One of the eleven known colossal stone heads attributed to the Olmec culture of southeastern Mexico has not been previously published. It is now in the town of Santiago Tuxtla, Veracruz, and was brought there in 1951 from a locality about 2 mi. north of the village of Tres Zapotes. It is designated as Tres Zapotes Colossal Head No. 2, even though it is probably not associated directly with the Tres Zapotes site which produced Tres Zapotes Colossal Head No. 1. The sculpture weighs about 8.5 short tons and is made of a distinctive olivine-and augite-rich basalt from the Cerro el Vigia not more than 5 mi. away.

Like good wholesome gossip, one of the things that adds spice to the archaeologist's life is to find something that just isn't supposed to be. This is apparently what happened to me, although I did not realize the import of it until Joe Caldwell of the National Museum looked at the pottery excavated at the historic site of Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. In the preliminary exploratory trenches excavated there last spring, a considerable amount of Indian pottery was found. With the exception of a few plain sherds, all of it is simple-stamped decoration, and most of it is shell tempered (Fig. 52). The shell is largely leached out, but there is little doubt that this is the tempering medium. Sherds were found near the bottom of the ditch types is not apparent from the excavating thus far, although Caldwell is of the opinion that on the basis of the decorating they may very well be contemporaneous wares.

In recent years the Okhotsk Sea region has become of increasing interest to students of New World cultural origins and relationships, particularly with regard to the problem of the Aleutians as a diffusion channel. But any real attack on this problem has been hampered by the gross inadequacy of the data. The few available sources in western languages are far from satisfactory; and attempts to augment these by utilizing illustrations from Japanese publications, divorced from the explanatory text, are fraught with danger.

The writer has therefore undertaken a systematic survey of the rather considerable field work done in this region by Japanese archaeologists in prewar years. Reports on this have been published exclusively in the Japanese language, which has placed them effectively beyond the reach of American archaeologists, although certain ones have been cited in American works for their illustrations.

The criticisms raised by Donn T. Bayard against a proposed statistical law of culture are examined, and an attempt is made to refute them.

I have read Irving Rouse's recent article on the Southwestern co-tradition (“On the Use of the Concept of Area Co-Tradition,” American Antiquity, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 221-5, 1954) and I must say that it fills me with mild astonishment. I fear that Rouse's strictures may have generated confusion in the minds of some students and may have given rise to the suspicion that any general formulation of Southwestern culture history is invalid or at least premature. In order to dispel these doubts I wish to discuss our underlying philosophy in this matter.

My general reaction to Rouse's article is to ask whether Bennett really intended the co-tradition concept to apply only to Peru? Has Rouse correctly codified Bennett's idea of a co-tradition and is Rouse's strict interpretation a proper one? If an affirmative is the response to these queries, then I must admit that in the narrowest and most literal terms the area co-tradition cannot be applied to the Southwestern area of the United States. At best, it would apply only to a few spots in the world in which the highest cultures have developed.

An unusual Maya stela in the St. Louis Art Museum has a number of distinguishing characteristics: (1) The cylindrical shape is comparatively rare for a free-standing Maya monument. (2) Thegtyphic inscription contains four previously unnoted glyph groups. (3) The inscription includes a rare glyph group of which only a very few examples are known. (4) The shape of the glyphs and the placement of the numbers seem to be governed by aesthetic considerations, although the variations of the tun glyph may have semantic implications.

Although Braje and Erlandson express concern with my inclusion of Santa Cruz Island sites containing small quantities of red abalone shells with red abalone middens on the other Channel Islands, doing so is justified because of the discrete period of time during which they occur. They also feel that I should have expanded the scope of my paper to include consideration of relationship between sea otters and red abalone, but this was beyond the intent of my report. Nonetheless, I point out that more explication is needed of the nature of sea otter hunting if its effects on red abalone availability are to be understood.

There has not been an adequate development of systematic programs of salvage archaeology on privately financed construction work. As a consequence, the great majority of building projects are undertaken without any effort being made to save the historic and scientific resources that may be destroyed during the course of construction. Salvage archaeology on privately financed projects is largely restricted to public lands. Because of a favorable industrial and public attitude toward salvage archaeology, this would appear to be an appropriate time to initiate a major campaign to extend salvage programs to other construction operations, particularly those on nonpublic lands. Four specific steps are proposed to expand salvage archaeology into the major unprotected areas.

Many Mesoamericanists today accept the fact that much Mesoamerican art, in various media, depicts historical events and persons. Much of this evidence has come from hieroglyphic texts. This paper attempts to demonstrate the value of using non-glyphic attributes of depictions of personages and of interaction scenes to investigate the same problems. Non-glyphic attributes of scenes and individual dress and ornamentation are treated as coded cultural information that reflects patterned sociocultural phenomena. This approach is applied to Cotzumalhuapan sculpture from Coastal Guatemala. It is demonstrated that there are two distinctive facial types in interaction which seem to represent two different socio-political groups.

On November 2, 1929, a stone carved to represent a man's head was found in a gravel pit in the ancient valley of Trinity River in Henderson County, Texas. Subsequently two additional carved stones were found in the same deposits. The deposits were formed by Trinity River, but are about three miles from the present stream, near a small back valley tributary known as Cedar Creek, about five miles west of the town of Malakoff and three miles north of Trinidad. Cedar Creek unites with Trinity River six miles south of the place where the carvings were found. In preliminary notices the discovery has been referred to as the Malakoff locality.