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.

Between 1956 and 1960, 20 ceramic figurines were discovered in Mound 42Ut111 at the Hinckley site west of Utah Lake in northern Utah. Circumstances of the discovery are discussed, as well as two other finds previously made in Utah Valley. Comparisons are made with figurines from the Fremont and Sevier areas, particularly from sites just north and south of Utah Valley. On the basis of these comparisons and a consideration of other items, such as ceramics, house type, and ecological setting, it is hypothecated that Utah Valley was a cultural center for northwestern Utah. It is proposed that this area be called the Provo culture area.

Site acquisition or placing of preservation easements on archaeological sites are the best means currently available for insuring site preservation for future research. The examples presented are intended to inform the archaeological community about agencies involved in the acquisition of archaeological sites.

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.

Davis has theorized that Paiute raids on the western peripheries of the Pueblo region caused withdrawals toward the central Anasazi areas, which in turn forced the Anasazi, who were also troubled by drought, to retreat eastward. Paiutes could have contributed to Puebloan migrations, but the evidence for movements toward the east is inconclusive. Contrary evidence, such as late Mesa Verde migrations to the south and west, the sequence of abandonments of Anasazi centers from east to west, and the probability that the Anasazi area was never populated to capacity argues against this theory.

The largest sculptured monument in Mexico is the unfinished Idolo de Coatlichán, which weighs 197 metric tons and lies in the bottom of a barranco near Texcoco, where it was abandoned by its makers. The Idolo is made of a huge boulder of andesite, which is the same material from which the Diosa de Agua (also stylistically related), found at Teotihuacán, was carved. A tentative attempt is made to compute the number of workers required to transport the finished monument.

One day, in the spring of 1937, while looking at some Indian artifacts in Peabody Museum at Harvard University, I saw a card of flaked stone objects that had been made by Mr. F. R. Whitney of Tacoma, Washington. The card stated that more information concerning these pieces might be obtained in the Museum Library. I promptly went to the Librarian and asked about them. She told me that if I were interested in the manufacture of stone arrow points I should get in touch with Mr. Charles E. Snow, who was then a student of anthropology at the University.

Recent reports on Alaska by Solecki and by Giddings. have mentioned the presence there of Mongolian-type lames and cores already noted some twelve years earlier by Nelson and by Rainey. In this connection, it may not be out of place to summarize the findings of Hitoshi Watanabe, a Japanese archaeologist, on the characteristics that distinguish a lame from an ordinary flake. Although the primary purpose of his research was to clarify some misconceptions created in Japanese archaeology by somewhat indiscriminate application of the term lames to relatively long and narrow flakes, found in both the main island of Honshu and the northernmost island of Hokkaido, much of the data is relevant to Alaskan archaeology.

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.

Within the town of Norton, Massachusetts, close by the boundary between it and the city of Taunton, lies the beautiful little body of water known to this day by its Indian name of Winneconnet. This lake, fed by a system of streams from the north and west and draining southward through a complicated network of ponds, swamps, and streams into the Taunton River, seems to have been the center of a large area of Indian population in ancient times. Cultivation and other disturbances of the earth surfaces have demonstrated the existence of many sites of former Indian habitation, while numerous items in local tradition point to the fact that many Indians lived and died within the township. Hardly a garden plot that has not yielded its quota of stone implements to the collections of local “relic hunters” exists in this vicinity.