On December 28, 1946, during the forty-fifth annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, a symposium on River Valley Archaeology in the United States was conducted under the auspices of the Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains. The Committee was organized in 1945 to represent American Archaeology and Anthropology in the emergency brought about by the extensive Government program for floodcontrol and irrigation. Plans for hundreds of dams in the major and minor river systems of the country are completed.

One of the minor mysteries of American archaeology concerns the use made by the Indians of certain stone disks found in the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast. According to Charles C. Jones, Jr., the first of these disks was “ploughed up in 1859, on the lower terrace of the large temple-mound on the Etowah River … near Cartersville,” Georgia. Other discoveries followed, and several scores of the disks are now in archaeological collections.

This article is based on an address to the society for American Archaeology at its annual meeting on May 17, 1946 at Indianpolis. A following address by Dr. Waldo R. Wedel desalt with the chronology of central Plains cultures. As the two chronologies embraced a very considerable portion of the United States and were in rather remarkably close agreement, it was suggested by retiring editor Byers that they be published in this journal.

The purpose of the present paper is to call attention to certain rock shelter sites in the vicinity of Huancayo, Peru, which—since they have yielded thus far several types of chipped stone artifacts and bone implements, but no pottery—appear at the present writing to be unique in Peru. The two sites described in the following pages are situated on old terraces of the Chupaca River, a tributary of the Mantaro, in Junín Department in the central Peruvian highlands. They were brought to the writer's notice by Mr. Paul G. Ledig, Observer-in- Charge of the Carnegie Institution Magnetic Observatory near Huancayo, who has in the past made small excavations at both sites.

In recent years a considerable amount of archaeological research has contributed to our knowledge of the Antilles. Especially valuable in this field are the numerous works of Osgood, Rouse, and Rainey, all of the Peabody Museum of Yale University, whose valuable investigations and excellent monographs have brought new life to the archaeology of the Antilles.

Nevertheless, much remains to be done, and important discoveries relating to Antillean problems will probably yet be made. Cultural relationships between the Antilles and the two adjacent continents constitute one of the primary historical problems of great importance. The affiliations of the Antillean cultures cannot be established until the archaeology of such points of possible contact as Venezuela, Yucatan, and Florida is more fully known.

Suggestions that archaeologists cease their dalliance with inconsequential minutiae and concern themselves to some extent with conceptualization and problem have appeared a number of times in recent anthropological literature. This injunction is probably justified, and if archaeology is to contribute to our knowledge of the processes of culture and the historical interrelations of peoples it must broaden its scope of understanding and sharpen its tools of analysis. This is not as simple as might be hoped.

Archaeology in the central and northern Great Plains stands today on the threshold of what may be its outstanding opportunity for sustained achievement. The intensive field investigations so auspiciously launched in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas in the decade before the war, have been at a virtual standstill since 1940; and with the rapid expansion of the nation's armed forces and defense industries, the number of students and laboratory workers available for study of the accumulated data and collections, dwindled nearly or quite to the vanishing point. Here and there, a few individuals found it possible, intermittently and subsidiary to war-connected activities, to carry on limited researches.

Within the town of Norton, Massachusetts, close by the boundary between it and the city of Taunton, lies the beautiful little body of water known to this day by its Indian name of Winneconnet. This lake, fed by a system of streams from the north and west and draining southward through a complicated network of ponds, swamps, and streams into the Taunton River, seems to have been the center of a large area of Indian population in ancient times. Cultivation and other disturbances of the earth surfaces have demonstrated the existence of many sites of former Indian habitation, while numerous items in local tradition point to the fact that many Indians lived and died within the township. Hardly a garden plot that has not yielded its quota of stone implements to the collections of local “relic hunters” exists in this vicinity.

When the Spaniards conquered the central portion of the Mexican state of Chiapas in 1524 they found it occupied by the so called Chiapanecs, a brave tribe which the Aztecs never permanently subdued, but who on the contrary, succeeded in seriously disturbing commerce between the Aztec metropolis and their most southern provinces.

Both the origin and the history of the Chiapanecs are still unknown. There is no codex of the time prior to Cortés, nor a history written by a Chiapanec after the conquest either in Chiapanec or in Spanish. We do not even know the name of a ruler prior to the coming of the Spaniards.

Ocmulgee National Monument lies on the left bank of the Ocmulgee River at the eastern edge of the city of Macon, Bibb County Georgia. A general description of the archaeological remains has appeared in a previous publication. The present report will describe the excavation of a ceremonial earth lodge uncovered on the Macon Plateau and will summarize traits found in earth lodges represented in the Macon Plateau focus. As this represents the earliest earth lodge so far reported in the southeast, the distribution and significance of the occurrence of this type of structure will be discussed briefly. No historical identification of the Macon Plateau focus can be made, but some parallels with southeastern ceremonial will be pointed out.

Dr. Max Uhle's excavations at Moche in 1899 for the University of California yielded a collection of pottery and associated non-ceramic objects that remains the touchstone for Early-period finds from the Northern Peruvian coast.

Moche pottery has been published by Kroeber.The Mochica were imaginative as well as skilled craftsmen, and their ceramics is proof of an ability to express ideas and to handle tools with precision.

In this paper we wish to point out (1) certain occurrences of cord-marked and stamped pottery in Mexico which possibly bear relationship to similar decorative techniques in the eastern United States, and (2) a few instances of trade pottery in central Mexico which point to an origin in more northerly cultures. Neither author pretends to be intimately acquainted with ceramic problems in Middle America, and this account is incompletely documented. We are, however, quite sure that the material to be presented will prove important in any consideration of pre-Columbian contacts between the eastern United States and Middle America.

In 1941–42 J. Frank Sterling, Paul Delgrego, and W. W. Yenney, amateurs who had become interested in collecting local Indian artifacts, excavated a rock .shelter on a stream flowing into Langford Run, near the town of Broomall in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Langford Run is a tributary of Darby Creek, which in turn flows into the Delaware River from the west at Eddystone, about ten miles southwest of Philadelphia. Further excavation, in a second shelter about 100 yards away from the first, on Langford Run proper, soon uncovered a burial, and contact was established with the University Museum in the fall of 1943 through the good offices of Dr. and Mrs. H. O. Albrecht, members of the Society for American Archaeology.

Early attempts at the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs by using the phonetic approach were ill-advised, and as a consequence the phonetic theory was generally discredited. However, in view of the fact that the nonmathematical glyphic texts are largely unread, the general reaction to the total ideographic point of view was unjustified. Because we cannot read these texts and know little of the origin of the various signs, any statement of the proportion of ideographs to the total number of signs would appear premature.

The aboriginal agriculturists discussed here lived in a somewhat secluded environment, the Connecticut River Valley from Bellows Falls to the Connecticut line. In this long-occupied territory, surrounded by high ridges of volcanic origin, heavily wooded, and watered by innumerable spring-fed streams, the cultural development of the inhabitants was apparently of a homogeneous nature. As late as 1636, when the English began to establish plantations throughout the valley, the natives were found united in a well-defined River Confederacy, with frequent intercourse maintained through river travel. While trade routes probably connected this section with many other parts of the country, cultural contacts had apparently persisted among the river tribes in spite of occasional raids of warlike groups from other regions.

Mainly through force of habit and lack of factual data, the general tendency has been to view Southwestern agriculture as arising from a Basketmaker-Puebloan center. Recently G. F. Carter has clearly demonstrated that, in addition to the above, there was a second center of equal importance and antiquity, mainly in the area occupied by the ancient Hohokam and their successors, the Pima-Papago. It is with the latter center that the present paper is concerned.

The Deep Creek region is a pleasant Great Basin valley bordering the southwest edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert—that is, it is pleasant in contrast to the 10,000 square miles of stark desert which bound it on three sides. The Deep Creek Mountains, which attain an elevation of 12,101 feet, separate the valley from the desert proper. Two small streams, Fifteen-Mile Creek and Spring Creek, have their sources in these mountains and join at Ibapah, Utah, to form Deep Creek itself.

Although graphical methods are in common use by engineers and astronomers, they are less familiar to archaeologists. To portray the rhythm of celestial motions, astronomers often use “elongation” diagrams to show angular distances of moon and planets from the sun on each day of the calendar year.

The Maya recognized a zone within which the planets could not be seen because of proximity to the brilliant disk of the sun. The moon cannot be seen on the day of conjunction with the sun, and is generally invisible on the day before and the day after this “new moon day.” The three consecutive days in the lunar table of the Dresden Codex may represent the 3-day phase of moon disappearance.

Ties between northeastern Asia and northwestern America are frequently postulated but have never been satisfactorily worked out in detail. Forms of subterranean or semi-subterranean houses and of large plank buildings were known in both regions and this fact has been used to suggest northern Asiatic-American relationships. It seems clear that some prehistoric ties did exist between the two regions but their exact nature remains unknown. Fuller data and more careful comparisons are needed and one segment of the American distribution is therefore given below.

The peninsula of Kamchatka in Siberia is situated between the Sea of Okhotsk on the west and Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean on on the east. This peninsula is about 750 miles long and 80 to 300 miles wide with a mountainous and volcanic interior and a somewhat severe climate. Forests cover all the land except where there are areas of tundra or alpine vegetation.