In the Summer of 1935, the finding of Folsom Man was heralded throughout the country by the daily press and several Sunday supplement articles on the subject appeared in various papers. The articles were based on a publication, New World Man, by J. D. Figgins, then director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, now with the Bernheim Foundation, Louisville, Kentucky. The identification of the remains as those of Folsom Man seemingly was made by some reporter who noted that they were found eight miles east of Folsom, New Mexico. Beyond the fact that the bones were in a bank of the Cimarron River, fourteen miles east of the quarry where the original Folsom points and extinct bison were uncovered ten years ago, there was nothing to warrant the conclusion that they represented Folsom Man.

Two years ago Lothrop (1934) published a summary of archaeological work in South America covering the years 1931–1934. This article continues the summary up to 1936. Relatively few archaeological expeditions have come to my attention in this period and consequently the review is based largely on published accounts. Such field reports as are available are incorporated under the proper sections. Thompson (1936) has published a guide leaflet on the archaeology of South America, reviewing the various fields included. Other publications refer more specifically to single sections. The review of sections starts in the Andean region, and continues with the eastern South American countries.

The Maya Area is of outstanding archaeological importance because its early inhabitants achieved the highest civilization in pre-Columbian America. The early Maya and Mexicans surpassed other highly developed pre-Columbian American cultures because they possessed a form of writing and an intricate calendrical system. While the question of priority and derivation of culture in the Mexican-Maya area is still a moot one, there is no doubt that the Maya developed writing, representational art, and the sciences of mathematics and astronomy to a degree of excellence far beyond that attained by the Mexicans.

The Maya lived, before the Conquest as today, in Yucatan and the country south of it. We have little evidence concerning the archaic or earliest peoples of this region. We know that in the southern part there was such a cultural substratum, identified by modelled figurines and distinctive pottery.

Aerial photographs were employed in archaeological work as early as 1880. The results proved the value of aerial photographs, but the methods of raising a camera aloft were unsatisfactory until the invention of the airplane. Also the quality of cameras and sensitive plates was not very good in the early days. For these reasons, aerial photography was applied to archaeology infrequently until after the World War.

Military operations accelerated the development of airplanes. Cameras were designed especially for air use and the quality of lenses and plates was improved greatly. This resulted in a rapid growth of aerial photography. The applications of aerial photographs were limited almost entirely to military uses, including mapping. The post-war development followed similar lines. Aerial photography was found to be indispensable to military operations and all air forces devoted considerable attention to this specialty.

There has been considerable discussion recently as to whether or not the coiling method was in use in the northeastern Woodlands area. There are two sources of information: early written reports of settlers, missionaries, and others, and archaeological material. Holmes reports the observations of Mooney and Palmer among the Catawba, who used the coil method. Sagard, a French missionary, described the the Huron as using the paddle and anvil method. Parker found a section of a coil in an Erie village in western New York, and several partial sections have been found since. Griffin summarizes the ethnological and archaeological evidence and describes his attempts to produce fractures along the lines of the coils. Little material on sherds showing horizontal breaks along the coils is available at the present.

A cave deposit in New Mexico has recently been discovered which seems to combine all the favorable circumstances under which the association of man with extinct mammals may be conclusively demonstrated. In the fall of 1935, one of the students at the University of New Mexico reported to the Department of Anthropology that he had located several caves in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque. He also produced such tangible evidence of archaeological remains found on the floor of the caves that an investigation was initiated to survey these and other previously reported caves. Most of them, as might have been expected, indicated but slight occupation of man, recent or ancient.

During the summer of 1935, the University of Pennsylvania Museum sponsored an archaeological and geological survey of the middle and lower Yukon valley, Alaska. The work was financed through the generosity of the National Research Council and the American Philosophical Society. The party consisted of: Dr. A. J. Eardley, Department of Geology, University of Michigan; Mr. Kenneth Gorton, a student of geology at the same institution; Mr. Norman Reynolds, a student of anthropology at the University of Washington; and the writer.

The principal object of the expedition was to investigate the possibilities of finding ancient human remains in the Yukon valley. The discoveries of ancient artifacts (belonging to the so-called Folsom culture) in association with bones of extinct animals, show that human beings lived on the southern High Plains east of the Rockies at the end of the Pleistocene or during the early post-Pleistocene.

Archaeology in the California area has been notoriously slow to recover cultural sequences. In part this is due to most of the earlier explorations having been conducted without sense of genuine scientific problem, as in the first stages of work in so many other regions. But in even larger measure the delay in discovering positive time changes is the result of difficulties inherent in the archaeological data of the area. Mostly there is no pottery at all. The historic cultures being simple, their artifact inventory is fairly limited and lacking in specialized types. Except in the Santa Barbara region, the numerical yield of specimen data is low for volume of soil moved. The San Francisco Bay mounds, for instance, tend to furnish only about one artifact, whole or broken, per cubic yard dug. This is probably not far from the average productivity the state over, the Santa Barbara coast and islands alone omitted.

The stone carving in bas-relief pictured herewith (Plate 19) was found during the summer of 1936 by the writer while in the course of conducting archaeological explorations at Starkweather ruin in the Reserve district of the Upper Gila area, New Mexico. Newspapers learning of this rather unusual find sensationally spread the story throughout the country that Aztec and Toltec art objects had been found in New Mexico. It is really amusing to note how they jumped at conclusions, for there is nothing in the find that would indicate any relation to the Aztec or Toltec. The writer hopes that all such inaccurate information will be corrected through the following description of the find and the conditions under which it was made.

In the North central Middle West there is a well-defined complex of archaeological material traits that received the classificatory name Oneota aspect of the Upper Mississippi phase at the Indianapolis meeting of 1935. The material which probably should be grouped together occurs over quite a large geographical area. In northern Illinois it is one of the best known of the prehistoric cultures and is represented by at least three foci. In Wisconsin the southern and western parts of the state contain quite a number of sites grouped into three foci, two of which appear to be local, namely, Lake Winnebago and Grand River. The sites in northeastern Iowa and southeastern Minnesota contain remains so similar to those of southwestern Wisconsin that they have been placed together in the Orr focus.

Charles P. Bowditch reproduces about seven different signs as hieroglyphs for Kin, “day,” in his fundamental work on the Maya calendar. They are: (1) the sun-disk, (2) the head of the sun-god, (3) the head of a sun-bird, (4) the dog's head, (5) the conch, (6) the inverted Ahau and (7) the composite glyph day-sky, sun-disc and Caban. There can be identified still a few more hieroglyphs as representing the same idea.

In this paper we shall treat of a new sign, generally composed of a quincunx (a variant of the character for “greenstone”) and a skull (Figure 1, a, b and f), for which the value “day” can be proved.

Some of the most common artifacts found on all of the ancient Hohokam sites in southern Arizona, and upon many of the Pueblo sites further to the north in both Arizona and New Mexico, are the thin, well-made bracelets, earrings and finger rings, fashioned from the Glycimeris shell. The broken fragments of these specimens are particularly noticeable in the great trash heaps marking the Hohokam villages. The normal type is a plain, smoothly-cut, well-polished circlet of shell, usually perforated with a small hole at the apex of the hinge.

Although archaeologists have long been familiar with these, and know that the shells from which they were made are found in the Gulf of California, the origin of the artifacts themselves has not been established. It has been inferred that the Indians of the interior obtained the complete shells in trade, or that in ancient times the inhabitants of the Gila and Salt valleys traveled to the Gulf, a nine days' journey on foot, even as the Pima and Papago have resorted thither for salt in more recent historic times.

In the course of its long and eventful prehistory, the territory embraced in the present state of New York was invaded from nearly every direction. For several groups, notably the Iroquois, it was the end of the trail; others sojourned briefly and passed on. In part it was heavily occupied by diverse bands for a considerable period of time. This is especially true of the central and southern sections and of large parts of the Genesee Valley. The latter and the Finger Lakes region, including the Seneca River, are thickly strewn with sites of varying age and size. In one section of the Genesee Valley, just south of Rochester, hardly a knoll is opened without revealing skeletons. Other relatively intensively occupied areas are the Susquehanna drainage, parts of the Mohawk and Hudson valleys and Long Island.

Almost all archaeological work in the Southwest in the past several years has been an attempt to establish a series of events in their proper time and space context. This implies as the ultimate objective the building of a spacial series of chronologies, each one of which will give as complete an historical picture as is possible to obtain from archaeological data. The particular emphasis which has been, and is being, placed on chronology has directed attention to the methods by which this end is attained. The method has been set forth in 1931 by Leslie Spier in an article in “Methods in Social Science.”

The list which Spier suggested is composed of the following methods: geology and paleontology, distribution, typology, stratigraphy, seriation, annual deposits, and documents.

The Archaeology of Alaska has been coming to the front in recent years as the result of protracted activities chiefly on the part of the National Museum in Washington, the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, the Canadian National Museum at Ottawa, and the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Some twenty years ago, through the efforts of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the American Museum of Natural History had already obtained a large archaeological collection from Pt. Barrow and vicinity, which is at least partly published and which may conceivably have helped to stimulate this new interest.