On a Wooded Hilltop overlooking Sheguiandah Bay on Manitoulin Island is one of the most remarkable Indian sites ever discovered in Canada. It was found in the course of archaeological survey work in 1951 (Lee 1953). Extensive surface collections were made; the materials indicated that the site might be one of the earliest known in Ontario. Hundreds of large quartzite blades were obtained and their apparent connections were with the George Lake 1 site at Killarney, some twenty miles away on the mainland (Greenman 1943). The Sheguiandah site, vastly richer in material, gave promise of yielding valuable information about the nature and cultural connections of the people who had worked and perhaps lived there. Further, despite the fact that the site had thus far escaped the attentions of souvenir hunters and relic collectors, it was believed that any delay in investigations might subject it to the destructive forces which have fallen upon so many important prehistoric features.

The Presence in the southern California coastal region of prehistoric cultures showing considerable use of milling stones has been recognized for some years. Attention was called to this fact by the publication in 1929 of David Banks Rogers’ Prehistoric Man of the Santa Barbara Coast. Rogers distinguished a sequence of three aboriginal cultures in the Santa Barbara area, the earliest of which (Oak Grove) was characterized by the employment of this form of grinding implement almost to the exclusion of other artifacts. In the same year Malcolm J. Rogers noted a somewhat analogous complex (now La Jolla) in western San Diego County (M. J. Rogers 1929: 456-7). Occurrences of similar assemblages have been reported upon since (Treganza and Malamud 1950; Walker 1952).

An investigation conducted at the Little Sycamore site (Ven 1) in Ventura County by a class in archaeological field methods from the University of Southern California uncovered evidence of yet another milling stone complex.

Proposed Construction of Table Rock Dam and Reservoir on White River in southwestern Missouri threatens with destruction a vast region of unique and important archaeological remains in the rugged Ozarks region. Every indication of prehistoric life both within the actual reservoir area and its perimeter is of extreme importance in reconstructing human activities of the region in ages past. Because of its geographical location, the Ozarks region is most promising from an archaeological standpoint. Bounded on the east by the Mississippi River, on the north by the Missouri River, and on the west by the Great Plains, the Ozarks were probably in prehistoric times a melting pot for a great many cultural traditions. The Ozark Bluff Dweller culture, with its apparent early agriculture, is only one of the many problems that need a great amount of additional work within this area. Recent investigations by the University of Missouri indicate that the history of man within the Ozarks may very well go back to a time comparable with some of the earliest occupations of the Great Plains.

This Article is intended less as a descriptive piece on the archaeology of the Rimac Valley than it is as a single-valley application of various conclusions reached by Richard P. Schaedel in his Major Ceremonial and Population Centers in Northern Peru (1951). Schaedel, in a broad synthetic study of major ruins on the North Coast of Peru, comes to several interesting conclusions on the “urban revolution” in that region. The author, who was already engaged in a survey of the Rimac, with the focus on the coastal cultures from sea level to the 1000-meter line, felt impelled to shift the emphasis of his survey from straight description to a Central Coast application of Schaedel's North Coast findings. This was a fairly easy task, as the sites were already being analyzed both architecturally and ceramically.

The Rimac, the “valley of Lima,” presents sufficient of both typical and atypical features of a Peruvian coastal valley to make the application of Schaedel's theories to a single valley at least fairly indicative of their validity for the entire Peruvian coast.

In 1952 I had the opportunity of investigating about 70 slab cists in the province of Munecas, Bolivia. Among the vessels found in the graves there were a few goblets provided with a tubular protuberance on one side. As my collections and personal outfit are still detained by the Bolivian authorities, the appearance of these vessels is illustrated here only by a drawing of a vessel taken over by the Museo Nacional “Tihuanacu,” La Paz (Fig. 50). A similar but undecorated vessel from the same region, Tacacacoma, is published by Schmidt (1929: 256, and Fig. 2). On the latter vessel the tubular protuberance is joined to the body of the goblet by two bare. Other minor variations in vessels of this type appear in the shape of the goblets and in the shape and placing of the tubular protuberance. Sometimes, for instance, the tube is longer than on the vessels depicted here and very often a raised human face is found on the outer side opposite the tube.

I have read Irving Rouse's recent article on the Southwestern co-tradition (“On the Use of the Concept of Area Co-Tradition,” American Antiquity, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 221-5, 1954) and I must say that it fills me with mild astonishment. I fear that Rouse's strictures may have generated confusion in the minds of some students and may have given rise to the suspicion that any general formulation of Southwestern culture history is invalid or at least premature. In order to dispel these doubts I wish to discuss our underlying philosophy in this matter.

My general reaction to Rouse's article is to ask whether Bennett really intended the co-tradition concept to apply only to Peru? Has Rouse correctly codified Bennett's idea of a co-tradition and is Rouse's strict interpretation a proper one? If an affirmative is the response to these queries, then I must admit that in the narrowest and most literal terms the area co-tradition cannot be applied to the Southwestern area of the United States. At best, it would apply only to a few spots in the world in which the highest cultures have developed.

In January, 1927, soon after my return from an exploring expedition in Peru under the Chicago (then Field) Natural History Museum, I arranged with Dean Frank H. Probert of the University of California College of Mining for quantitative analysis of samples from 17 specimens of ancient Peruvian metal objects selected by me from the Max Uhle collections in the University's Museum of Anthropology. Professor Walter S. Morley kindly undertook to make the analyses in person. On February 26, the last of the specimens were returned to the Museum, and soon after that Professor Morley turned over to me a typewritten sheet giving the proportions, to a hundredth of a per cent, of copper, tin, antimony, arsenic, zinc, lead, gold, silver, and silica or insoluble materials determined.

I filed the sheet, but when next I went to use it, it could not be found. Neither Morley nor Probert any longer possessed a copy by then, and both of them have since died.

Various authors in the past have speculated on the epoch and culture to which the so-called “Laughing Faces” belonged. But with only a small number of sporadic finds they have not been able to explain satisfactorily their origin, cultural epoch, symbolism, or typological evolution. There exist, however, some useful works on the subject, such as those by Phillip Drucker, C. W. Weiant, J. L. Melgarejo, Vladimiro Rosado Ojeda, Alfonso Medellin Zenil, and Fredrick Peterson.

In the fall of 1952 the antiquity market of Mexico City was suddenly flooded with sculptured pieces of which the “Laughing Faces,” or “Smiling Heads,” formed the chief part. Their source was made known when the Presidente Municipal (Mayor) of the village of Joachin, in the municipality of Tierra Blanca, Veracruz, denounced illegal excavations in his territory. The looting of the archaeological zones had taken place in the small communities of Los Cerros and Dicha Tuerta.

There seems to be some possibility that artifacts representative of the Old Copper culture were associated with fossil animals. The evidence is inconclusive but worth noting as a stimulus for future investigations.

In his report on the geology of the Thunder Bay, Ontario, district, Tanton (1931: 83-4) mentions some interesting archaeological remains, information about which was preserved in the files of the Geological Survey of Canada. This information is as follows: in 1918, during industrial excavations, a copper spear point and about 12 mammal bones were found about 40 feet below the surface of the ground in the Kaministikwa Valley at Westfort on the edge of Fort William, Ontario.

The geological section here, according to Tanton (1931: 82) consists of bedrock and conglomerate above which is a “deposit of stratified blue clay between 60 and 90 feet thick, the surface of which has been eroded in channels, and on this uneven surface there are crossbedded sands varying from 4 to 40 feet in thickness filling up the inequalities on the clay surface and forming the plain at the present surface — 638 feet above sea level.”

Fluted points, like many other artifacts, seem to be more common than previously thought. Once attention is called to a given item representative specimens are 'found in existing collections only waiting to be recognized. Smail (1951) has presented a discussion of many points of this type from the St. Louis area in Illinois.

Recently several interesting specimens have been brought to the Illinois State Museum and are here illustrated, due to their unusual combination of attributes and location. The first of these (Fig. 57) was found in Fulton County in 1924 by the late Frank Aidrich of Bloomington, Illinois. It is lanceolate in shape, WA inches long, 114 inches wide about % of the length from the base, and lenticular in cross section. Its very delicate chipping produced parallel long flake scars running from each edge to the center. The base is ground on each side and across the bottom.

Several thousand stone tools have been found along the Imlay channel in eastern Michigan. The first were noticed in 1937, but it was not until 1952 that enough were accumulated to be very certain there was a people here before readvances of ice of the Wisconsin glaciation. The area is within that shown for the Cary Substage on the Glacial Map of North America (R. F. Flint, et al., Geol. Soc. of Am., Special Paper, No. 60, Pt. 1, 1945).

Opinions have varied among professionals who have seen this material, some thinking it is all natural, others, that some at least might be artificial, and George F. Carter who examined the largest sample, nearly 500 specimens, that it is all man-made. That many of these are artifacts could be demonstrated to anyone taking the trouble to examine the stones of this region. While many can be ruled out as possibly of natural origin, others cannot.

In Marian DeWolf's recent interesting article on Jamaica archaeology she refers to an earthwork and trench as Windsor Fort, built by the British in 1803 (DeWolf 1953: 236), citing Cundall (1915) as her authority. Actually Cundall mentions the fort but makes no attempt to suggest that its site was on Windsor Hill, which trench has always been known as Spanish Fort. From my local research, Fort Windsor was built on the sea shore, 1000 yards north of the hill, where up to a few years ago stone foundations still existed.

The Windsor Hill site presents one of the most curious mysteries of the north coast, and in 1951 I excavated the hole with a view to a solution and moved and sifted about three tons of earth which had been thrown in during the early part of the 19th century.

Investigators in the western and northwestern areas of Mexico as well as in southern Arizona have for a long time been familiar with a rather curious type of artifact, the possible purpose of which has thus far defied even logical speculation. Moreover, in spite of the fact that these artifacts are of relatively wide distribution and are numerous enough to escape the designation “rare,” there is only the most meager reference to them in the literature. This artifact is a cross, usually quite well made, of obsidian, chalcedony, serpentine, or other stone and there is even one reported of moonstone (Kelly 1945, Fig. 47 a). One of similar form but made of coarse lava was found at Topolobampo, Sinaloa (Ekholm 1942). The size of the crosses varies from quite small ones to larger ones measuring as much as 5 inches diagonally tip to tip.

The state of Durango, Mexico, is situated almost in the middle of the Sierra Madre Occidental. Nearly the entire state is rocky and mountainous and there are fairly large areas which are almost inaccessible though there are numerous fertile valleys which serve to produce the grain and herbage for the cattle which are important in the economy of the state. In the mountains and in the valleys may be found abundant evidence of the activities of man over what was likely a rather long period of time; there is evidence of what appear to be several rather diverse cultures though relatively little archaeological study has been made of these cultures thus far.

In the mountains in the vicinity of Mezquital some 50 miles to the south of the city of Durango are numerous caves and rockshelters. It was in one of these caves that the writer discovered a bowl (Fig. 61) which conceivably may have been an “ancestor” of true pottery.

L. van der Pijl published an article with the above title in the Annates du Jardin Botanitjue de Buitenzorg (Vol. 68, Part 1, 1937, pp. 17-26, 6 plates). He has written to me to call my attention to it because of the striking way in which it corroborates O. F. Cook's idea that some useful American plants, among them the Hibiscus, were carried to Asia in pre-Columbian times. I have recently reviewed some of Cook's ideas (Carter 1950, 1953) on this subject and found them to have more merit than it has been customary to allow them. It is curious that Pijl seems not to have known of Cook's work, nor did I know of Pijl's. Yet these pieces of work are distintcly complementary and, of course, must be considered in relation to recent work by Ekholm, Heine-Geldern, Heyerdahl, Sauer, Burkhill, and others.

The role played by irrigation in the development of civilization in Mesoamerica has never been satisfactorily determined. Steward (1949: 12-13, 17) has assumed that it played a role in Mesoamerica similar to that which it played in the development of the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, north China, and coastal Peru. In each of these other areas the first urban civilizations to develop were in regions requiring the control of water for the cultivation of crops, and the necessity for this control is generally accepted as having provided the basis for the development of these urban class societies. Yet in Mesoamerica the matter has actually never been established one way or the other. Armillas (1948: 109) states that rainfall is sufficient today during the rainy season in the highlands of central Mexico in general, and the Valley of Mexico in particular, to produce a crop of maize without irrigation, but that irrigation is necessary for the production of an additional crop in any year.