Prehistorians frequently must depend on archaeological evidence alone in forming judgments. It is evident from prehistoric studies, however, that difficulties are likely to arise when archaeological evidence is credited as being, of itself, a completely adequate basis for reconstructing every aspect of prehistory. This paper outlines the challenge that historical and linguistic evidence have posed to one explanation based solely on archaeological data. The problem concerns the ethnic identity of the so-called Laurentian Iroquois, who inhabited the St. Lawrence Valley in the 16th century. The archaeological material from this period has been identified as “Onondaga” or “Onondaga-Oneida,” but the vocabularies that were collected by early explorers in this area do not appear to be those of any of the languages of the Five Nations Iroquois. This particular confrontation of archaeological and linguistic evidence has resulted, not in the confirmation of current archaeological theories, but in the awareness of a broader range of alternative hypotheses than has been entertained hitherto.

Solid core drilling was used to provide guidelines for future excavation of Monks Mound at the Cahokia site. The objective was to study, within reasonable limits of time and finances, the internal structure of the largest earthen mound in North America. The process is described along with a discussion of its problems and limitations as applied to similar archaeological situations. Radiocarbon dates indicate construction over approximately 250 years, from A.D. 900 to 1150. Evidence of construction stages is described and used to arrive at an estimate of labor figures and the necessary sustaining population of the Cahokia settlement. It is suggested that most of the mounds at the site were built after the completion of Monks Mound.

In 1963, the Glenbow Foundation excavated a bison bone bed exposed at a water hole in southern Alberta near the Montana border. Age estimates grounded in geology place the bone bed between 7,000 and 11,000 years ago. Projectile points at the Fletcher site include the Alberta and Scottsbluff types. Other artifacts suggest that the site was not only a kill but also a butchering station. The heavy emphasis on bison here, as well as at nearly all related sites in the northern Great Plains, makes it clear that Fletcher properly belongs to the Paleo-Indian big-game hunting continuum rather than to the Archaic stage.

Late Archaic developments along the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi Valley, after 2000 B.C., contributed a substantial base for the Poverty Point culture. New coastal and inland discoveries bring the total number of Poverty Point sites to 34, with many additional possibilities.

A study of 70,000 artifacts from the type-site is reported; the known cultural content is increased by numerous new traits. The thesis is advanced that Formative elements of Mesoamerican origin, including ceremonial organization, massive mound construction, village planning, ceramics, figurines, advanced lapidary industry, and probable agriculture, enriched the basic Archaic culture and contributed to subsequent cultural developments in the valley.

In definitions of the postglacial readaptation in eastern North America, attempts have been made to apply a single standard to the entire area. Such definitions are inadequate since a number of environmental zones existed in the region during late glacial and early postglacial times. These consisted of a periglacial zone with a fairly high carrying capacity supporting a cold-climate hunting adaptation; a zone of closed boreal forest with a relatively low carrying capacity; and a region of broadleaf and southern forests with a relatively high carrying capacity for a mixed gathering-and-hunting base. In the southeast there is a gradual transition from formally defined Paleo-Indian to Archaic culture, although both groups, if separation is possible, had potentially the same subsistence base. In the northeast there is a low population density hiatus between two periods of higher population density.

Recent excavations in the Gulf of Georgia region have added microblades and microcores to assemblages of the Locarno Beach and Marpole culture types. The production of microblades is now seen as a regional tradition lasting from at least 1200 B.C. until around A.D. 400. Persistence of this technology may indicate more continuity of culture growth than has until now been ascribed to the Gulf of Georgia sequence.

A Late Prehistoric period buffalo kill and butchering site in northern Wyoming (Site 48 JO 312) produced a large number of stone tools. Flakes removed in sharpening stone tools provided much of the interpretation of the activity that occurred at the site and in addition gave a number of ideas concerning tool use and sharpening.

Muskeeta Cove 2 is a stratified, two-component Woodland site on the north shore of Long Island in Glen Cove, Nassau County, New York. The earlier occupation, in the upper 6 in. of a glacial sand zone, is attributed, on the evidence of its ceramic content, to the earlier segment of the Windsor tradition, most probably its North Beach focus. The second occupation, in a thin layer of black midden earth and shell overlying the sand, is more difficult to identify culturally. By many criteria, most of its pottery can be assigned to the Bowmans Brook focus of the East River tradition, but this assemblage is most distinctive for the disconcerting way in which it blends Bowmans Brook ceramic traits with those of the contemporary Sebonac (Windsor) and Canandaigua (Owasco) foci—often on the same sherds. This mixture of traits has prompted the suggestion that, in this boundary region at least, the generally accepted invasion-replacement relationship between East River and Windsor must be reexamined. After analysis of the pottery from this site, in which the distributions of individual modes as well as their combinations into whole types are considered, a new hypothesis is tentatively advanced: Early East River pottery is seen as the result of the blending of Sebonac, Canandaigua, and central New Jersey decorative modes on vessels with the constricted necks and elongateglobular bodies that were the dominant formal horizon markers throughout the entire region at this time level. Diffusion, rather than invasion, would appear to be the central process here.

In the summer of 1953 the Texas Memorial Museum of Austin, Texas, conducted scientific excavations of a Paleo-Indian bison kill near Milnesand, New Mexico. After the departure of this group from the site, a large number of artifacts were collected from the bison bone bed by Ted Williamson of Milnesand, New Mexico. Because of the site's importance and the paucity of culturally related sites, a detailed description of the artifacts collected by Williamson is considered to be of immense value to specialists in the Paleo-Indian field.

Edge-angle measurements from 1,448 Paleo-Indian stone artifacts are presented. The relationships between edge-angle size and differential functional applications are explored. Differences in angle size distributions are found to characterize distal and lateral edges. General categories of functional effectiveness are suggested for different angle size ranges. The utilized edges of tools with different angle sizes are found to exhibit different types of wear, and these differences are considered to be indicative of different functional operations.

In 1966 and 1967, amateurs unearthed a number of split-twig figurines in Stanton Cave in the Grand Canyon’s Marble Gorge. A number of these figurines are described, including one which is perhaps the finest ever discovered. It is documented that these finds by amateurs were stimulated by publication about this site in popular periodicals. It is also argued, using the Grand Canyon as an example, that survey and salvage in connection with large dam construction is never a substitute for long-range study of the archaeology and its environmental context, and that salvage cannot be considered as a benefit justifying dam construction but only as an alleviation of some of the dam damage.

This paper deals with the results of the author"s attempts to replicate the obsidian polyhedral cores and prismatic blades of Mesoamerica. Blades have been produced by the direct percussion, indirect percussion, and pressure methods. The pressure method using a chest crutch and a clamp produces cores and blades which are true replicas of aboriginal specimens. The importance of preforming the core and of platform preparation is stressed, and it is pointed out that, usually, actual removal of the blade offers few problems. However, to produce exhausted cores which show the perfection of aboriginal specimens and a large series of nearly identical blades requires good muscular coordination, high quality material, the establishment of patterns or rhythms of motor habits, and the absence of distractions. The author also discusses the difficulties of recovering from mistakes in manufacture.

High-speed photography of prismatic blade removal, at 5,000 frames per second, has helped illustrate the behavior of the material and of the stoneworker. These photographs also indicate that under the present experimental and photographic conditions the author (Crabtree) is able to remove a prismatic blade from a core in about 1,250th of a second.

The use of native copper in some prehistoric cultures of North America was both extensive and technically skillful. The remains of pits sunk into every major native copper lode in the Lake Superior region (Griffin 1961; Drier and DuTemple 1961: 16; Quimby 1960: 52-63; West 1929) show that the material was mined in quantity. Float copper, found on the surface, was also used. The Indians appreciated some of the properties of copper and made use of these in shaping tools, weapons, and ornaments of high-quality workmanship. Figure 1 shows typical examples of the thousands of beautifully shaped native copper artifacts which have been found in mid-North America. The development of metallurgical techniques is usually supposed to follow a progression of hammering, annealing, melting the native metal, smelting ores, casting, and alloying. Curiously enough, the techniques of copper working in North America evolve only through the hammering and annealing stages, and apparently they remained at this level for centuries. In this paper the authors examine some of the metallurgical properties of the artifacts and the native copper from which they were made.

Arrow Grotto, an inner sanctum deep within a mountain of south-central New Mexico and reached only by a crawlway from Feather Cave, was found to contain masses of offerings untouched for six centuries or more. Examination of material and of accompanying pictographs by men from several living pueblos led to identification of the grotto as a shrine for Earth Mother and Sun Father, visited at the period of biannual solar ceremonies. Parallels between Arrow Grotto, other prehistoric ceremonial caves, and even the Anasazi sipapu, show a pattern surprisingly similar to that of a number of Pueblo ceremonial caves in use today or in the recent past. Parallels to concepts regarding caves and supernaturals in Mexican cultures indicate a series of rapid northward diffusions of religious ideas, the first, at least, from eastern Mesoamerica, through Preclassic to Postclassic periods, one of our most specific evidences of influential contacts.

Original owners of Feather Cave and Arrow Grotto probably were Piros who left the Rio Bonito Valley to become mingled, eventually, with southern Tiwa relatives, whose descendants still inhabit pueblos near Albuquerque.

Vista Shelter, on the northwestern margin of the Ozark Highlands in southwestern Missouri, is identified as a hunting station of the prehistoric Mississippian Steed-Kisker focus. This shelter, suitably located for the exploitation of water-dwelling, forest, and prairie-dwelling species, was used by small groups engaged in deer and bison hunts in prairie areas far removed from their riverine settlements near present-day Kansas City. The bone frequencies at the site suggest that animals were killed nearby, cuts of meat were taken to the shelter and processed, and dried meat was returned home. This hunting station helps explain the rarity of refuse bone in the permanent villages, since many animals were butchered and processed far from the home villages. These conclusions are related to prairie and plains hunting and butchering patterns, and the significance of food bone in archaeological sites is thereby emphasized.

A review of previous systems for describing the disposal of the dead reveals basic inconsistencies in terminology and logic. A new classification is proposed that not only utilizes concepts and terminology wherever possible but also attempts to eliminate non-mutually exclusive categories and ambiguous terminology. The system is summarized in outline form to facilitate the use of the scheme as a field checklist during the excavation of burials.

This paper outlines the procedures and equipment necessary for applying a simple flotation technique to recover animal bone, seeds, and other small cultural remains lost in the normal screening of soils from archaeological sites. Soil is initially processed in the field by a water-separation technique. The resulting concentrate is later treated, in the laboratory, by chemical flotation, to separate faunal from plant remains.

This simple, inexpensive technique enables processing of soil in quantity, thereby allowing recovery of small plant and animal remains from midden or feature fills where they occur in very low densities.

It is argued that, without use of such a flotation procedure, inferences about prehistoric subsistence patterns from faunal and floral remains are sharply biased in favor of larger animals and in favor of hunting, over natural plant food collecting, since conventional screens are not adequate for recovery of most plant remains or small animal bones.

The Chalchihuites culture of the Colorado-Suchil river drainage of western Zacatecas began about A.D. 100 as a somewhat evolved and belated Early Preclassic colonization of simple agriculturalists. By the Alta Vista phase (ca. A.D. 350-550) it had assumed the role of a much more complex society. A great expansion of population occurred. This transition was very rapid and present evidence supports the hypothesis that highly organized social groups colonized the area in order to exploit the mineral resources located there. Extensive mining operations, coupled with self-supporting agricultural patterns, characterize the zenith of the period. The extent of mining was much more than local consumption could possibly require and therefore points to the economic dependence of the exploitative organization upon the high cultures farther south and southeast. This paper reviews the 1963 and 1965 surveys of the Alta Vista mining operations and draws some conclusions about the character of the society which sponsored them.