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.

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.

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.

Among the shells sent us for examination by Mr. Emil W. Haury, which were found in a Snaketown ruin of Hohokam culture (Gila River, Arizona), there is a partly-broken specimen of a west coast conch (Strombus galeatus Wood), No. 46,652. The only workmanship shown is the grinding down of the tip of the apex or spire of the shell, the hole thus formed permitting the blowing of the unbroken specimen (Figure 2). A slight sound still can be obtained upon blowing into the shell. The cracked condition of the porcelaneous texture of the shell with traces of blackened surface in places indicates its having passed through a conflagration. The pitted condition, due to sea-worm borings, clearly gives evidence that the shell was originally a “dead” or beach-worn specimen.

Most students of pottery types have met with difficulties in selecting descriptive terms which would convey the intended idea. Particularly is this true where varying degrees of differences or similarities were being discussed. Since description embraces all characters of pottery, relative terms are unavoidable. One important character of pottery, namely texture, even when description thereof has been attempted, has been inadequately described, the terms used being wholly meaningless to persons unfamiliar with the character in question, and having little value even to those more familiar with the pottery. This is because relative comparative terms have been used. A method is here submitted for standardizing the descriptive terms of texture so as to leave no doubt regarding the exact meaning of the term employed.