In a brief report, which was read before the 8th Conference for Plains Archeology by George Metcalf, 1 attempted to reconstruct the procedure by which the carcass of an antelope was prepared for food. The inferences thus drawn were based upon the ratio of the various elements to each other and to the greatest number of individuals represented, as well as the location of the breaks or cuts in the bones. Since the antelope is one of the smaller food animals and could be moved to a convenient butchering place, the question immediately posed itself: “How would size affect the butchering technique since a bison must necessatily be butchered where it is killed?“

The bison bone which provides the basis for this study was collected during the excavation of two archaeological sites near Pierre, South Dakota. The Dodd site was a multi-component village, but there was evidence of only a single cultural complex at the Phillips Ranch site (Lehmer, 1952).

Recently Noel Morss published several recumbent figurines (American Antiquity, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1952) and pointed out the area of distribution of this type giving examples of Mexican as well as North American origin. His interpretation was that they represent children strapped to their cradles.

As early as 1949 I published, in the first volume of “Selected Papers of XXIX International Congress of Americanists” in New York, a paper on the same subject, which, apparently, Noel Morss had not seen. I had assembled several similar specimens originating from a vast area extending from Ecuador to the Valley of Mexico and to Colima. The new point which Morss (who has never heard of kindred subjects in South America) makes in his paper, is the inclusion of North America in the same complex. The Nashville specimen (Morss, 1952, Fig. 74) differs only in size (it is 9 inches long). All the other figurines quoted by both of us are less than half that length.

The following is a discussion of Carter's (1952) third interglacial artifacts. Carter's conclusion that he has found third interglacial artifacts is based on two hypotheses: 1. The objects found are artifacts; 2. The layer in which they were found dates from the third interglacial. These comments are limited to a brief discussion of the first hypothesis.

The pictures and descriptions furnish no concrete proof that the finds are artifacts, although the burden of proof must rest with him. We contend that these “artifacts” are well within the range of naturally chipped stone. This conclusion is based on Barnes’ (1939) discussion of natural and artificial flaking of flints which is based on his own work and that of the Abbe Breuil, S. H. Warren and others. Barnes and Breuil have shown that natural forces can produce flaked flints, many of which are far more convincing “artifacts” than those Carter reports.

Interest has recently increased in problems of pre- Conquest contact between the two foci of high culture in the New World, Mesoamerica and the Andean Area. In approaching this question, three major categories of culture diffusion should be recognized at the outset, since each requires a different methodological approach on its own level. The first category would include such basic foundation elements as the cultivation of maize and other closely associated plant staples, pottery, metallurgy, weaving, architecture, etc.; the second, such considerably more specific traits as highly specialized technological processes in various crafts, distinctive art styles, unique design motifs, etc.; and the third, actual trade objects manufactured in one region and imported into the other. There has been more agreement concerning the actuality of diffusion of at least some first category traits than of those in the second, where the claims when critically examined often turn out. to be founded on highly subjective criteria. As for the third category, the striking thing here is the marked paucity of claims of finds of this type.

Located in deep, narrow limestone canyons draining into the Little Colorado River in the vicinity of Wupatki Basin in northern Arizona are numerous small masonrywalled cliff ruins. While these were apparently occupied at the same time as the large pueblos now included within the boundaries of Wupatki National Monument, they are little known and have not previously been reported upon except in the archaeological surveys of the Museum of Northern Arizona.

One of these sites, N.A.3940, situated with a southern exposure some fifty feet above the floor of Antelope Canyon, is of interest in that the masonry courses are laid in beds of grass rather than with the usual adobe mortar. The ruin itself is located in a shallow overhang in the Kaibab limestone cliff and contains but three small rooms. In no place do the walls remain standing over three feet, and along the front they have almost completely deteriorated. On the surface of the fill inside the rooms only a few corn cobs and four sherds were found.

In American Antiquity (Vol. 17, No. 3), Heizer reports “Incised Slate Figurines from Kodiak Island, Alaska.“ This Comment was concerned With a number of unusual incised slate fragments portraying human faces. Doctor Heizer was of the opinion that they were quite late, having come from the upper levels of stratified sites or from known recent sites.

Comparing the features of these stylized portraits with Plate 17 “A Man of Kodiak” from Billings, London 1802 (reproduced here as Fig. 28 a with Heizer's Fig. 28, b), one cannot doubt that they are recent. The elements besides the stylized faces are easily recognized as beaded ear and chin ornaments, and the typical squared collar of the Koniag of 150 years ago.

A recent development of some interest in Maya archaeology has been the appearance of several studies showing rather unexpected connections between the art of the Toltec period at Chichen Itza and that of the late Great period in the Classic centers to the south. Inferentially, this may indicate the approximate contemporaneity of the Chichen Itza Toltec and the late Classic Maya. Such a reconstruction is not only a far cry from the outmoded concept of “Old” and “New Empires” but, as Lothrop (1952, p. 112) points out, challenges the generally favored 11.16 (Goodman-Martinez- Thompson) correlation of the Maya and Christian calendars. Three studies may be cited as of particular importance in emphasizing the affinity of Chichen Toltec and Classic Maya art. Monographs by Proskouriakoff (1950) and Lothrop (1952) deal, respectively, with sculptured monuments from the Maya area as a whole and with metal objects from the sacred cenote at Chichen Itza. A paper by the present writer (Rands, 1953) is concerned with portrayals of a single motif, the water lily, in the Maya area.

The two large mounds at the Poverty Point and Motley sites in West Carrol Parish, Louisiana, were first adequately described by C. B. Moore (1913, Fig. 29), and for a long while these structures and the cultural remains scattered about them remained one of the principal puzzles in the archaeology of the lower Mississippi Valley. Clarence Webb has made extensive surface collections from this locality for a number of years and his three articles in American Antiquity, the last written with Haag, form the bulk of the information which we have on the culture (Webb, 1944, 1948; Haag and Webb, 1953). The purpose of the present brief note is to report some newly discovered facets of the Poverty Point cultural complex.

The writer was able to work a few weeks at the site in the spring of 1952 and again in 1953. However, the most remarkable discovery was not made in the field but in the Cartographic Laboratory of the Mississippi River Commission in Vicksburg.

Deep-basined metates are frequently found in early sites on the southern California coast, but the faces of the accompanying manos usually are only moderately convex. Mano faces examined by the writer never have been sufficiently excurvate to make contact with the grinding surfaces of the deeply ground metates. This presents an interesting problem: how were the manos manipulated on the metates?

An examination of specimens from Oak Grove sites 7, 21, and 79 (Rogers, 1929) and the Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys’ sites 4SBa477 and 4SBa485 in Santa Barbara County, California, reveals the following associations and characteristics. Slab, shallow-basined, and deep-basined metates are found in association. The first two types exhibit an unbroken grinding area, but specimens of the latter almost invariably have a slight shoulder running at least a part of the way around the basin, the transition between a slightly concave ground area and the deeply ground cavity.

Archaeological research in Chihuahua, Mexico, is something that has been talked about a great deal recently, but little in the way of field work has been accomplished. During the 1930's there was a spurt in archaeological activities in that area which saw a number of individuals conducting surveys and small scale excavations mainly in the northwestern part of the state. Reports on much of this work, and upon field work accomplished earlier, appeared in this same period. But since that time very little has been accomplished. As more knowledge of the prehistory of southern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, and central Mexico became available, attention was focused on north central Mexico, including Chihuahua, as a key area in which might be found answers to many existing problems, especially those dealing with Southwestern-Mexican connections. In the period since World War II, J. Charles Kelley has reported upon work in southern Chihuahua in the Rio Conchos drainage, and the University of New Mexico conducted investigations in the Bolson de Mapimi in southwestern Chihuahua. The latter work, however, is unreported.

S. V. R. Cammann's interesting analysis of the Chinese stone carving found by Gann in a Maya site in Quintana Roo has indeed thrown some explanatory light on this, and other pieces of the same general type. Zelia Nuttall (1910) mentioned a “soap-stone teapot“ from the island of Sacrificios, and says that “it gave rise to much speculation, especially as similar ones were found by respectable authorities at Tepaca (on the ancient high road to Puebla) and in the Huaxteca.“ Nuttall says further, “The well vouched for fact that the teapot was actually found on the island of Sacrificios can doubtless be explained by the employment of the island by the Spaniards, during centuries, as a lading place for merchandise from the Philippines and China, after it had been brought overland by mule-back from Acapulco to Vera Cruz, to be shipped from thence to Spain.“

My notes on the Brown mound (Br. 3) of the Spiro site filed at the University of Oklahoma were misplaced and therefore not available to Kenneth Orr at the time he prepared his preliminary Spiro report. (American Antiquity, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1946.) The following data are from a personal copy of the original notes.

When I visited the Spiro site in August 1935, members of the Pocola Mining Company were “exploring“ the Brown mound. Using a team and slip, they had put one trench about 20 feet wide almost completely through the mound from the north side and a side trench from the west to the center of the mound. The clay subsoil was exposed in both trenches, less than a foot of it having been removed from the north-south trench. These trenches, with the spreading of the fill around the north, south, and west sides of the mound, had all but obliterated its original shape and size.

Archaeologists usually recognize four culture patterns in the Southwest: the Hohokam, Mogollon, Anasazi, and Patayan. Two of these groups, the Cohonina Branch, usually regarded as Patayan, and the Kayenta Branch of the Anasazi, were in contact along the southern side of the Grand Canyon. While the Cohonina specifically, and the Patayan culture pattern generally, are not yet clearly defined, certain differences between them and the neighboring Kayenta Branch Anasazi are apparent. The Cohonina finished their pottery by use of the paddle and anvil, instead of scraping and polishing it as the Anasazi did; both groups, however, used a reducing atmosphere for firing, which produced a gray ware. In architecture, the Anasazi were generally more advanced. Cohonina sites usually consist of scattered surface houses, often with ramadas nearby. The Anasazi lived mostly in permanent villages of pithouses and later surface structures of true masonry, and in distinction to their western neighbors, they built ceremonial rooms. In the making of stone and bone tools, as in architecture, the Anasazi were more advanced and produced a greater variety of tool types.

The existence of an enigmatic site on Fremont Island in Great Salt Lake has been brought to the attention of the University of Utah by Earl Stoddard of Ogden, Utah. The archaeological specimens which Stoddard gathered from the site, especially the stone bowls, do not seem to bear any relationship to known cultural materials from northern Utah; consequently the site is being reported here in order to call attention to the unusual assemblage of artifacts. The materials reported and illustrated are in the possession of Stoddard.

The primary purpose of this paper is to report the finding of two Clovis Fluted points in southeastern Arizona and hence to further define the geographical range of the hunting complex represented by these points. The secondary purpose is to define the characteristics of the two points in question, for they closely resemble the eight points found at Naco, Arizona.

Haury and others (p. 1 ff.) report the finding of eight Clovis Fluted points in the near vicinity of Naco, in southeastern Arizona. This (American Antiquity, Vol. 18, No. 1, p. 91) was the first reported find of these fluted points in this area. The importance of the find was emphasized by the fact that the projectile points were found in direct association with the skeletal remains of Mammuthus (Parelephas) columbi (Haury, “The Naco Mammoth,” The Kiva, Vol. 18, Nos. 3-4, 1952, p. 17).

The six papers reviewed by T. D. Stewart in the July 1952 issue of American Antiquity (Vol. XVIII, No. 1, pp. 71-72; also reviewed in the American ]ournal of Archaeology, Vol. 56, No. 4, October 1952, pp. 234- 236, by E. K. Reed) were given in the symposium on new methods and techniques of interpretation of the physical anthropology of the American Indian constituting the second half of the Viking Fund's Fourth Summer Seminar in Physical Anthropology, August 29 to September 3, 1949 (the first half being devoted to the Australopithecinae of South Africa). Abstracts of all papers were published in the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 4, 1948, New York (Viking Fund), 1949. In addition to the six papers presented in full in Physical Anthropology of the American Indian (ed. W. S. Laughlin, published by the Viking Fund, New York, 1951), these were: Morris Steggerda, “Anthropometry of the living American Indian“; Charles E. Snow, “The Sequence of Physical Types in North America“; and T. D. McCown, “The sequence of physical types in California.” Final discussion, of methods and theoretical considerations, was presided over by Stewart as moderator.

In the late summer of 1952, as the author was breaking camp at conclusion of the Smithsonian-Princeton field investigations at the Horner site, near Cody, Wyoming, a large earthenware vessel was brought to him for examination. According to its owner, Mr. Don Marquess, the vessel had recently been found “ … under an overhanging rock near Goff Creek Lodge, which is located 43 miles from Cody, Wyoming, on the North Fork of the Shoshoni River, 10 miles from the East gate to Yellowstone National Park. The ledge of rock under which it was found is on the bank of Goff Creek, a mountain stream which runs through the camp and empties into the Shoshoni River. The bottom [of the pot] was protruding slightly from the surface of the ground. The rocks under which it was buried are of a flat nature of various sizes …” (Marquess to Wedel, letter of October 31, 1952).

J. H. Connery (1932, p. 516) reported a supposed association of artifacts and extinct vertebrates at the Bon Terra Farm, in Flagler County, Florida. It was stated that an arrowhead was found beneath the jawbone of a mammoth elephant. The arrowhead was not described or illustrated. E. B. Howard (1940, p. 309), who tested the site, thought the association questionable, but did not elaborate on his reasons for so thinking. Recently, through the cooperation of Connery, I reexamined the Bon Terra site (Fl 5) and the material found there. A drawing of the arrowhead was made, the outline being traced and the chipping indicated by freehand sketch. The artifact is small, thin, and flat; it was ovate before notching. The diagonal notches resulted in a barbed projectile point with a wide tang. The edges bear fine pressure retouching. The tip had once been broken and the artifact then reworked into what would usually be called a stemmed scraper. This type of point is unlike anything attributed to the paleo-Indian, and has not been reported from the Archaic of Florida.