Early in 1954 the author and his wife were stationed by the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología at Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. This provided the opportunity to continue their program of archaeological research on the Colombian coastal area which, at an earlier date, had already led to the formulation of a tentative time and space framework (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1954). While during most of 1954 a survey of the area surrounding Cartagena was made (Dussán de Reichel 1954; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1955), the dry season of 1954–1955 was spent in making a reconnaissance of the Sinú Valley, southwest of Cartagena. During a 4-month trip excavations were carried out at 2 major sites and extensive surface collections were gathered from some 20 others.

Almost 50 years ago, Clarence B. Moore called attention to the presence of “the symbol of the open eye on the open hand” in both the Southeastern United States and Mexico (Moore 1907: 346). The design has achieved some renown as one of the motifs characterizing the so-called “Death Cult” in the Southeast and has also continued to be cited as an indication of Middle American connections (for example, Phillips 1940: 356). Rather little has been done in following up Moore's observation through detailed comparative studies between the 2 areas.

Growing knowledge of cultural sequences in Mesoamerica and in Peru has caused archaeologists interested in correlating these areas and explaining the derivation of various traits to look longingly at the little-known intermediate region occupied by Ecuador and Colombia. In the fall of 1954 an invitation by Emilio Estrada, Director of the Museo Arqueologico “Victor Emilio Estrada” in Guayaquil, Ecuador, gave us the opportunity to make a brief survey and to excavate stratigraphically a few sites in the Guayas Basin on the central coast of Ecuador (Fig. 1). One of the sites excavated (R-B-l: La Chorrera) and two included in the survey (R-B-2: Al Frente el Tejar and G-D-8: 5Jaupe) produced potsherds and other artifacts of types that have been classified as belonging to the Formative period in Middle America and Peru.

Although the problem of stonecutting techniques is but one key to understanding the civilizations of the Middle American people, it is through their stonework that they left their greatest mark and in order to fully appreciate the organization and magnitude of their achievements, we must examine this aspect. To this end the author, who is by training and experience a mechanical engineer, attempted to check in various centers in Mexico on the feasibility of estimating the man years required to build various monuments in order to test hypotheses concerning techniques of construction.

Until recently Panamanian archaeology has been essentially descriptive with little attempt at chronological ordering. Outstanding monographs and writings of this nature are those by Holmes (1888), MacCurdy (1911), and Osgood (1935), on the Province of Chiriquí, and Linné (1929) on Darien. In the 1930's the Peabody Museum (Harvard) excavations at Sitio Conte in Coclée Province, central Panama, were devoted largely to the careful uncovering of graves and their contents; but analyses of these collections were not made with an eye to cultural sequence (Lothrop 1937, 1942).

In the summer of 1954 the University of Illinois undertook an extensive archaeological village site survey of the Illinois River valley. The Illinois River, more than 250 miles long, is located in the heart of the great Central Plains, an essentially uneroded region of drift covered uplands, with a billowy surface and less than 1000 feet altitude above sea level. The river is the largest, except for the Ohio, draining into the Mississippi from the east. It gathers rainfall from about 25,000 square miles, almost half the total area of the state of Illinois, and flows into the Mississippi about midway between its head and mouth. It is located centrally on a venation of waterways stretching from the foothills of the Rockies to the Appalachians, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.

Evidence of aboriginal contact between Mesoamerica and the Greater Antilles is hardly overwhelming and the little that has been gathered remains controversial. The problems surrounding the derivation of the Antillean ball game (for a brief summary, see Rouse 1953: 197) exemplify the need of caution in interpreting resemblances. A more generalized connection between the areas exists on the level of the sociopolitical organization developed in Classic Lowland Maya culture as well as in the Circumcaribbean and the Gulf Coast area of North America (Steward 1947: 104-5; Sears 1954).

In the Central American Republic of El Salvador the Rio Lempa divides the eastern third of the country from the rest. In its lower course it flows through a large coastal plain, built up in geologically recent times by river deposits and sediments from the volcanic chain in the north (San Vicente and the volcanic group of the east). From west (Balsam range) to east (Colinas de Jucuarán) this plain has a length of about 100 km. and a width of 20 km. Some 20 years ago the nearly flat land, which slopes only very slightly from the volcanic chain to the Pacific coast, was still heavily wooded, but since then most of the forest has been cleared away for cotton crops, only leaving tiny patches of the original vegetation. In this process a number of archaeological sites were revealed, especially east of the Rio Lempa, in the department of Usulután.

Heinrich Berlin, in 1953 and 1954, conducted an archaeological survey of eastern Tabasco, Mexico, for the Department of Archaeology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Berlin 1954: 293–5). The pottery recovered was brought to the Institution's ceramic laboratory in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, for analysis and storage. Early in 1955, while Berlin was in Mérida preparing his final report on the Tabasco survey, I had opportunity to examine the material and note the occurrence of dentate and dentate rocker stamping on a ware called Fine Gray. Berlin found Fine Gray in abundance at the sites of Jonuta and Tecolpan on the Usumacinta River associated with untempered “Z” Fine Orange and a tempered Thin Black.

No sooner is an archaeological monograph published than certain errors and misinterpretations become so evident that the author wishes he had an opportunity to do the whole thing over. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), this is not possible, so the next best thing is to correct the text from time to time, thus bringing it into agreement with more recent investigations. Short articles in professional journals are ideal for this purpose, as Stephan de Borhegyi demonstrated recently with a note in these pages (Borhegyi 1955: 284–6), concerning certain pottery specimens described in my Copan report (Longyear 1952). Since Borhegyi's observations incidentally involve the dating of several archaeological periods at Copan, some additional comment is obviously in order.

In December of 1954, Mr. and Mrs. Ruben Emrick of Conrad, Montana, found a broken sandstone object in an arroyo cut located 30 miles north of the town of Empalme near Ortiz in Sonora, Mexico (Fig. 1). They very graciously brought the artifact to the Amerind Museum for examination where it was repaired and studied. The object resembled the tubular stone pipes found in the Southwest (Figs. 2, 3). It had the exterior and inner proportions so characteristic of these pipes, which were produced by drilling out the pipe interior until it resembled a modern venturi tube having a constricted throat.

While engaged in recent ethnological field work in the San Miguel Valley of northeastern Sonora, I had occasion to observe a potter at work. This area, in aboriginal times, was inhabited by the Opata Indian tribe. Today it is predominantly mestizo racially, and culturally is a blend of aboriginal, early Spanish, and Mexican traits. I was assured by many people that the potter, who is extremely Indian in appearance, was “pura indigina.”

In San Diego County clay figurines occur sporadically throughout most of the intermediate valleys, inland valleys, and mountain regions, and although of rather wide areal distribution they seem to be numerically rare. In addition to those described in this report, specimens are known to be in the possession of the Museum of Man, San Diego, and the Cuyumaca State Park Museum. A probable fragment was found by B. F. McCown in the excavations at Temecula. Other finds are occasionally reported but have not been documented or described.

The large oyster shell heaps on both sides of the Damariscotta River, just north of the towns of Damariscotta and Newcastle, Maine, have been known for many years and both geologists and archaeologists have speculated about their age. During the summer of 1955 I made 2 collections of Mya shells from the largest shell heap on the west side of the river (Glidden estate) for radiocarbon age determinations.

It seems somewhat tardy to set right a mistake made 24 years ago, especially as I learned that it was one not very long after. But better late than never.

The matter concerns some tubular carved bone objects I published in Artifacts of Pecos, page 263, and Figure 220. I was at a loss as to their use, but said that although I had no clue to their exact period, one was certainly prehistoric.

In Notes and News in 1953 in American Antiquity (Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 100–1) there is the following statement: “If interglacial artifacts are present in America, they will of necessity be of very crude nature.” This follows a discussion of the specimens found and described by George F. Carter in California, Carmen Baggerly in Michigan, and others in California and Texas. Amos Green of Eau Claire, Michigan, has recently collected and submitted to us at the University of Michigan a number of specimens equally as crude as those from the West and Southwest.

For the student of the archaeology of the Plains, Browns Valley Man has been an engima. Loosely dated between 8000 and 12,000 years ago by Jenks (Jenks 1937a: 17) it has remained in splendid isolation — an important group of artifacts found in a burial site with the skeleton of a man who may be presumed to have been their maker — with, heretofore, no known close affiliations. That he hunted the giant bison has been inferred in an unpublished script by Lloyd Wilford to accompany a filmstrip on Minnesota archaeology being prepared by the University of Minnesota. This must be presumed to be based on one or both of 2 midden sites of giant bison dug by Jenks, Wilford, and Eddy. One of these has been described in a brief note in Science by Jenks (Jenks 1937b: 243–4). The other site has no published data.

The subject of this report is a group of 70 gravers collected in 1954 and 1955 from the surface of a village site about 12 miles southeast of Madison, Wisconsin. The finding of this number of gravers at a single site is unusual and is also of special interest since gravers have usually been associated with Archaic and earlier horizons. A separate report (Nero 1955) has been published on the total assemblage of artifacts from the site, material which represents a conglomeration of several cultures, though an Archaic-like complex predominates.