The twelve specimens here analysed were obtained from the island of Kagamil in the Four Mountain Group and from the island of Shiprock in Umnak Pass. No date other than merely "pre-Russian" has been assigned either burial cave from whence the specimens were obtained, although it is likely that Dr. Aleš Hrdlička will formulate a satisfactory chronology for the known sites of the Aleutian Islands. The specimens consist of the fragments of five baskets or mats, five cords, and two bird skins, the latter presumably from parkas. While these specimens are few in number and in no wise unique, the paucity of published material on the prehistoric textiles of the Aleutian Islands justifies this paper.

Contra Costa County lies east of San Francisco Bay, between the southern shores of San Pablo Bay, Carquinez Straits, Suisun Bay and the San Joaquin River, on the north, and Mount Diablo on the south. This peak, the highest of the many ranges of hills, reaches an altitude of 3800 feet. The terrain is very diversified. As to prehistoric inhabitants, Kroeber places the entire area in Costanoan territory, while Schenck mentions the Yachicomnes, etc., names, perhaps of Spanish invention, which mean nothing.

A promising field for sites of ancient man lies in the region of the Estancia Valley, central New Mexico. This area was covered by the vast, extinct Pleistocene Lake Estancia, estimated by Antevs to have been at its height 15,000 years ago. The lake covered approximately 450 square miles and had a maximum depth of about 150 feet. Today, evidence of the lake remains in the form of beach terraces and gravels. Some 160 miles to the east are the Clovis sites excavated by Howard, while about thirty miles to the west is Sandia Cave, a site of ancient man excavated by the University of New Mexico.

Rock paintings in red pigment were discovered in June, 1940, on a bluff where Moose Creek flows into a slough of the Tanana River, eighteen miles above Fairbanks, Alaska. The find was made by engineers of the Army Flood Control Project after trees and brush had been cleared from the face of the bluff in process of obtaining dam material from the hillside. The paintings, some of them destroyed by weathering, others obscured by lichens, represented human figures in various attitudes, and covered most of a comparatively smooth, slightly underhung rock face approximately twenty feet high and fifty feet long. A smaller group of paintings occurred on a vertical rock face higher on the slope.

The article, “An Interpretation of the Prehistory of the Eastern United States,” by J. A. Ford and G. R. Willey in the 1941 American Anthropologist inauguratesan epoch. At last we have an interpretation of the archaeology of most of our East which is definite, evidential, and sequential.

Eastern archaeology has developed its generalized findings very slowly. It is almost a century since Squier and Davis published. The cultures are undoubtedly hard to interpret. Their remains are such as to call both for quantities of finds and for fine discriminations in relatively low-quality material. Nevertheless, venture at broader but substantiated understanding has been less than the difficulties warranted. The systematic or McKern classification has been extremely valuable; but at its rate of progress, a quarter century or more might have elapsed before classification was converted into chronology.

In 1937, while exploring a series of rock shelters in the southern extremity of Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, a copper ornament was found in association with shell tempered potsherds and flint artifacts. Due to the composition of the article, its construction and embellishments, a careful check was made as to its possible origin. Data and conclusions are given in the following.

This brief description of the site and evidence of occupation is written for the purpose of preserving the data. Considering the rare reference to cave habitations in reports of Eastern activities, this bit of evidence seems worth recording.

Approximately one mile below Carvers Falls, in the valley of the Poultney River, and nine miles from Lake Champlain, the cave entrance is seen as a crevice, open overhead, in an outjutting part of the southern face of a limestone cliff. The opening is near the top of the cliff and at the summit of a talus incline extending into a land-locked pool where once the river was navigable by large boats before historical freshets changed the scene.

A new and interesting archaeological site was discovered in the Wyoming Basin, just west of the Continental Divide, by Mr. O. M. Finley of Eden, Wyoming, in 1940. It represents a Yuma camp site associated with bison bones.

In the spring of 1940, Mr. Finley discovered seven stone points or fragments on the surface among sand dunes, ahout four miles southeast of Eden. They were concentrated in an area about five by twenty meters at the base of a dune, and the presence of decalcified bone led Mr. Finley to the conclusion that they had weathered out of a Yuma site nearby. A slight amount of excavation produced additional points, in place, along with decalcified bison bone fragments. A Folsom point with the tip gone had been picked up by Mr. Finley in a blow-out about six hundred and fifty meters to the north, which added interest to the site.

In Etnologiska Studier 8, 1939, Helen Palmatary analyzes former Tapajó pottery from Santarem, Brazil. On pages 122–123, she gives a tabulated list of thirty-five structural and stylistic pottery traits from eleven South and North American areas. These areas, she says, are “generalized somewhat,” and they are not defined. Her symbols in the table are 3, 2, 1 for frequent, less frequent, rare; p for probably present; a for probably absent; n for no data.

In recent reports on work done in the area in southern Arizona occupied by the Salado people during the Classic period, a term new to the literature has been introduced, and a feature described which has hitherto not been mentioned by workers in the field. The term “plaster mixing bowls” or “caliche mixing bowls” is self-explanatory, but a description of the feature may be of interest to other workers in archaeology.

The Salado people, successors to the Hohokam in the Salt and Gila River Valleys, introduced the use of caliche, a limy material native to the region, in building, and erected many great structures of it, quarrying the caliche, pulverizing, mixing and puddling it in courses to form massive walls. Basins lined with caliche are very plentiful about these sites, in all levels, and associated with all wall construction.

With the publication, in this issue of American Antiquity, of a review of the Hibben-Bryan report on evidence of early occupation in Sandia cave and its correlation with the glacial chronology, there will doubtless come to the minds of many readers the interchanges which have occurred in these pages from time to time since the publication of “A Chronological Problem Presented by Sandia Cave” by Wesley L. Bliss, V. 5, p. 200, this series. The reviewer is not acquainted with the facts and circumstances that gave rise to this controversy, and he and the Editor have deemed it wise that he judge only the published report without knowledge of events which might lead to a biased review. Accordingly, these paragraphs will attempt to explain occurrences that might lead some persons to consider the site as so tainted that its evidence must be taken with a grain of salt.