gould's naivete regarding his own philosophy. Therefore, I have attempted an analysis of Gould's works that will, I hope, clarify his position as well as the character of the points he raises that are in need of debate.

Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in collagen from bones of individuals who lived in the Tehuacan Valley during the period 8000–1000 years B.P. have been interpreted as indicating earlier use of maize and more utilization of legumes as food sources than is suggested by the occurrence of the remains of these plants in the coprolites and debris excavated along with the bones. Reassessment of the assumptions made in interpreting the bone collagen isotope ratios reduces some but not all of the discrepancy between the isotopic and archaeological reconstructions of diet. The original archaeological reconstruction relied entirely on remains from cave sites, thus introducing seasonal and locational biases into the dietary reconstruction. Using the bone collagen isotope ratios as a guide, we re-interpreted the archaeological data to produce a more complete picture of temporal changes in the overall diet. We suggest that heavy dependence on grains began in the Coxcatlan phase and then may have remained unchanged for the next 5,500–6,500 years. These conclusions, which are based on a relatively small isotopic data base, need to be verified by an extensive program of isotopic analysis of the floral, faunal, and human remains from Tehuacan.

Interest in the prehistory of America is hardly more than two centuries old, but it is within the last half-century that our concern for preservation and salvage has bloomed. Prior to that time there were individual voices urging study and protection of archaeological sites, but no grass-roots sentiment for protection. This may be largely because most of our antecedents came from the Old World; New World archaeology concerned our past not at all.

Analysis of 100 desiccated feces of the Desha Complex (6800–4800 B.C.) from Dust Devil Cave near Navajo Mountain in southern Utah shows high proportions of Chenopodium seed and an absence of parasitic round-worms. Conversely, fecal remains from other sites in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau show high incidences of parasite infection and low frequencies of Chenopodium. The implications of Chenopodium as a vermifuge are discussed.

Field surveys of lithic sites in Central Australia and experimental tests of materials from these sites permit evaluation of Binford's (1979) concept of embeddedness. While basically agreeing with Binford's view that raw material procurement by mobile hunter-gatherers occurred incidentally in relation to other subsistence activities, our results indicate that Binford's argument cannot account for patterning in raw material procurement based on the utilitarian properties of the materials themselves. In dealing with questions of raw material procurement, we propose that controlled efforts be made to evaluate the technological characteristics of materials vis-a-vis the mechanical forces involved in their known or presumed uses before assuming the degree to which their procurement was structured by subsistence factors.

A set of 296 obsidian artifacts from the lakes area of the Department of Peten, Guatemala, has been provenienced by X-ray fluorescence and neutron activation analysis. The obsidians come from socioeconomic contexts (primarily rural/domestic) and time periods—from the Middle Preclassic period, ca. 800 B.C., up to the time of Spanish contact, A.D. 1525—that have been poorly represented in previous Lowland provenience studies. Thus they provide new data on the acquisition and distribution of this important non-local commodity in the Maya Lowlands.

Archaeological thought is dynamic. It progresses toward new goals, or veers from one to another and, as the pendulum of orthodoxy swings, the archaeologists' perception of what constitute appropriate foci for research changes with almost every student generation. Given such change and variation, it is small wonder that trends and events of the past rapidly grow dim in the discipline's collective memory; or that current trends are often taken for granted (particularly by students) as being fixed and immutable.

Radiocarbon analyses by accelerator mass spectrometric (AMS) techniques on organic fractions of human bone from various North American localities previously assigned ages ranging from about 70,000 to 15,000 years B.P. now suggest that none of these skeletons is older than 11,000 C-14 years B.P.

A series of buried ridged agricultural fields has been discovered at the Sand Lake Site (47 Lc44) in La Crosse County, Wisconsin. Associated artifacts, features, and assayed carbon samples demonstrate that the fields were constructed by Oneota people in the fifteenth century A.D. Evidence suggests that water control was a major function of the ridges.

One of the hallmarks of the new archaeology was a shift from “sites” to regions as the investigatory universe appropriate to most archaeological problems (e.g., Binford 1964). This new emphasis was accompanied by a call for multidisciplinary investigations. The precedents usually cited are studies such as MacNeish's Tehuacan Valley project (Byers 1967-1972) and Braidwood's Jarmo project (Braidwood and Howe 1960). Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947 (Phillips, Ford, and Griffin 1951), which shares many of these features, is not commonly cited and is one of the more undervalued classics of its time.

In this paper we argue that although investigators often address themselves generally to human interaction with deer and the results of such interaction, they often fail to consider a number of related nonhuman factors that bear directly upon deer populations. Thus, such populations are seen and described as static, unchanging, and a given rather than as entities capable of considerable fluctuation and change that affect the human adaptive system. In addition, the related issue of the use and abuse of deer density figures is examined. We conclude that in most instances published density figures used by archaeologists are unrealistically high and in need of reassessment.

The fiftieth anniversaries of the Society for American Archaeology and of its journal are plainly occasions for stock-takings of various kinds. My assignment is to comment on the progress of the theory underlying archaeological activities during this time with particular attention to the situation at the outset. My principal qualification for this task is the simple fact that my period of participation in American archaeology coincides closely with this fifty-year span. I began graduate study at the University of Michigan in the autumn of 1936 and immediately developed a specialized interest in eastern and northern North America. Subsequent discussion reflects this interest; my basic concern is to describe and appraise the intellectual groundwork of archaeology as it was practiced by archaeologists working in this field.

Information regarding the order of natural disarticulation in a wider variety of ungulate species than previously studied emphasizes the need for caution in claiming that any particular pattern of dismemberment is uniquely distinctive of human activity. However, it also suggests possibly distinctive features of North American Indian butchery practices on prehistoric Bison.

In this report I present evidence of a prehistoric trade network that operated between the inland desert and coastal regions of southern California. Jasper, a nonlocal commodity from sources in the inland deserts, was found in large quantities at the Tomato Springs site, a prehistoric coastal village. This lithic material appears to have been of some value to the inhabitants of the coastal region, as evidence indicates that it was procured in quantity for a period of approximately 4,500 years over distances in excess of 175 km. The available data indicate that jasper trade between the inland deserts and the coast does not fit any distance-decay models proposed for trade in spite of the distances under consideration.

This article begins with a description of excavations in the Las Vegas type site on the Santa Elena Peninsula, Ecuador. A pre-Las Vegas phase (11,000 to 10,000 B.P.) is defined provisionally, and the Early Las Vegas (10,000 to 8000 B.P.) and Late Las Vegas (8000 to 6600 B.P.) phases are described from artifacts, burials, settlement data, faunal remains, pollen, and phytoliths. The Las Vegas people were unspecialized hunters, fishermen, and gatherers living in a littoral zone who added plant cultivation to their subsistence system before 8,000 years ago. Evidence for bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) and primitive maize (Zea mays L.) was found in the Las Vegas type site. The differences between the modern, semiarid environment and the environment of the preceramic period are accounted for without hypothesizing climatic change. Las Vegas is interpreted as a local manifestation of an early tropical forest cultural tradition out of which developed the ceramic-stage cultures of the Ecuadorian coast.