The Peruvian records indicate that the guano islands (Fig. 14) yielded, between 1826 and 1875, several thousand artifacts of pre-Conquest origin. These are probably only a fraction of the archaeological material actually discovered during the commercial destruction of guano caps. Most of it has been lost; several hundred specimens in the museums of Europe and America still retain some record of their origin; and a small group of pieces, with which this paper is principally concerned, are known to have been discovered under stratified and depth-recorded conditions.

To understand better the nature of the American Indian civilizations they must be viewed as a whole. To do this it is necessary, as Dr. Steward indicated in his paper, to establish adequate bases for the comparison of general trends in cultural development, leaving out for the time being the frequently confusing individual traits and peculiarities of style.

Such a point of departure requires a re-evaluation of our knowledge of the Meso-American cultural sequence, but to do this there is the obvious difficulty that the available information is as yet quite inadequate. From the beginning of the modern period of research in this area the efforts of most investigators were attracted almost exclusively to the ceremonial aspects of Meso-American civilization and their artistic expressions. Perhaps inevitable because of the dazzling splendor of the ruined buildings and ritualistic art, this resulted, nevertheless, in an overbalance of our knowledge in that direction.

Many studies have recently appeared in which an attempt was made to derive age-specific birth and death rates from anthropological populations. The display of age-specific death rates usually takes the form of an abridged life table; fertility rates are rarer in the literature. One recent compendium has discussed the construction of life tables for skeletal populations (Acsádi and Nemeskéri 1970). In another work, I have argued that the fragmentary nature of anthropological data and the problems of sampling from small populations required the use of various smoothing techniques in order to make the construction of life tables and vital rates meaningful (Weiss 1973); in that work, I suggested the use of stable population theory as a means of data smoothing, and a set of model life tables based on that theory were determined for use with fragmentary demographic data.

Both direct and indirect means of constructing life tables and vital rates from anthropological data involve inference from a census and very little additional data, since that is usually all that is available to us.

The models discussed so far have been, effectively, asexual.We have considered fertility in terms of females and their daughters, but we have used pooled survivorship data to derive model mortalities. In so doing, we have assumed an equal sex ratio at birth and equal sex-specific mortality rates. This introduces some error, and the direction is probably known: pre-industrial males have generally a higher adult survivorship than females, although the sex ratio may vary from age to age and from group to group (Weiss 1972b). Given our purpose and the quality of data available to anthropologists it is doubtful that the error introduced in this way is significant. A fieldworker who insists on constructing 2-sex models must have a larger data sample, so that the stochastic variations in age-class representation are minimized. But if the data seem sufficient and a 2-sex demographic model is desired, this chapter will present the methods by which such a model can be constructed.

The classification of cultures into a workable number of types for descriptive or interpretative ends has occupied anthropologists since the science was born. Many kinds of data have been selected. Within the last decade Coon's (1948) subdivision of human societies into six levels on the basis of complexity of institutions, and the attempts by Strong (1948), Armillas (1948), Steward (1949), Willey and Phillips (1955) to distinguish developmental periods in the Mesoamerican and Andean archaeological sequences may be cited. Our excuse for attempting yet another formulation is that the current schemes emphasize either ethnographic criteria that are difficult or impossible to detect archaeologically, or unique features of particular cultural configurations rather than general criteria defining more universal patterns. Starting from a point of view different from those heretofore employed, we have tried to develop a classification of cultures that is usable with both ethnographical and archaeological data and that has functional and evolutionary as well as historical and descriptive significance.

The study of cultural stability requires a knowledge of cultural development over a reasonably long span of time. The definition of this time perspective is one of the major contributions of archaeology to the study of culture. The archaeologist therefore should be in a position to make a significant contribution to the appraisal of the stability problem itself. However, the lack of a commonly accepted anthropological definition of the concept of cultural stability imposes semantic difficulties which hinder the determination of practical limits for the stability- instability problem area. Moreover, the nature of the data available to the archaeologist conditions the kind of contribution he can make.

The authors of this paper met at Harvard University in July, 1955, to discuss the theoretical problems which arise in the study of culture contact situations in archaeology. The subject of contacts between cultures is one in which ethnologists have long been interested, and there is a substantial body of literature, both descriptive and theoretical, on contemporary and recent historic situations of this kind. Archaeological interest in the subject is somewhat more recent, but a few excellent reports on specific examples have appeared which we could use as a basis for our discussions. We believe that this paper is only the second attempt to contribute something to this field by generalization from archaeological data (Willeyl953).

Since the beginnings of scientific archaeology in Peru investigators have employed the concept of the “horizon” or “horizon style” in attempting to reconstruct the major outlines of Central Andean prehistory. This formulation of the horizon is an abstraction based upon the recurrence of specific features of style or manufacture in prehistoric artifacts, ‘mainly pottery, from one region to another so that the phenomena become pan-Peruvian in scope and coordinate our knowledge of the past in a broad temporal and spatial scheme. This integration is made possible when the same stylistic or technical complex of traits is found in the respective culture sequences of geographically widely separated regions, and by this means the two or more sequences are brought together and equated in time. The constructs of horizons have been useful synthesizing elements in the understanding of Peruvian archaeology on the level of time-space systematics. As yet, however, there has been little consideration of their functional significance in the prehistoric native societies of which they were a part. This present exploratory analysis ventures to define and characterize as cultural forces on the level of social interaction what heretofore have been viewed chiefly as historical phenomena.

Most of our knowledge regarding the Paleoeskimos of Arctic Canada is derived from the “core area” of Paleoeskimo occupation, a rough circle of some 1,000 km diameter including the coasts of Fury and Hecla Strait, Hudson Bay, and Hudson Strait. This is the area in which Dorset culture was first recognized, the source of most of our larger collections, and the area where continuity of development throughout the Paleoeskimo sequence has been demonstrated (Meldgaard 1962; Taylor 1968a; Maxwell 1973). The number and size of archaeological collections from this area suggest that it supported a larger Paleoeskimo population than did other regions of Arctic Canada, while the temporal distribution of components and continuities of style suggests that the region was occupied continuously throughout the Paleoeskimo period.

In the fringe areas surrounding this central core, continuous occupation has not yet been demonstrated through any major segment of the Paleoeskimo sequence. Work in these fringe areas has rapidly progressed during the past decade, and it now seems certain that most of the temporal gaps and cultural discontinuities are not the result of poor archaeological sampling but reflect a situation of sporadic occupation occurring at different times in different regions. One of the striking features of the Paleoeskimo population was its propensity for expanding and retracting its geographical range, and this is the phenomenon which this paper will attempt to document. The primary aim of the paper is to sort out who lived where and when; a secondary aim is to suggest how they may have got there and what happened to them.

My aim here is to summarize briefly some serious difficulties with assumptions that have frequently been made in considerations of prehistoric population and culture changes, and to suggest better alternatives. I have discussed these matters more fully, with many more references, elsewhere (Cowgill in press).

One problematic assumption is the notion that a fairly strong tendency toward increase is a natural characteristic of human populations, or at least of sedentary food-producing populations. It is taken for granted that as a rule population growth will continue in a region until a point is reached at which further growth would create (or at least pose serious threat of) major shortages of important resources. A second fallacy is the assumption that stresses resulting from resource shortages will naturally tend to evoke developmental responses. Cultural development or evolution is frequently explained as a response to such stresses.

The spatial, temporal, and formal controls available in Colonial gravestones permit the investigation of the various social dimensions of their occurrences. Those aspects which can be studied include status, community intermarriage, the social implications of stylistic evolution, and, in the case of the cemeteries, relative importance of community as opposed to familial control of interment practices. Such studies provide an understanding of some of the social factors reflected by measurable data of the type encountered in archaeological research. This paper documents specific responses in the evolution of marker styles to the Great Awakening's effect at Boston.

Several distinct structural fibers, all yucca, were observed in the twines taken from the Wetherill Mesa sites. Attempts were made to duplicate these fibers, using leaves from Yucca baccata and Yucca harrimaniae. Although our methods did not produce all fibers with the exact coloration of the prehistoric fibers, it is probable that our procedures approximated those of the ancient Indians.

The practical problems involved in measuring and using “carrying capacity” have proven the concept to be deficient in theory, unrealistic in implementation, and impossible to measure. The concept should be abandoned or modified. It is suggested that the actual rates of morbidity and mortality due to resource deficiency and starvation are easier to measure and more accurately reflect the types of information which “carrying capacity” was meant to encompass. These measures can also accommodate the cyclical nature of resource availability which has rendered carrying capacity useless as a working concept. Emphasis is placed on “efficiency” of population maintenance at given levels.

Feathers provided by the Wetherill Mesa Archeological Project archaeologists were cleaned, placed on glass mounts, and examined under a microscope. Some initial comparisons were made from macrocharacters. Structures differ from species to species, and trial-and-error comparisons were made until the characteristics of the unknown species matched those of a known species. A file of photographs with characters of known species was kept and was useful for preliminary matching. Most of the material was identified as coming from Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), with Mourning Dove (Zenaidura macroura) also being identified.

The excavation of Mound C, at the Etowah site, near Cartersville, Georgia, revealed a series of burials which suggests social stratification within the resident population. The differences between burials in the mound and those within the village cemeteries is to be seen not only in the more elaborate goods which accompany the mound burials, but also in the fact that the mound burials are accompanied by goods made of exotic and rare materials. The duplication of certain kinds of materials with individuals who represent different age groups suggests that the costume and paraphernalia is symbolic of an office and does not reflect individual taste in ornamentation.

Having surveyed the cultural content of the sites called Mogollon by their excavators, and those obviously belonging to the same cultural expression, we may now ask whether there is, or was at any period, a pattern which may be recognized as a functioning cultural entity. This, of course, leaves aside the question of relationships with other cultural patterns, which does not affect the problem at hand. Table 16 brings together the culture elements which characterize the Mogollon Culture Pattern.

The farm remains which will be described in the next chapter can be classified rather easily into three main types, (1) short walls or lines of stones across stream channels, forming terraces, (2) linear borders, made of long lines of stones arranged in more or less parallel or concentric lines, and (3) grid borders, a term we have chosen for lines of stones arranged as in the linear borders, but with added transverse rows of stones. The characteristics of these types will be described in this chapter, together with two other important types of remains occurring in association with some of the farms — field houses and boundary markers. It should be realized that most sites show a combination of two or more kinds of field systems, as will be pointed out in describing the sites, although it is convenient to first define each type separately.