When Jimmy Griffin asked me to reflect upon the founding of the Society, I compared the assignment to beating a dead horse. Then it occurred to me that most of you here tonight were high school students or younger, when Vol. 1, No. 1 of American Antiquity was in press 32 years ago this month. Throughout your professional lives you have accepted the Society as the natural focus for archaeological contacts and interests. Yet there was a time when it was only a dream; when a number of us worked hard to make it become a reality.

Picosa is defined as a continuum of similar closely related preceramic cultures existing in the southwestern United States during the last three millennia before Christ. It is seen as representing the elementary period of the development of the Southwest as a discrete culture area and is believed to be the result of a cultural synthesis of uniform developments originating as early as 8000 B.C. Although similar to the Desert culture in a culture-typical sense, the Picosa is distinct in terms of detailed inventory and historic derivation. Its role as the progenitor of most of the ceramic period cultures of the Southwest is examined.

A Basketmaker II manifestation is defined from the excavation of an open site northwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico, containing two surface dwellings and a large outside cooking pit. Designated the Rio Rancho phase, this culture is found to have had had affinities to Basketmaker II cultures in the San Juan area and to late Cochise and early Mogollon cultures in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona. The Alameda phase, an early Basketmaker III manifestation in the same area, is believed to have developed out of the Rio Rancho phase with accretions coming primarily from the San Juan area.

This paper consolidates and summarizes the mass of radiocarbon determinations that has accumulated in various books, journals, newsletters, and manuscripts between 1951 and the spring of 1965. The dates are derived from Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Early Ceramic, and Late Prehistoric occupations in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and the Plains areas of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa. Included are 195 radiocarbon dates attesting to the presence of man on the Plains for the last 12,000 years.

A series of seven idealized levels of procedure in conducting archaeological research is proposed: preparation, acquisition, analysis, interpretation, integration, comparison, and abstraction. This scheme was employed to investigate archaeological phenomena from Lava Beds National Monument, northern California.

The traditional approaches of comparative human osteology have proven largely unsatisfactory in attempts to determine biological relationships among human populations which cremated their dead. However, one category of information, that of discrete traits or skeletal anomalies, has been largely ignored. Cremations from Point of Pines, Arizona, were analyzed to determine if this kind of information, along with that usually sought from skeletal material, could be obtained in sufficient quantity to make comparative biological studies feasible. The results were encouraging, but they indicate that extraordinary care will be required in the future excavation and storage of cremated material.

Several areas with extensive obsidian-working debris on the surface have been found in Teotihuacán. These date from the Late Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic periods. During the Late Preclassic and Classic periods there seems to have been a continuous expansion of the city's obsidian industry, accompanied by an increasing trend toward specialization in certain of its aspects. It is probable that the introduction of some new markets, for example the Mayan area, into the Teotihuacán economy was one factor involved in this expansion. Another probable factor was the growth of population within the Valley of Teotihuacán itself, which in these periods depended upon the city"s workshops for its supply of obsidian.

In his surface survey of the Valley of Mexico, Tolstoy found large quantities of a distinctive type of pottery concentrated in the southwestern portion of Lake Texcoco (Tolstoy 1958: 53). This pottery, called Texcoco Fabric-marked, was almost always found on low mounds, tlateles, lying either within or very near the old lake bed.

Tolstoy offers no explanation for the correlation between the tlateles and the fabric-marked pottery other than that they seem in some way “to be traditionally connected with the Aztec practice of extracting salt.”

Evidence is presented in this paper that shows Tolstoy's explanation of the use of Texcoco Fabric-marked pottery is not a very satisfactory one, and an alternative hypothesis—that this fabric-marked pottery was used in food production—is proposed.

A study of floor construction in the Maya area leads to the conclusion that a definite technique or pattern seems to have been used from the Preclassic to the Postclassic periods and that this consisted of using a foundation under a base which was covered by a plaster. It appeared further that the same technique was applied regardless of the raw materials at hand. It was also found that the use of burned earth or clay as an element of a floor was rather widespread and appeared to be deliberate rather than the result of the burning of flammable superstructures. No attempt was made at this time to determine the fine structures of the separate floor elements based upon their chemical or physical properties.

During the excavation of Arikara burials which were 130 to 160 years old, the author discovered the chitinous exuvia of fly pupae with many of the burials. The pupae of these scavenger flies seasonally date the burials from late March to mid-October, corresponding to the year's arrival and disappearance of these flies in South Dakota.

Setaria, foxtail millet, was eaten in quantity in Tamaulipas, Mexico, in 4000-3500 B.C., with selection for grain size during the following 1,500 years, before maize was introduced to the valley. Setaria was eaten in quantity in Tehuacan, southern Puebla, Mexico, in 5500 B.C., but maize was being cultivated there by 4500 B.C., and there is no increase in Setaria grain size. Grinding techniques with Setaria are shown to have changed between 5200 B.C. and 900 B.C.

Evidence of tooth filing, north of Mexico, is found primarily in the Cahokia area in Illinois. The custom is associated with the acculturation process that took place between peoples having a Mississippian technology and those having a Late Woodland culture. An attempt will be made here to itemize all the discoveries in the Cahokia area in the order in which they occurred and also to add new information not available to earlier reporters.

The writers recently examined the famous Cerro de las Navajas obsidian mines described by William H. Holmes. Evidence was found there of extensive Aztec period working. The high proportion of mines to workshops suggests that the obsidian was only roughly processed at the mines, most of it having been carried elsewhere to be worked into final form.

A unique, miniature, anthropomorphic stone hacha from the Gulf Coast of Mexico is described and illustrated. The author also discusses other miniature stone objects from Mesoamerica, such as mushroom stones, yokes, “toad altars,” “doughnut-stones,” metates, spherical stone balls, and star-shaped maceheads, and suggests that some of these Mesoamerican miniature stone objects may have been used in connection with the various forms of the pre-Columbian ball game.

After expressing general agreement with the major conclusions reached by Emery and Edwards, the author comments on two points. 1. He takes issue with the oft repeated assertion that Archaic peoples of the Northeast coast did not “learn to eat marine mollusks,” and suggests, instead, an environmental explanation for the absence of shellfish debris from some Archaic sites. 2. He adds to the list of archaeological sites now under water, points out that, at some of these, artifactual materials seem to have been protected from scattering by the development of peat layers over the occupation areas, and he suggests that this fact may hold out hope for the future discovery of relatively undisturbed drowned sites in the waters off the Atlantic Coast.