In september, 1949, while in west central Nevada for the purpose of collecting vegetal materials from the lowermost cultural levels of Lovelock cave (Loud and Harrington, 1929) to be used for radiocarbon dating, the author revisited an open rockshelter site some six miles up the valley from Lovelock cave. The site, since named Leonard rockshelter (site 26- Pe-14) after Zenas Leonard who in 1833 traversed the Humbolt Sink area as a member of the Walker expedition (Leonard, 1904), is not referred to by Loud and Harrington. It is the same site from which, in 1936, Thomas Derby mined bat guano and recovered artifacts described in a brief article (Heizer, 1938). The bat guano formed a layer two to three feet thick lying on ancient gravels of Lake Lahontan and beneath a thick accumulation of aeolian dust and rockfall.

Prehistoric shaft-like excavations which may have been aboriginal water wells were discovered in the fall of 1949 and the summer of 1950 at the well-known early man site 12 miles southwest of Clovis and 7 miles north of Portales, New Mexico. Work at this site is part of an extended program of geologic studies of Quaternary deposits on the High Plains of western Texas and eastern New Mexico being carried on by the Texas Memorial Museum. A report dealing with the geology and ancient archaeological horizons at the Clovis site will be ready for publication in the near future, but a separate description of the shafts or wells seems desirable at this time.

In the course of an archaeological survey of the Point of Pines area, San Carlos Apache Reservation in east-central Arizona, E. W. Haury and E. B. Sayles, of the University of Arizona, noted the presence of a number of depressions which held surface water for a considerable period of time beyond the normal time for runoff. Furthermore, these depressions, or basins, appeared to be associated to some extent with specific archaeological ruins. The possibility that these depressions were made by the aboriginal inhabitants for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a water supply, led the writer in 1948 to excavate several of the depressions to determine their nature and date of construction, length of usage, time of abandonment, and other cultural information. The work was carried on during the 1948 season of the University of Arizona archaeological field school.

This will report the results of several years' search for historical sites in Simcoe County, Province of Ontario, in the area where the historic villages of the Huron were located. In the course of this work, certain aboriginal artifacts were found to be numerous on many sites but did not occur on others. In view of the current assumption of homogeneity for Iroquoian material in this area, the presence of a multiple artifact complex presented an interesting field for archaeological activity. Evidence of two cultural horizons accumulated as more sites were visited and more material marked and segregated, until finally in the summer of 1949 artifacts of two types were found in a stratified position on the Fallis site. Herewith I wish to give a brief description and grouping of the sites, and of their aboriginal material.

This report deals with the results of excavating the last intact portions of a shell heap long known to collectors as one of the richest sources of artifacts on Cape Cod. Although the primary aim is to give a factual picture of the site, some idea may also be conveyed of the general archaeology of this isolated area, which exhibits cultural shadings differing somewhat from those of the rest of eastern Massachusetts.

The Lavon Dam and Reservoir, under construction by the Corps of Engineers, Department of the Army, is one of the many projects throughout the country which will soon obliterate information relating to the prehistory of North America. This particular project is located on the East Fork of the Trinity River in Collin County, Texas, 21 miles northeast of Dallas. It was scheduled for completion in January, 1952.

The Trinity River is one of several major rivers flowing in a southeasterly direction across the state of Texas. It heads in four branches north and northwest of the city of Dallas and flows into Galveston Bay and thence into the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 40 miles due east of the city of Houston. The East Fork (and its principal tributary, Pilot Grove Creek) is the easternmost of the headwater branches. It rises in Grayson County and enters the main stream in southwestern Kaufman County.

David I. Bushnell, Jr., first aroused wide interest in the fluted points found in Virginia. He accomplished this primarily by an article in the June 9, 1934 issue of the Literary Digest, in which he announced the discovery of “two Folsom points” in Virginia. This article and subsequent references to these two “points of recognized Folsom type” (Bushnell, 1935, pp. 35-6, 56) called special attention to the importance and possibilities of such finds in the East. In 1934, only one collector of Virginia projectile points, Arthur Robertson of Chase City, Virginia, could claim “five or more” of these fluted points (Wells, 1935, pp. 1, 14). However, the intense interest which Bushnell created stimulated a search in Virginia for this rare type of point, with the result that shortly after Bushnell's 1934 announcement, sporadic finds of fluted points having a resemblance to both the Folsom Fluted and the Clovis Fluted began to be noted in various parts of the State. Their occurrence seemed to indicate that there actually was a paleo-Indian in Virginia.

For the past two years Mr. and Mrs. Tully H. Thomas of Concho, Arizona have been collecting surface material from thirty or more non-pottery sites located within a twenty-mile radius of their home (see Fig. 46). Included among the points from these sites are fluted points, indistinguishable from Folsoms (Wormington, 1949, pp. 19-48), parallel flaked points, previously called Yumas (Wormington, 1949, pp. 48-68), and many others best described as similar to Pinto (Campbell, 1935) or Amargosa II (Haury, 1950, p. 193) points of the so-called Desert culture of southern Arizona and California.The importance of this Concho discovery will be immediately recognized by those familiar with the prehistory of the American Southwest.

The tests made at the Emerald mound site (MAd-5; also known as the Selzertown site) located on the proposed right-of-way of Natchez Trace Parkway twelve miles north of Natchez, Mississippi, were performed in order to salvage archaeological information and cultural materials along the route of roadway construction. The work was confined to two stratigraphic tests and one area test, the former on the primary mound and the latter in the area to the south of the primary mound assumed to have been a village site. By the area test it was hoped to demonstrate or disprove the existence of a village site associated with the great mound and to salvage data in the path of Parkway construction which was projected immediately south of the base of the primary mound. By the stratigraphic tests it was hoped that the cultural identity of the builders of the primary mound and the adjoining village site could be established.

Since the excavation of Bat Cave and the location of Cochise implements in situ along the banks of Wet Leggett Wash in western New Mexico, it has seemed likely that one or more of the Cochise periods might be represented in the Middle Rio Grande area where living conditions would have appeared very attractive to hunters and gatherers. In 1949 Bruce T. Ellis collected a series of artifacts, spalls, and cores in and along the surface of a wash in the Atrisco Grant, lying some 3 to 5 miles west of the city of Albuquerque. Most of the 72 possible implements were of such irregular and haphazard design that both Ellis and E. B. Sayles (who examined a representative group of specimens) felt that their identification as objects of human manufacture was open to considerable question. But the remaining group of pressure flaked blades and scrapers, the single point, a slab metate of volcanic scoria with slightly concave surface, and a number of one-handed grinding stones led to hope that further search might locate such materials in position, with the small manos, especially, suggesting Cochise affiliations.

Despite the general lack of detailed reports on individual sites, the broad framework of the prehistory of eastern Oklahoma has been fairly well outlined in recent years. Orr (1946) presented a summary of the situation at the Spiro site. In the same year Krieger (1946) set up two aspects with a number of component foci which include the Spiro materials together with a majority of the other cultural manifestations in the area and in 1949 he amplified and partially revised sections of his earlier discussion (Newell and Krieger, 1949). Baerreis (1951) presents a significant body of data on preceramic horizons in the northeastern part of the state, and the recent paper by Bell and Baerreis (1951) summarizes most of the existing information on Oklahoma in general.

The corps of engineers is currently building a power and flood control dam near the little town of Buford on the upper Chattahoochee River in northern Georgia. This is one of several such dams under way in the State, and in accordance with the usual procedure the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys made a routine archaeological reconnaissance of the impoundment area from November 15, 1950 to April 7, 1951. During the survey the writers came upon a large prehistoric mound (9HL64) not previously reported.

We spent three weeks investigating the structure to determine if its eventual flooding in the Buford impoundment would constitute an important loss of archaeological data. The conclusion reached was that a full scale excavation should be made before the site is inundated sometime in 1954 or 1955.

Human figurines in the Basketmaker III collections resulting from excavations in the Prayer Rock district of northeastern Arizona by the Bernheimer Expedition and Carnegie Institution of Washington are of two classes; those made of clay and those fashioned from vegetable substances. The former have been described from several localities. The latter have not been previously recorded. Of the clay variety there are, whole or fragmentary, 23 representatives; of the vegetal, 4.

During a trip to greenland in the summer of 1948 Hans Mosegaard, a well known amateur archaeologist, visited Sarqaq in the Ritenbenk District of the northern part of Disko Bay. Directly west of the present settlement near the low cliff along the beach Mosegaard located remnants of an old midden layer, of which he excavated a surface area of 12 sq. m. with a culture stratum reaching a depth of 30 cm. The find consists of 182 artifacts; stone refuse is plentiful, but only a few bones, none worked, were preserved. No house ruins occur in connection with the culture layer, and Mosegaard was unable to establish any regular arrangement of the many stones scattered at the area.

Loma Seca (Chihuahua E7-5) was discovered July 23, 1949. It is an eroding village site located about one kilometer south of the Rio Conchos some eight kilometers southwest of Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico. The site is located at the western edge of a large draw which intersects the valley of the Rio Conchos at this point. Physiographically the site occupies an eroding saddle at the foot of a high mesa which represents an outlier of the high gravel terraces of the Conchos valley. The mesa or butte lies just north of the site and separates it from the lowlands of the Conchos valley and at the same time provides protection from northerly winds. There is a thin scattering of hearthstones, flint chips, and artifacts over the eroding surface of the draw just west of the site.

During the 1950 and 1951 seasons, field parties of the Missouri River Basin Survey carried on a series of excavations in the vicinity of the Oahe dam near Pierre, South Dakota. Most of the work was done at two earth lodge villages, the Dodd site (39ST30) and the Phillips Ranch site (39ST14). On the basis of the archaeological material from the Dodd and Phillips Ranch sites, and from a series of previously excavated sites located within a thirty-mile radius of the Dodd site, it seems possible to set up a sequence of cultural complexes for the area, complexes which follow one another in time and which appear to represent a series of modifications in and accretions to the earliest one known for the area.

The Dodd site, located on the west bank of the Missouri River about six miles upstream from Pierre, provides the basis for the chronological seriation of the material.

The origin of the old stone tower in Newport has been an important problem in the ancient history of American archaeology for something over a century. The argument swirls around two questions. Who built the tower? When was it built? There are two possible answers to the first of these questions; the second question can readily be answered if the first can be solved. Either the tower was built by persons unknown at some time in the pre-Colonial period; or it was erected in Colonial times shortly before it is first mentioned in the documents. And there is a shortage of the documents on this problem until the development of the nineteenth century romanticism. Either there was no interest or there was no problem. Up to about 1800, moreover, a clear line of legal documents traced the structure as well as the land on which it stood as belonging to Governor Benedict Arnold. The legal documents are supported by strong local tradition that the building was a stone mill. Specifically, in 1677, three documents, including Arnold's own will, mentioned the tower, and for the next 100 years other mention is rare. Thus, at the outset, we see that the controversy over the origin of the tower is recent.

The viru valley Project of 1946 was undertaken as an intensive and integrated study focusing the research of a number of anthropologists on the problems of a single, relatively small valley on the north coast of Peru. The ideal of the project was an analysis of the cultural history and prehistory of the Viru Valley from the time of earliest human occupation to the present. The final reports of the participants are now beginning to appear (Ford and Willey, 1949; Ford, 1949; Bennett, 1950) and these document the very substantial success of the project.

The problem of the antiquity of man in early America has rapidly divided itself into a series of detailed researches, each one dealing with special facets of the matter. To date the greatest progress in the relationship between the various cultures of the paleo-Indian has been made with geologic methods by which the rhythm of climatic changes of the late Pleistocene and recent times has been tied in with deposits involving human materials. The radiocarbon method has now appeared to bolster and refine the time scale. From all of these activities there is rapidly emerging a clearing picture of early times in the Americas.