The acceptance of pre-Columbian art as true and great art did not come speedily. In fact, it has not yet been as generally accepted as has the art of the great civilizations of the Near East and the Far East. An attempt is made here to trace the slow progress toward its general acknowledgment and to examine some of the problems now confronting those concerned with the subject.

When, in the second half of the eighteenth century, humanistic studies gained a wider interest, there already existed a predilection for the art of Greece and Rome and what was built, developed, and permuted on these styles. Neither the Near East nor the Far East was then sufficiently known to be given serious esthetic consideration, and their artistic products were appreciated mainly as rarities and curios; the arts that throve or lay in ruins elsewhere over the globe were glimpsed only occasionally in the travel descriptions of intrepid voyagers.

The Sidey-Mackay village site, excavated by the author in 1926, is located on the farms of Messrs. William F. Sidey and John A. Mackay, on Lot 8, Concession V, Nottawasaga Township, Simcoe County, Ontario, about one mile west of the village of Creemore, in territory known to have been inhabited by the Tionontati Indians, or Tobacco Nation, a tribe of the Iroquoian stock. This site, unlike many in the same area, had suffered little from the depredations of collectors; an instructive representative collection was secured. Additional material was collected by the writer from the surface of the Mackay farm in 1923.

This is a brief, preliminary account of some of the discoveries made during the summer of 1944 when the author, in collaboration with botanists and a geologist conducted an archaeological survey of the region traversed by the Alaska Highway. The investigations were carried on in but a small section of an area, many thousands of square miles in extent, about which practically nothing was known. A similar survey had been made, in 1942, by Froelich Rainey, but unfortunately this was unsuccessful. However his previous excavations in the Yukon and Tanana River valleys in Alaska did give some indication of what might be discovered. Oscar Lewis had had better luck for he had found a few very interesting artifacts at a site on the Highway near Trutch.

To the archaeologist whose primary field of endeavor is California, the grooved stone ax is a relatively unfamiliar object, since it occurs but rarely either in the course of excavation or in the perusal of the literature. That the grooved ax occurs at all in this region is significant, chiefly for the reason that in western North America it is a form highly characteristic of, and, with few exceptions, restricted to the Southwestern culture province proper. Since southern California is generally considered a western peripheral extension of the Southwestern culture area, it is not surprising occasionally to encounter the grooved ax here. It is interesting to note that this implement also occurs far to the northward in central and northeastern California, a region commonly thought to be beyond the zone of direct influence by or immediate contact with the Southwest proper. Presumably the grooved ax in central and northern California represents an extreme northwesterly extension from its native locale, which we assume to be the Southwest.

In the chapter on the Mazatec language of his “Zentral-Amerika” Dr. Walther Lehmann mentions the fact that Dr. Wilhelm Baur had found the tonalamatl among the Mazatec Indians, but he did not give the names of the twenty days.

During the months of January and February, 1936, while in Usila, a western Chinantec town, the junior author obtained information regarding a Mazatec calendar from Adalberto Gonzalez, a native ( Mazatec from Huautla Jimenez. This informant remembered names of twelve months, and meanings of some.

Several exceptions have been taken recently to the use of “guess dates,“ assumptions, hypothetical sequences, the theory of cultural continuity, and other concepts in eastern and middlewestern archaeology.1 These criticisms lay bare a division of opinion on several fundamental issues of method and theory, and it is the purpose of this communication to shed some light on the conflicting views. We may at the outset indulge in some labelling, not for purposes of name-calling, but to provide handles for verbal manipulation. It is the opinion of the writer that two trends in method and theory can be distinguished: one we may call “empiricist,” the other, “experimental.” Reasons for the choice of these rather mouth-filling terms will subsequently become clearer. Also note we do not use the word “school” this term implies a company of individuals, all subscribing to a special dogma, whereas the contemporary trends actually crosscut several “schools” in archaeological thought. In many cases, individual archaeologists exemplify both of these trends in their own work.

In 1940, at Great Neck, Long Island, Mr. Calmer Forsander found a waterworn glacial cobble with a crudely executed face on one side in an old stone wall bordering his property. Mr. Forsander knew that I had excavated the Baker Hill site, located about three hundred yards west of his house, and brought the find to my attention. The specimen is roughly egg-shaped and is composed of a crystalline material which appears to be indurated sandstone (Fig. 24). It measures approximately IS inches in length, 11 inches in width, and 10 inches in thickness. On one of the broader sides is a face, pecked and ground into the surface. The workmanship is crude and resembles that found on the pitted hammer stones common in the region.

Archaeological material obtained from Eskimos on the east side of Hudson Bay has been described by Mathiassen, Quimby, and Jenness, but no systematic excavations have been made in the area. Mathiassen was told by Mr. S. Berthfi of Reveillon Frdres that there were house ruins of turf and stone on the east coast of Hudson Bay at Kovik Bay, Mosquito Bay, and Cape Dufferin, and also on the Ottawa Islands; and by Mr. Perdy of the Hudson's Bay Company that there were house ruins at Cape Wolstenholme and many around Port Harrison. Obviously, Mathiassen concluded that these were regular houses of the Thule type. Quimby6 found only oval and rectangular tent rings on the Belcher Islands, and assumed that the semisubterranean houses characteristic of the Thule culture were lacking.

Recent studies of trait distributions by Collins, de Laguna, and Heizer, have, in my opinion, demonstrated a cultural connection between southern Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, Kamchatka, and Kurile Islands. These circum- North Pacific cultural connections seem to have been established after settlement of all the areas mentioned and therefore are not properly a part of the problem of man's first entry into America.

Southern Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, Kamchatka, and the Kurile Islands form a zone or rim around the North Pacific shores of Asia and America. Along this rim of the North Pacific there seems to have been a drifting of traits and trait complexes, both from America to Asia and from Asia to America. And for the most part, the cultural connections of the circum-North Pacific zone seem to have been rather independent of the diffusions and cultural development of the Bering Strait region.