Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), the “Father of American Anthropology,” was one of the most distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century. After graduating from Union College in 1840 he studied law, practising this profession in Rochester until 1862 when he gave it up to devote himself to scientific labors. His first work in anthropology was with the Iroquois. His The League of the Iroquois,” the first scientific account of an Indian tribe ever given to the world,” appeared in 1851. This was followed by years of exhaustive research in the field of kinship and social organization, culminating in his monumental Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). His greatest work, Ancient Society, appeared in 1877. Translated into virtually all the languages of Europe and into Chinese and Japanese, this work has exerted a profound and enduring influence upon social science throughout the world. Morgan's last work, Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines, was published in 1881, shortly before his death.

In a recent paper notable for its lucid presentation of certain of the wider problems confronting the American anthropologist in his attempt to unravel New World prehistory, Dr. A. L. Kroeber has touched, doubtless with justified trepidation, upon the problem of Folsom man in America. That subject has indeed suffered but little illumination in so far as its relation to the rest of the American archaeological record is concerned, and Dr. Kroeber, with sturdy honesty, minces no words in pointing out the hiatus which intervenes between this early horizon and later cultures. It is, he warns, dangerous to produce “speculative bridges that quickly tend to run into fantasy.” He notes that “the earlier date, the longer time span, have an inherent attractiveness to most human minds.” “So long,” he says, “as there is a real possibility that some of the associations of human artifacts with extinct animals may be no more than three thousand years old, it is certainly not wise to build interpretations on the contrary possibility that some of them may be twenty-five thousand years old.”

Practically all of the aboriginal inhabitants of Canada, including the Eskimo, made and used pottery. The only people who do not seem to have used it are the Indians of the coast and interior of British Columbia; in fact, according to Wissler, “practically the whole Pacific belt … is without pottery.“

As can be seen from the map (Fig. 7), pottery is fairly well distributed over the southern part of Canada, but even here our knowledge of its occurrence is far from complete, owing to the lack of archaeological exploration. There are vast areas elsewhere in Canada from which no pottery has been reported, including southern Ungava, northern Ontario, northern Manitoba, northern and western Alberta, and the Northwest Territories.

In 1915, while making ethnological investigation? among survivors of the Tadoussac band of the Montagnais Indians at Tadoussac, Quebec, Dr. Frank G. Speck, of the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, learned from the Indians that stone implements had been found on a sandy hill north of the village. From the surface of the site he collected about three hundred chips and stone artifacts which are now in the National Museum of Canada. Another lot of about two hundred and fifty specimens collected by him are in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. In 1927, this and other sites were investigated by the author, who made a careful search of the exposed surface of the area between Tadoussac and Moulin Baude River, about three miles to the east and gathered about one thousand instructive specimens besides several hundred chippings.

The Papago Indian Reservation, touching the Mexican border in south-central Arizona, has been the scene of anthropological work by the Department of Anthropology of the University of Arizona and the Arizona State Museum during the past four years. One branch of this general study has been archaeological, consisting of reconnaissance and of excavation in what were considered to be key sites. Beyond Gila Pueblo's limited survey in Papagueria, next to nothing was known about it. The environment is harsh and arid, and scanty surface water limits agricultural possibilities. Yet more than 5000 Papago Indians somehow manage, as they have for centuries, to make a comfortable if simple living in the area. Certainly the life there today is nothing new and it is a fair conclusion that, although inhospitable, the area should furnish a fairly rich archaeological picture. As our work proceeded it became evident that there were ruins in abundance. With few exceptions, these were small and the occupation thinly spread. Occasionally, a large site with sizable trash mounds gave promise of stratigraphy.

There are several hundred known shell heaps, along the coast of Maine, some of which have been hardly dug into while others have been completely excavated. Except for their size, they appear much alike both on the surface and in their internal structure.

It is not possible to say with certainty that one tribe or group of Indians inhabited each shell heap from the time of its beginning until the heap reached its present size. It is probable that many of the shell heaps were not, in many instances, occupied year after year, while others show a continual growth without any marked indication of periods when the areas were not in use.

Nearly sixty years ago, the wife of a territorial governor of New Mexico was among the first to recognize that ruins of the Southwest represented, not a vanished and mysterious race, but the ancestors of the living Pueblo Indians, and added: .“from the sameness of the remains I infer that no important facts are to reward the search of dreaming pilgrim or patient student.”

In the half-century since, patient students have ferreted out many facts of interest and possibly of importance, and have found that the sameness of the remains is not complete. The gradual recognition of successive periods of sequential development, their confirmation through stratigraphic studies, and the working out of temporal classification or horizontal segmentation, culminating in the Pecos-Roberts classification, is a familiar story.

Additional details of a unique burial custom, practiced on the Delmarva Peninsula, have recently come to light. This practice involved preliminary treatment of the remains by bone-scraping and mummification and temporary incarceration in a temple or bone house and, secondarily, the use of an ossuary dug in the earth for the final and permanent disposal of the skeletons. The practice is reported on the Virginia and Maryland mainland and in the Carolinas by early writers. MacLeod has written a comprehensive account of the complex, and Willoughby discusses it in a paper on the Virginia Indians. From the viewpoint of archaeology, Bushnell and Stewart5 have made leading contributions in recording locations and excavations of ossuaries.

A preliminary report has already been made on the Finley site,2 located in Sweetwater County, southwestern Wyoming, in the southeast corner of the N.E. ¼ of Section 25, Township 24 N., Range 106 W., about four and a half miles east and a little south of the town of Eden, which itself is approximately thirty-seven miles northwest of Rock Springs. The altitude of the site is approximately 6750 feet.

The wide utilization by primitive peoples of animal teeth for implements as well as for ornamental purposes is too well known to archaeologists and ethnologists to require further comment. The object of the present paper is to describe and classify those types of rodenttooth implements found locally, to discuss the method of manufacture and to present evidence as to the grinding of the canine teeth of various carnivores in all probability for utilitarian purposes. The material upon which this study is based has been collected by the author from several sites on or near Naskeag Point, Brooklin, Maine, chiefly from a single shell heap on Harbor Island.

The principal aim of archaeology is the reconstruction of history. How archaeology plays this part is usually not very clearly thought out, although Rouse has made a good attempt. In the reconstruction of history, we deal with human social units. These social units are composed of animals which reproduce their kind, inherit biological traits, mutate, evolve, take in food, give off waste products, react to their environment, die, and, in so doing, behave fundamentally like other animals. Moreover, the animals have a language, form part of a social pattern, have ideas of the supernatural and what we can call religion, and can manufacture certain objects in a certain way. These animals are grouped into families composed of mother, father, and children. They are further grouped into extended families, sibs, or clans made up of real or fancied relatives. A number of extended families under the leadership of one man or a group of men forms a political group.

This paper deals with the. archaeology of the northeastern region of Lower California and the southeastern portion of California. Evidence derived from these aboriginal remains indicates two possible cultural horizons, late prehistoric Yuman pottery making groups and an earlier non-ceramic group.

Most of the data have been derived from Baja California, because the area north of the International Boundary line has been so severely pot-hunted that sites fail to yield data in sufficient quantities for analysis. The area covered in this report comprises some nine hundred square miles, bounded by the Coast or Peninsular Ranges, the Superstition Mountains, and the Sierra de los Cocopas, and including the southwestern part of Imperial Valley and the northern half of Laguna Salada in Baja California.

Two new sites of the Cape Dorset Eskimo culture were discovered, and partially excavated, by the author in 1935 and 1936. Both of them lie on the south side of Hudson Strait: one, examined in 1935, is on the south side of McLelan Strait, a narrow channel which divides Killinek Island from the northern tip of the Labrador, and contained both modern and Cape Dorset material; the other, which was examined in 1936, is on Nuvuk, an island or a group of islands, lying about thirty miles south-west of Cape Wolstenholme, at the west end of Hudson Strait, and contained only Cape Dorset material, with the exception of some quite obviously modern objects lying on the surface.

Although the conventional design appearing on aboriginal American ceramics has been used successfully as a diagnostic feature in archaeological pottery classification, there has been little analytical and comparative work done on this mass of material. Much of the design, despite the simplicity and wide distribution of its elements, is complicated and richly variable. This apparent complexity has been a stumbling clock in the way of its study.

The purpose of this paper is to present a generally applicable, objective terminology for a classification of conventional design. The terminology is based on symmetry of arrangement, which we have found more useful than any other scheme in elucidating complex designs.

This report is based on two months reconnaissance in the summer of 1941 in the Eden Valley, Wyoming. The work is as yet far from complete and the conclusions presented here must be regarded as tentative. It is hoped that in the future more extensive geological work may be undertaken.

The Finley site provides a promising opportunity for a determination of the age of the Yuma culture. The points and bones described by Dr. Howard occur in a culture layer which has been found in a large dune area, here called the Killpecker dunes. The deposition of the culture layer is one of a series of events in the dune area which can be correlated with the cutting and filling of gravel terraces in the Eden Valley to the west, and these in turn may be related to the glacial chronology in the Wind River Mountains which lie to the north.

The problem of the functional identification of the distinctive grooved wooden clubs from the early archaeological horizons of the Southwest, and of their possible connection with the modern rabbitsticks of certain Southwestern and southern Californian tribes has never been set forth in proper form. Similarity in form does not necessarily signify identity in function. Nowhere should this caution be followed more closely than in the allocation of use by the archaeologist to archaeological specimens. Thus, a disagreement on the identification of a highly specialized form of implement suggests that we may perhaps profitably inquire into the problems presented by the difference in opinion.

During the past fourteen collecting seasons, paleontological expeditions of the University of Nebraska State Museum have excavated a large number of sites which contained the bones of extinct mammals associated with the artifacts of Early Man. Many of these sites have been reported but some data have not been published. All of the studies of Early Man have been carried on from a paleontologic and stratigraphic point of view. It is hoped that a faunal and stratigraphic sequence connecting the Pleistocene and Recent will eventually be established, and that Early Man's relation to this sequence will be determined. It is the purpose of this brief paper to summarize the work relating to Early Man which has been done by the field parties of the University of Nebraska State Museum since 1937. The explorations have been confined chiefly to Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming. Since the studies of the Nebraska sites have, for the most part, been published, the discussion will be confined to the sites in the latter three states.

Kirk Bryan and A. P. Butler, Jr., reported finding, in 1938, artifacts of glassy andesite on the northwestern part of the Taos Plateau in New Mexico. They concluded: “non-Pueblo peoples having Great Plains affinities appear to have used the material.” Knowing that we were to be in New Mexico, Bryan suggested that we investigate a small cave at Tres Piedras where, in 1940, he had found flakes of the andesite in association with coal. The week of July 7, 1941, was spent at the site.

Tres Piedras is located in the extreme north central part of New Mexico, about twenty-five miles south of the Colorado state line. The site is about two miles south of the town on land owned by Mr. Claire Hawkins, who very kindly gave us permission to excavate.

Many unusual and decorative pipes of the early Indians have been discovered in the Northwest, but, as far as it is ascertainable, only one pipe of considerable antiquity has ever been found enclosed in a wooden case especially designed to fit the pipe. Such a pipe and case, which the writer fortunately was able to acquire at a later date, were found in 1934. Considering the exceptional rarity of such a “find” it would seem that these specimens are worthy of some consideration.

Moses Coulee is a great chasm formed by the ice and waters of bygone ages; it is about forty miles in length, approximately one mile wide, and from six hundred to one thousand feet deep, entering the Columbia River valley about twenty miles below the city of Wenatchee, Washington. This district is well known for the abundance of the archaeological material and particularly for the fine craftsmanship of the majority of artifacts.

The tree-ring record in the Flagstaff area goes back to about 500 A.D., with one gap in the sequence prior to 1317 A.D. To close this gap of forty years, a sampling was taken from Kinnikinnick ruin on Anderson Mesa twenty-two miles southeast of Flagstaff. Material found there in June, 1940, by Dr. A. E. Douglass, yielded dates from the earlier part of this missing period. The location of the site on the postulated southern boundary of the Sinagua branch of the Mogollon made it of further significance. It seems to have escaped notice by early investigators, is pot-hunted very little, and has not been reported on up to this time.