Rock art studies have indicated that the katchina cult and associated religious sodalities arrived in the Pueblo Southwest in the early 14th century from the Jornada region of the Mogollon. Recent studies of prehistoric Pueblo social organization suggest that population aggregation after A.D. 1150 led to the need for means of intravillage social integration. It is proposed that the arrival of the katchina cult and its widespread acceptance occurred in response to this need for intravillage integrative mechanisms.

E. Z. Vogt has proposed a reconstruction of ancient lowland Maya social organization based on the settlement pattern and organization of modern central Chiapas highland Indian municipios. The occurrence and persistence of Vogt's "typical" Maya pattern is examined. Archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnological data from central Chiapas are used to demonstrate the presence of at least two patterns of settlement in the region at the time of Spanish conquest. These are discussed as imprints of two systems: (1) internally exploitive and (2) externally exploitive. The first represents primary adaptation to natural features of the landscape. The second represents an expansive adaptation to changing social environments. It is suggested that both these systems were in operation at various times in the southern Maya lowlands as well as in the central Chiapas highlands.

A detailed discussion is presented of the archaeological value of the scale remains of fish. The various forms of scales are presented along with a discussion of the morphological characteristics of these elements. A brief summary of the past uses to which fish scales have been put within archaeology is presented and the use of fish scales to estimate the size of the fish and the minimum number of individuals represented, as well as their use as seasonal dating devices is also discussed in detail. In addition, the limitations of scale remains in each of the above areas of interpretation are also presented.

Archaeological records of the fourth and third millennia B.P. in eastern New England, from Massachusetts to Maine, evidence the initiation and spread of intensive shellfish exploitation from a Late Archaic forest and riverine-oriented economic base. Changes in the degree of exploitation of several shellfish species follow the economic shift during Early and Middle Woodland times. Ritchie and Snow have recently explained these changes as the result of a single process of purely internally initiated cultural evolution involving a systematic expansion of exploitative techniques and the subsistence base. Evidence from the Boston Harbor area, Massachusetts, and from paleoclimatic, ecological, and paleoecological literature are presented in arguing that such an explanation is unwarranted. An alternative framework, emphasizing the primacy of ecological factors, is presented.

An exchange network based on long-distance export of Spondylus and Strombus, two mollusks native to coastal Ecuador, united the sierra and coast of both Ecuador and Peru during a long period of Andean prehistory. The gradual expansion of the export area is sketched, using evidence from three successive periods: (A) 2800 to 1100 B.C., (B) 1100 to 100 B.C., and (C) 100 B.C. to A.D. 1532. Each of these periods corresponds not only to an enlargement of the exchange sphere, but also to a striking change in the sociocultural status and role of the two shellfish in highland Ecuador and in Peru. This series of qualitative changes is related to evolutionary sociopolitical developments in the central Andes. Chávin is seen as a pristine state, linked to the later Huari and Inca empires through their common use of Spondylus and Strombus shells as symbols of the oracles that were important integrative mechanisms in the evolution toward large-scale societies.

An attempt is made to view an assemblage of stone tools as something in the process of being generated over time. A formal model is developed which includes variables such as activities and tool types and also draws attention to somewhat less visible variables that enter into the formation of an assemblage such as the dropping rates of tools and mapping relations between tool types and activities. Implications of the model for the interpretation of correlation coefficients which are often used in the quantitative analysis of assemblages and also for the "functional" argument are discussed.

Two functions of contemporary bird-form pottery from Oaxaca, Mexico are described. It is suggested that comparable functions may have existed elsewhere for similar vessels, whose effigy forms are simply elaborations of utilitarian shapes.

The need to coat obsidian artifacts for photographic purposes can be eliminated through the use of a light polarizing filter attached to the camera lens.

The economic basis of the Cantabrian Upper Palaeolithic as reported by L. G. Freeman is compared with the coeval parietal art, and a motivational basis for the latter suggested.

Weymouth's X-ray diffraction analysis of prehistoric pottery necessitates a reevaluation of what diffraction peaks and "groupings" of peaks mean culturally. Specifically, archaeologists need to clarify what they mean by "temper" and what "temper" means behaviorally. X-ray diffraction will not screen out naturally occurring inclusions in the clay from those added by potters; consequently, X-ray data based on mineral ratios cannot necessarily be interpreted culturally as "temper" added by potters.