This paper concerns the regions of Central and Southern Mexico, Guatemala, British Honduras, and the western parts of Honduras and El Salvador, which are recognized by archaeologists to have constituted a cultural unity in pre-Spanish times. This area was one of the two centres of civilization in pre-Columbian America, Peru, being the other. It includes the several cultural centres north of Tehuantepec, usually grouped together under the name of Mexican Civilization, and those south of that isthmus, in the Mayan zone. For a long time before the Spanish conquest this entire region formed a definite cultural unit—it was a culture area, using this term in the precise meaning as defined by Kroeber—for which the name Mesoamerica is now generally used.

The interesting discovery of a spear-thrower in central Africa was made in 1937 by Mr J. S. Owen, then Assistant District Commissioner El Fasher, who heard of one being used in the Daju hills of Southern Darfur, and obtained two examples from Harun Yasīn the man who introduced the spear-thrower to that area. It had not come into general use among the Darfur Daju; and there was uncertainty as to its origin, when I was asked to find out from where it came.

Antiquity has recently received some information* of great value in connexion with radiocarbon dating from the advisory committee on the subject set up by the American Anthropological Association and the Geological Society of America. It consists of an historical foreword, a corrected list of dates, a number of reports on specific problems, a summary and a bibliography, partly in typescript and partly on microfilm. The list differs little from the printed one which was distributed to a number of interested people in September 1950, though it contains a few additions and corrections, and the real importance of the material now received lies in the reports and the summary.

In 1898 a Swedish-American farmer, Olaf Ohman, cut down an aspen tree on his farm. He found enveloped in its roots a large flat stone which he only just managed to get out without ruining his axe. When his ten year old son had brushed some of the dirt from the stone, Ohman discovered that one of the faces and one of the edges were covered with strange engraved figures. It was soon decided that these had something to do with runes. This is where the saga of the Kensington stone begins: from Ohman's farm to a shop window in Kensington, to Prof. O. J. Breda in Minneapolis, to Prof. George O. Curme, back to Ohman's farm condemned as a blatant forgery. Here it lay despised as ‘a stepping stone near his granary for eight years, without further notice’. It was ‘rediscovered’ by Hjalmar Holand, bought by him, and he devoted his life (three large books and innumerable articles) to attempting to prove that the inscription was genuine. Finally in its Jubilee year 1948 it was given the place of honour in the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington as one of the finest pre-Columbian monuments of America.

Archaeology has, for its own good or ill, caught the popular mind. A generation ago the average person was quite unable to divest his mind of the idea that an archaeologist must have a long white beard, large spectacles and a pathetic enquiring look on his face: it was equally suspected that, when roused, he would burst into a paroxysm of rage if his views were doubted. There was, in fact, a good deal of truth in this popular conception, for in the first half of the 19th century what then passed as archaeology was largely a hobby reserved for the aged and the retired who, by virtue of curious minds and an inquiring nature, spent their leisure in probing the ancient sites of the past, and collecting ancient relics and ‘curios’. Some less aged men, but nevertheless men of leisure, made very important contributions to knowledge, such as Boucher de Perthes, a French customs officer, who in the '50's was the first to identify palaeolithic implements; or Harrison of Ightham, a Kentish villager, who, with great insight identified, not long after Boucher de Perthes, a still earlier phase of the stone implement industry, the so-called Eolithic. But for the most part the elderly white-bearded men did in fact represent the activities of the student of Antiquity, both in England and elsewhere. Then, slowly, it was seen that there was a difference between the Archaeologist and the Antiquary : that the former was a student of one of the branches of humanist study which can serve, in the historic periods, to add enormously to historic knowledge, and in the prehistoric periods to formulate chronology and create a history recorded not by written records, but by archaeological facts. But the power of the written word, reinforced by the tremendous prestige associated with Holy Script, has given such kudos to what was written that records not consisting of words were considered by scholars as trash. Archaeologists were called, until quite recent years, ‘collectors of pots and pans’, men unworthy to rank with those who in the quiet of their studies had spent long hours emending and correcting the ancient literary records of literary men. To make an emendation in the text of a Greek manuscript was held by many to be a far greater achievement than to have recovered two hundred years of unrecorded history, even if the emendation was a pure invention of the emendator.