The Chronological relationship of the Adena and Hopewell cultures and their placement within the temporal column of North American prehistory was considered of sufficient importance by the Committee on Radioactive Carbon 14 to warrant a special effort to obtain dates. Individuals and institutions in the Mississippi Valley were requested to provide samples, with the result that specimens were submitted from an Adena site in Kentucky (126) and one in Ohio (214). Two specimens from a Tchefuncte culture midden in Louisiana thought to be of comparable age and typology to Adena (150 and 151) were processed in order to provide information on a common cultural level over a considerable area. A total of six specimens from the Hopewellian level were dated. These comprise runs on three different kinds of organic material from mound 25 of the Hopewell group (137-139), Ross County, Ohio; a specimen from mound 9 of the Havana group in Mason County, Illinois (152); material from Bynum, a Hopewell period site in northeast Mississippi (154); and from the Crooks site, a Marksville mound in LaSalle Parish, Louisiana (143). It was believed, before the samples were dated, that this would afford satisfactory information not only on the time position of Adena and Hopewell but might also clear up the question as to the priority of appearance in the north or the south of those cultural influences which produced the general stages of early to middle Woodland and their local representations.

Investigations of the Birhor were confined to Hazaribagh District in the southern part of the state of Bihar, India. Hazaribagh District is on the northern edge of the Chota Nagpur plateau. The plateau is 540 to 600 meters in height with isolated rocky hills rising sharply from this surface as much as another 270 meters in altitude. At its northern edge, the plateau drops off sharply to the Gangetic Plain. When approached from this plain, the escarpment appears as a range of rugged, densely forested hills. This topography is the major reason for the continued existence of tribal people in the area despite the existence of a center of fairly advanced civilization in northern Bihar for over 2000 years.

To the west are the central mountain ranges of Madhya Pradesh. To the east, toward the coastal plain of Bengal and Orissa, the plateau is dissected by river drainages to give the configuration of successive ranges of low hills rather than a plateau. The study area is shown in Figs. 7 and 8.

Plant and animal populations on the plateau have been greatly changed in the past three centuries due to the agency of man. All areas of forest have been cut over in the past and most areas are recut often enough to give a dense scrub-forest cover.

This Brief Paper will serve as an introduction to an examination of the ceramic material excavated by Giddings at the site of Iyatayet on Cape Denbigh in Norton Sound in northwestern Alaska. Norton Sound is located in the northeastern Bering Sea. The site has become well known because of the Cape Denbigh flint complex which occurred in the lowest level of the site and which was separated from the pottery levels above by a sterile zone of varying thickness, from 2 to 18 inches, made up of laminated, sandy clay (Giddings, 1949, 1951). This sterile zone was contorted and has been tentatively interpreted as indicating a colder climate than the present.

The upper sections of the excavated area at Iyatayet give every indication of having been intermittently occupied from relatively recent times back through Eskimo history to approximately 2000 years ago. The top layers of the site contain the same artifacts and ceramic materials as those found on the neighboring Nukleet site which is thought to date roughly around 1500 to 1600 A.D. Other materials from the upper zone are suggestive of Early Punuk.

Hunting remains the major activity of the Birhor despite the rapid deforestation now going on in the district. The forests in which they hunt are of second-growth sal trees, quite bushy and dense.

Within these forests, the Birhor rely entirely on small game and do not attempt to take anything larger than wild pigs and smaller varieties of deer. The Birhor word for the small barking deer (Cervulus muntjac) is jflu which is the same as their word for meat. But today the jflu, apparently once quite important to the Birhor, is taken only rarely. Also formerly of importance to the Birhor were monkeys—both the langur and macaque. These animals have decreased in number to the point that they now occur as isolated populations in rugged ghat areas or on steep hillsides. Formerly, they were hunted for food, and the hide of the langur was traded to Ghasi drum-makers. Today, there exists a market for live macaques but most Birhor bands of Hazaribagh District, at the present, take no monkeys within the course of a year. Of primary importance today is the hare (kulhāi). It is this animal which the Birhor think of, talk of, and hunt daily.

Materials recovered in archaeological research expand in numbers, while increasingly refined analytical techniques make sorting more complicated than ever. Welldesigned data sheets, tailored to a specific job and carrying space for on-the-spot illustrations, expedite field reporting and report writing. For analysis and comparison of limited amounts of material, edge-punched cards provide accessible storage of information, as well as rapid means of comparing data. Cards are available in a number of types and sizes and may offer an excellent alternative step to rough sorting or computer programming. Examples are presented of three applications of edge-punched cards in analyzing various kinds of data in the hands of three persons who worked on the Wetherill Mesa Archeological Project. These individual approaches indicate the variety, flexibility, and sophistication of punch-card recording and analysis.

The Dorset culture was first recognized and described by Jenness (1925), on the basis of materials in the National Museum of Canada that had been excavated by Eskimos at Cape Dorset on Hudson Strait and on Coats Island in Hudson Bay. Since then Dorset material has been found at many sites in the eastern Arctic from Newfoundland in the south, along the coasts of Labrador and the northern Canadian islands to Inglefield Land in Northwest Greenland. Though some of the Dorset sites have been excavated carefully and systematically, there are many points about the culture that remain obscure. It is somewhat exasperating to realize that we actually know little more about the Dorset culture than we did when Jenness first described it 26 years ago.

While recent excavations in Canada or Greenland have not added significantly to our knowledge of the origin of the Dorset culture or the role it played in the eastern Arctic, some of the earlier evidence, if reexamined and reappraised, is seen to have important implications in connection with recent discoveries in Alaska.

The data for this paper are taken from a larger manuscript study (Dyson, ms.) aimed at the collation of the specific evidence available at the present time on the first occurrences of the major traits of material culture in each sub-area of the Near East for the period from 5000 to 2500 B.C. Such a survey has not previously existed and it provides a solid reference work for checking on the exact locations of key items in the fields of agriculture, husbandry, textiles, metallurgy, transportation, and so on.

In making a survey of this nature the problem of chronology is paramount, for it is upon this basis that priority in discovery must be accredited to any one area, and that directions of diffusion must be determined. In this region, as in other parts of the world, the correlation of cultural events with Christian chronology has yet to be satisfactorily completed. We cannot, therefore, deal with any degree of accuracy in terms of particular years. The presence of stratigraphic deposits, however, does allow us to deal with periods of relative cultural time.

There can be little doubt that the majority of the area through which the Arctic Small Tool horizon spread was unoccupied by human populations. This is particularly true of the Eastern Arctic, with the exception of the southern fringes where they may have come into contact with Archaic peoples near the ecotone between the tundra and the taiga.

In the Western Arctic, it is apparent that there had been earlier human populations in many areas, but these later migrants appear to have occupied a previously unoccupied ecological niche. Geographically, they spread along the Arctic coasts until they had reached the maximum extent of seasonally frozen coasts, usually with adjacent tundra. While it may be that the rising sea level had flooded earlier evidence of such a coastal occupation arid that this habitat had not been unoccupied as it now appears, the present data support the inference that Arctic Small Tool populations were the first to accomplish a successful adaptation to these particular conditions in the American Arctic. For the present, I wish to focus on this coastal aspect of Arctic Small Tool peoples, ignoring (or not modeling) the expanded distribution of sites in interior Alaska which also occurred at this time.

In Order to understand the problems presented by the archaeological material from the middle and lower Yukon Valley, we will need to see this region in a cultural perspective. The area is inhabited today by Athabaskanspeaking Indians whom I call the Tena, following Jetté. These correspond to Osgood's Tanana, Koyukon and Ingalik. Practically all the specimens we shall have to discuss come from the territory of Osgood's last two tribes.

These Tena had, at the time of white contact, a culture which was much like that of all the interior Alaskan Athabaskans, whom we can take as typical exponents of the Snowshoe hunting stage, discussed in Chapter X. The Tena differ from their relatives in two respects: first, they had a richer source of food in the salmon which come up the Yukon every summer to spawn, and second, they had borrowed much from the Eskimo. On the north, west, and southwest, Tena territory abutted on that of the Eskimo, and their strongest contacts were with the Eskimo of Kotzebue Sound, Norton Sound, the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim, and Bristol Bay.

In this section of the report we have described the artifacts representative of the Tchefuncte culture as a whole. These artifacts were made of pottery, stone, bone, and shell—pottery vessels, however, are described in the next chapter.

Clay Tubular Pipes.—Tubular pipes made of fired clay are a diagnostic trait of the Tchefuncte period (Fig. 7). Complete specimens averaged about 15 cm. in length and the stem diameter increases gradually from about 1.5 cm. to 2 cm. which is the average diameter of the tobacco chamber. Frequently these pipes have flattened mouth pieces (Fig. 7 a, d, f, p, q, s, t). A few specimens exhibit slight shoulders between the stem and the tobacco chamber (Fig. 7 l, m) and a few others have slightly flaring rims (Fig. 7 c, k).

In most of the specimens there is a slight interior constriction between the tobacco chamber and the stem. The bore tapers gradually from the chamber to the mouthpiece where it has an average diameter of 6 mm. The tobacco chambers have an average interior diameter of 16 mm. About one-half of any pipe is tobacco chamber and the other half is stem.

The following account of ancient remains in northern Peru is the result of a reconnaissance during May, 1941 from Cabo Blanco southward to Piura. The surface collections from various archaeological sites, now in the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, have not yet been repaired and will be published subsequently. The present report, however, includes material from local collections, which tells the basic story.

The region of which we write embraces two river valleys: Parinas and Chira (Fig. 44). The Parinas, according to a classification published by Kroeber, is a third-class river which reaches the sea a few miles north of the oil port of Talara. When I saw it, there was considerable flow of water, but automobiles could cross in places.

One of the seminar topics scheduled for the summer of 1955 by the Society for American Archaeology was “The American Southwest: A Problem in Cultural Isolation.” The assignment was to “… examine the assumption that these Southwestern cultures resulted from local acceptance and development of generalized and/or specific traits which can be isolated in distant cultural contexts at earlier times than their climactic developments can be observed in the Southwest.”

In the 31 dates of specific interest to palynology contained in Table I there are some surprises for the student of pollen chronology, although there are only three (349, 433, and 450) that must be regarded as unacceptable. For two of these, the list itself contains evidence that the stratigraphic position of the samples was incorrectly determined; we are left with only one sample (433) suggesting that the radiocarbon assay is subject to errors of an unknown nature. It follows that the new method of dating has been placed on a firm footing, and that it will amply justify the high hopes originally held for it.

To say this, however, is not to say that the entire list of dates will or should meet with unqualified acceptance. All degrees of palatability are represented, some apparent contradictions are evident, and in nearly every case a certain amount of special pleading is required to harmonize the results with what was previously known or believed. While the difficulties are not considered at present to be serious, it would be most unwise to minimize them, and the fact is that confirmation is required at every point if the newly acquired dates are not to make postglacial stratigraphy more controversial than it was before.

The magnetic results obtained in teste at two sites did not indicate the location of buried archaeological features and suggest that magnetometry is not suited to sites of the type found on Wetherill Mesa.