It seems to be a general rule that sciences begin their development with the study of the unusual. They have to develop considerable sophistication before they interest themselves in the commonplace. American archaeology has been no exception. It began with digging in mounds and the collecting of choice objects and has now progressed to the excavation of camp sites and the delimitation of culture complexes as wholes. Nevertheless, there is still a tendency to underrate the importance of simple utilitarian artifacts of types which are widely distributed in space and time. This may be justifiable as long as the archaeologist's interest is centered on foci and aspects, but such types become of extreme importance as soon as one attempts to broaden the frame of reference. Thus the fact that certain stone artifact types seem to be present throughout most of the area east of the Rockies, from Folsom on, becomes highly significant when we contrast this area with others in the New and Old Worlds.

One of the activities of the University of New Mexico's 1939 field school at Chaco Canyon was a reconnaissance excavation in the vicinity of Largo Canyon, to the northeast of the Chaco, proper. This was a continuation of the survey and excavations of the past four seasons, as a part of the project for outlining chronologically and geographically the culture known as Gallina. The extent of the Gallina manifestation to the east and south has already been fairly accurately delineated, but its western and northwestern boundaries are unknown. Since the San Juan and Mesa Verde centers lie to the northwest, it was deemed imperative that the cultural connections in that direction be determined. Typical Gallina unit houses are common on the headwaters of the Largo and in the Llegua Canyon area which heads in the same region. The extremely rugged area lying between this district and the San Juan and Mesa Verde region, however, is not only difficult of access, but is practically unknown archaeologically.

Holmes states that steatite was widely used by the Indian tribes north of Mexico for the manufacture of implements, ornaments and utensils. The manufacture of stone vessels predominated on the Pacific coast, especially in the Santa Barbara region where sites have stone vessel fragments in all strata, and along the Atlantic coast, where this trait was especially associated with the Old Algonkian culture of the North Atlantic. The use of stone vessels in the areas in which pottery was used, both in the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast, although much less common, is indicated by occasional references to vessels or fragments on various sites and by the presence of quarries such as those described by Jones3 in the Tallapoosa River region of Alabama. The comparative infrequency of these artifacts on sites in the lower Mississippi Valley inspired the preparation of this report of a large cache of fragments of stone vessels found on a site in West Carroll Parish in northeastern Louisiana.

Two recent papers, one by Arthur Woodward, the other by J. Alden Mason, have called attention to the transportation of artifacts by the process of animal migrations. The impulse for both of these works derived from the finding of an Eskimo arrowhead imbedded in the breast of a duck shot at Bakersfield, California. Similar cases from the states of Indiana, North Carolina, and Nebraska are on record in these reports. Undoubtedly there are other known instances, but these four should serve to illustrate the fact that sizeable migrating birds may import projectiles of outland origin from tremendous distances.

I should like to present some additional instances which have come to my attention. These deal chiefly with transport of artifacts by migrating sea mammals and fish. The larger sea mammals are peculiarly suited,to carrying weapon points, since they have a thick protective fat covering in which a projectile could remain imbedded without having a harmful or hindering effect on the animal's health or movement.

The geology of the Clovis site cannot be fully understood from examination of the immediate surroundings. While the studies published by the investigators who have been excavating the vertebrate fossils and human artifacts have contributed much to an understanding of the locality, there are important items in the regional physiography and geology which have not heretofore been described in print. The writer has for several years been attempting to complete a manuscript on the Llano Estacado, its cap rock, and similar cap rocks of the world. This study is now essentially completed and the manuscript will, it is hoped, be submitted to a geological periodical in the near future. For the guidance of archaeologists, this short outline of salient features bearing on the Clovis locale is offered in advance of fuller demonstration.

The Natchez Trace Parkway is an area, still in a construction stage, controlled by the National Park Service. The Park Service's three general policies of presentation, protection, and interpretation are familiar to most Americans through either reading or travel, or both. Recently an innovation in Park Service areas—on a grand scale—has been introduced by congressional action, so that the Service has begun the development of a series of parkways. These parkways—sired by the East's super-highways with restricted traffic—are in effect elongated parks consisting of a high-standard roadway insulated from unsightly commercial encroachment and despoliation by the usual Park Service regulations regarding protection of natural beauty. Of the three parkways, the George Washington in Virginia is both scenic and utilitarian, the Blue Ridge is essentially a scenic recreational effort, while the Natchez Trace Parkway is commemorative of an ancient road of considerable importance in the early history of the nation.

The diversity of types of stone tools, as of any other class of artifacts, may be regarded as due to differences in the nature and functional relations of the relevant variables existing in the given situations in which these artifacts were produced. These relevant variables may be conceived as of three major kinds: those associated primarily with the individuality of the given artisan, those arising primarily from the cultural matrix in which the artisan lived and worked, and those directly or indirectly due to the resources and nature of the physical environment in which the artisan and his culture existed. In setting up such categories, a corresponding functional dissociation must not be assumed. Each recognizable element in each category is of course functionally related to every other. But the archae6logist must, in attempting to evaluate his material, schematize in some such fashion. He must evaluate, as well as he can, each of the variables involved.

For a full thousand years before the conquest, peoples of the Pueblo area of the American Southwest manipulated adobe clay to meet their architectural needs with marked cleverness and skill. In the dim beginning, they used it to stop the cracks of their slab-lined storage cists against rodents and trickling sand. Later, they applied stout crusts of it over the thatch that covered the pole walls and roofs of their singleroomed dwellings. Later still, they learned to make independent walls of it. Usually these were built up layer by layer much as were pottery vessels of the day. But occasionally they were made of “turtlebacks,” which, though of pure clay in rare instances, customarily'consisted of a core of twigs or other vegetation encased in mud. At their architectural zenith, the Pueblo raised massive adobe structures of pise-like appearance in localities where good stone was absent or hard to obtain and used it universally for mortar in stone construction, as well as for floors, plaster and roof covering.

For reasons best known to him, McGregor has included in his recent book on Southwestern archaeology a brief statement regarding the midwestern taxonomic method, although this method is not used in the Southwest. The statement is in error on several fundamental points, and it seems important to publish a correction just to keep the record straight.

First: the interpretation of “diagnostic culture traits” as traits which are standard for a culture complex in all cultural comparisons (p. 61) is not in accord with the usual concept as employed in midwestern terminology. As originally proposed by Ritchie, and as previously pointed out in my review of Cole's and Deuel's Rediscovering Illinois, the diagnostic trait is determined by a specific comparison of two culture complexes, and applies only to a culture in that comparison. A trait which is diagnostic in one comparison may appear as a link trait in another, and so can not be generally diagnostic for a given culture complex in all comparisons.

Among the less frequently encountered, yet widely distributed, items of material culture recovered in the Anasazi Province are tiponi, or Corn Goddess symbols.

In the excavation of the Evans Site in the Gallina region of northern New Mexico three tiponi were found. Two, the largest and the smallest, were in the North House; the third was in the South House. All were of sandstone and were simply-fashioned cones, flat on one end and bluntly pointed on the other. Aside from their shape, no distinguishing features were discernible. The largest was 48 cm. in height and 20 cm. in basal diameter; the smallest was 18.4 cm. in height and 15.2 cm. in basal diameter.

The tiponi found in the South House was one of a number of miscellaneous stones which had been used as fill in the bottom of the fireplace or had fallen into the pit.

While attending the 1941 summer field session of the University of New Mexico at Chaco Canyon, the author hired four Navahos and partially excavated a small pueblo site on the talus about one-third of a mile up the valley from Chetro Ketl and on the same side of the wash. A small unit of at least four rooms and two kivas of middle Pueblo III time was indicated.

Standing upright on the bottom of the ventilator opening in one of the kivas was found a sandstone phallus measuring 9J inches in height. It was oval in cross-section and measured 8X7 inches at the base. The bottom was irregular, but the rest had been carefully carved and smoothed to represent most realistically the end of a phallus when erect. The specimen is now at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

During the course of field-work in the summer of 1942 two specimens unusual enough to warrant special notice have been located in private collections.

About 1900 a small mound was opened on the Marion West farm near Saxon, Meigs County, Ohio, along the Ohio River. Mr. West found the inscribed tablet (PI. XXXIX, lower) in this mound. The specimen was obtained shortly afterward by Mr. Richard Allen of Columbus, Ohio, in whose collection it is now preserved. This Adena tablet depicts the conventionalized bird design found on several other specimens of this type. It is particularly reminiscent of the Cincinnati and Richardson tablets. The Allen tablet is 8.9 cm. long, 1.9 cm. thick, and 5.1 cm. wide. It is slightly concavo-convex in cross section.

During the cataloging of a collection of some 650 tiny projectile points from the banks of the Columbia River in Columbia County, Oregon, an unusual specimen was brought to light. All but five of the points in the collection are under 3/4 inch in length and are proportionately narrow and thin. The five larger specimens were, then, immediately outstanding. Of these, one is of the corner-tang variety. It is 2.13 inches long, 1 inch wide, and 0.36 inch thick. It is made from a tan, slightly opalitic chalcedony,8 a material which is quite common in the collections of chipped stone artifacts from the lower Columbia River area.

The specimen is of the type that Patterson has called “diagonal corner-tang” and possesses a small crescent notch on the side opposite the tang. The tang is quite narrow and pointed. The chipping is somewhat rough and uneven, and on one side there appears to be something of a channel groove running approximately two-thirds the length of the specimen. This is, in all probability, quite accidental.

In American Antiquity for July, 1940, there appears a short article by Robin Drews, of the University of Oregon, entitled “Peculiar Wooden Tubes from Southeastern Oregon,” in which the author asks if these tubes may be “beads, gambling pieces, pipe stems, or what?” Recently I noted a scrap of ethnobotanical information which reminded me of this query and which, I feel, may throw some light on the subject.

Frederick V. Coville, in his “Notes on Plants Used by the Klamath Indians of Oregon,”1 has the following to say of. the Blueberry Elder (Sambucus caerulea): “ One curious use of the plant, now rarely resorted to, but formerly common among the Snake Indians, consists in punching out the pith from sections of the stem, ramming them full of large crickets, Anabrus simplex Hald., and plugging the ends. The contents of the stems were used for food in the winter” (p. 104).

In discussing recently the modern cultivation of tobacco among the Pueblo Indians, Leslie A. White remarked that “archaeologists have no evidence of the use of tobacco among the Pueblos in prehistoric times.” He further added that it seems that “tobacco was not used among the Pueblos prior to the advent of the white man.” These statements are counter to the rather firmly established opinion that tobacco must have been smoked in the pipes which are found in archaeological sites in the Southwest. As rumblings of consternation and dissent have been provoked by White's remarks, it seems in order to review briefly some of the data relative to this question.

Less surprise might have been occasioned had White worded his remark to read that no direct or tangible evidence of tobacco has come from archaeological sites in the area.

In the July, 1936 and January, 1937 numbers of American Antiquity, under the head of “Correspondence,” there were published certain data, bearing mostly on the subject of the burial customs of the Indians of eastern Maryland, which I had gathered together from several contemporary sources. In this connection I called attention to the occurrence in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina of place-names of more or less ancient date which embody the word “quiackeson,” or another of its various forms, giving this as evidence of the former existence of the mortuary temples called “quiackeson houses” in those places.