The Tepalcatepec Basin lies in west central Michoacán, about 250 miles west and south of Mexico City. It can be reached in the dry season by a road that leads south from Uruapan. The area covered is in a large valley (50 by 35 miles) limited on the south and west by the Rio Grande de Tepalcatepec and on the east by the Rio Marqués (Rio Cupatitzio). The northern limit is approximately the 700-meter contour where the foothills rise abruptly to the Sierras surrounding Mt. Tancítaro. This valley extends northwest some distance up the east side of the Rio Tepalcatepec.

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.

A new and significant element was added to the archaeological inventory of California by the discovery, in 1940, of two unique objects of baked clay. These seemed to be fragmentary female figurines but several considerations at the time of discovery called for reserve in this interpretation. Although a well developed baked clay complex is known archaeologically in the Central Valley of California, it had not been evidenced before this time to the west of this stoneless region. Moreover, none of the figurines occurring in this Valley complex represents any part of the human figure; it has been noted, in fact, that aboriginal California in general lacked a tradition of human representation. In addition, these two pieces were fragmentary.

Utah is nearly bisected north-south by the Wasatch Mountains. Between Ogden and Nephi, Utah, these mountains have undergone extensive folding and faulting and reach a maximum height of 12,000 feet at Mt. Timpanogas. South of Nephi this range branches into three great fingers with narrow valleys between. Flanking the Wasatch, east of Salt Lake City, are the lofty Uintah Mountains. These, unlike other ranges in North America, have an east-west axis forming a barrier between Pueblo-dominated lands to the south and the territory of nomads living in the Wyoming Basin to the north. Little evidence of Pueblo occupation has been observed in southeast Wyoming, though there are a number of passes through which occasional hunting parties from the plateaus to the south may have ventured north into the plains of southern Wyoming. This, of course, could only have occurred in the summer, as the area is free from snow for only three or four months of the year.

While in the field, running a stabilization survey at Wupatki National Monument, the writer and Phillip Van Cleave, an assistant, encountered a site which illustrates another method utilized by the prehistoric Indians in dealing with the problem of water supply in this arid region.

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.

During the summer of 1939, Dr. D. D. Brand led a party of graduate students in anthropology into Mexico with the purpose of studying the archaeology of the state of Michoacán and adjacent areas. After preliminary examination of the better known ruins in the northern part of this state, the party broke up and each individual went into a previously determined area in southern Michoacán or neighboring Guerrero or Mexico. The several resulting manuscripts are available in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.

In 1938 Steward and Setzler published a brief plea for a more enlightened interpretation of archaeological materials, calling attention to the necessity for ecological and configurational considerations of material culture complexes. Since that time a number of studies touching upon these features have appeared–enough to constitute a trend. It is the purpose of this paper to analyze these contributions and suggest further possibilities along functional lines.

A number of mescal knives have been found throughout the southwestern United States, but very few of these have been adequately described in print. As the use or non use of this distinctive type of implement may in the future be of aid in establishing cultural affiliations and migrations of peoples, a brief description of two of these unusual pieces is presented below.

The first of these mescal knives came from a small cave, or rock shelter, located about three and one-half miles southeast of the former town of St. Thomas, Nevada, at the foot of Bitter Spring Wash, where the latter enters the Virgin River. This site is now forever covered beneath the waters of Lake Mead, backed up behind Boulder Dam. The cave was excavated in 1936 by Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees under the direction of Junior Foreman Fay Perkins and under the supervision of the National Park Service.

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.

The Cordillera de Talamanca, the principal mountain range in southeastern Costa Rica, is a rugged chain which overlies, in part at least, an earlier volcanic mass, and is directly connected with the Chiriqui range of western Panama. The Pacific Ocean is, as the crow flies, a comparatively short distance from the Talamancan peaks. From the Rio Savegre in the southwest to the Rio Chiriqui Viejo in Panama runs a smaller parallel chain, known as the Pacific coastal range.

In the spring of 1941, Dr. W. T. Edmundson, a medical doctor of Newberg, investigating sites along the Yamhill River, located mounds of the same type as those of the Calapuya. With some assistance from Mr. Mark Wald, of Portland, myself, and others, he has now excavated two of these “mound” sites. The objects recovered from the Yamhill River sites exhibit many differences from those of the Calapuya River Mounds. At the period of Caucasian entry the Yamhill Indians spoke a Calapuyan dialect that was different from that of the Indians in the area of the Calapuya River to the south, and were reputed to depend more upon hunting and fishing than the Calapuya proper. The relatively large number of bone and antler objects, the relative absence of large stone work, mortars and pestles in the local collections from the Yamhill area, and numerous fish vertebrae (not found in the Calapuya sites) all indicate the possibility of an archaeological perspective for early historic cultural differences between the Calapuya and Yamhill bands.

This paper concerns an excavation carried out by the author at a newly reported prehistoric site at Seba in British Guiana. The work done was very limited, being intended originally to be only exploratory, but by a fortunate chance an unusual and substantial cache of stone and pottery artifacts was found in one of the trial pits. This yielded a considerable amount of information about both the material and non-material culture of the site, thus lending more interest and value to the work than normally expected from excavations of such small extent.

In Dr. Philip Phillips' recent paper, “Middle American Influences on the Archaeology of the Southeastern United States,” there appears the following statement concerning the architecture of late cultures associated with the Mississippi pattern:

Three peculiar carved stone objects from eastern Montana merit mention, because carved biomorphic forms are otherwise almost entirely absent from this area (Fig. 27).

One was found on the surface about twenty miles south of Glendive, Montana. It is a vaguely trapezoidal piece of rather hard pumice 4.7 inches high, 5.1 inches wide, and 3.5 inches thick, which had been smoothed throughout, apparently with a rubbing stone, though on the back and sides many irregularities remain. A large, flat area has been smoothed on the bottom, apparently to provide a base. On one side an excellent representation of a bison head has been carved in bas-relief. The background has been so reduced that the head is elevated .3 inch above it. The whole has been well smoothed and rounded and only a few striations remain which suggest that the work was probably done with a stone chip or similar tool. Each eye has been accentuated with a daub of what appears to be pitch.

Durante la Misión arqueológica que en 1936 me fué confiada por el Ministerio d: Educación Nacional, para hacer investigaciones sobre los recientes hallazgos de Tierradentro, hube de recoger en el Municipio de Inzá, Departamento del Cauca, trece cuentas de collar procedentes de una sepultura precolombina (PI. IX, a). Desde la primera observatión llamóme positivamente la atención el material de las cuentas que lo forman, una roca semi-transparente, de tonalidades violáceas y azulosas, poco consistente, de quebradura cristalina irregular y presentando filamentos alargados.