Geologic-Climatic dating of archaeological finds in the arid and semiarid western United States is based on geology, on the relationship between moisture, vegetation, and geological processes, and on climatic history. The procedure of dating includes 4 main steps, namely, (1) study of beds and geological features, (2) climatic interpretation of beds and features, (3) assignment of the bed with the human record to a particular regional climatic age or phase, and (4) correlation of the regional relative chronology with a dated climatic history. The geological study of the site includes texture, structure, and appearance of the beds or terrace deposits, their modes and conditions of formation, their sequence, fossils, and artifacts, the soil zones, caliche incrustations, and erosions. The climatic interpretation of the beds and features is made in conformity with the delicate regional relationship between climatic conditions and changes and geological processes and deposits.

Several Early man hunting sites have been discovered and excavated by various institutions in and near the High Plains region of Texas and New Mexico, including the Folsom, San Jon, and Clovis, or Blackwater Draw, localities in New Mexico, and the Miami, Plainview, Lipscomb, and Lubbock localities in Texas. To the west and north are similar sites in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas. This large region, including a part of the great interior plains, was indeed for early man a big game hunting area of the North American continent.

A new hunting site in this region, located in the southern part of Roosevelt County near Milnesand, New Mexico, about 40 miles south of Portales, is here described. This locality, containing artifacts, a bison-bone bed and charred bison bones, is in a sand-dune region about 3 miles northeast of Milnesand post office. (The name Milnesand is derived from “mill in the sand,” a term formerly applied to a windmill and watering place located near the present town.) The first artifacts obtained from the locality were collected by Ted Williamson of Milnesand.

Although the basketry of many parts of California is known ethnographically and a few archaeological descriptions are appearing, the textiles of the Santa Barbara region remain relatively unknown. The ethnographic information available on the historic occupants, the Chumash, has been limited by the early missionization and subsequent disintegration of native culture, and most archaeological reports of basketry from this area have been sketchy. It is hoped that the following discussion of twined water bottles from archaeological sites in northern Santa Barbara County will supply some needed information and indicate the relation of these water bottles to twined ones of the Great Basin and Southwest.

A few of the specimens described herein have been pictured by Kroeber (1925: 561, PL 53) with a mention of some weaves employed in their manufacture.

With one possible exception, all of the specimens are from the Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Santa Barbara County. This range, stretching in a general northwest-southeast direction, is bounded on the north by the arid Cuyama Valley and on the south by the precipitous Sisquoc Canyon.

Wildrose Canyon, the site of the summer headquarters of the National Park Service for Death Valley National Monument, is on the west side of the Panamint Range in eastern California. The canyon, which runs in a roughly east-west direction, is about 13 miles long. Structurally, its width widens from its mouth where it measures less than 1/4 of a mile inland to a maximum of 11/2 miles and then narrows again in its upper reaches. There is a general upslope of the valley floor from about 4000 to over 8000 feet in elevation.

The valley is flanked on either side with rugged mountains which rise steeply above its floor. Their sides are furrowed with many gulches and narrow canyons and the lower slopes are piled high with rock debris. The uneven valley floor is covered with boulders, gravel, sand, and silt washed down from the surrounding heights. Branch canyons extend back into the mountains at many points, dwindling to narrow gorges in their upper reaches.

The area dealt with in this report is that portion of northwestern Sonora and southwestern Arizona bounded on the southwest by the Gulf of California, on the west by the Colorado River valley below the junction of the Gila River, on the north by the Gila River valley, and on the east by an imaginary line from the vicinity of Gila Bend south along the western edge of the Papago Reservation and thence southwest to the mouth of the Sonoyta River on the Gulf of California (Fig. 106). Within this area Sauer has suggested a boundary between the Piman-speaking people of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, and the Yuman-speaking tribes of the lower Colorado and Gila River valleys, based on linguistic affiliations described in early historical sources (Sauer 1934, map). On archaeological evidence Gifford has suggested that the locality between Punta La Cholla and the mouth of the Sonoyta River represented a point on an ethnic boundary (Gifford 1946: 221).

Every radiocarbon sample that an archaeologist turns in to a physicist for dating has its particular story to tell. The story is likely to be much longer and more devious than is easily expressed in a simple number. I am a little worried about our use of “lists” of radiocarbon dates in view of the recent treatment of some dates from Cape Denbigh.

During the field seasons of 1948, 1949, and 1950 we secured from the Denbigh Flint layer no more than a small pillbox full of charcoal. When this was submitted to Libby, at the University of Chicago laboratory, he regretfully notified us that the sample was not enough to coat a cylinder. Our 4th field trip to Cape Denbigh, in 1952, was made for the express purpose of scraping together enough organic matter for analysis of the oldest cultural layer.

In a recent issue of American Antiquity (Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 101-11, 1954) Thomas Lee states that several geologists reject wave action as the cause of the worn condition of some of the blades found at the Sheguiandah site in Ontario, Canada. This fosters doubt in his mind that I am right in assigning wave action as the cause of the worn condition of artifacts from George Lake 1, 25 miles to the east. This is a matter of crucial importance for the site because it involves the only method of establishing the contemporaneity of cultural material with construction of the beach by waves at an elevation of 297 feet above the present level of Lake Huron.

The most secure support of wave action at George Lake is the abrasion of the artifacts to the same degree and in the same manner as the cobbles of the beach itself. Both are in the condition described by sedimentologists as subangular. It is also important that the aretes of the implements are in most cases much smoother than the surfaces of the flake scars. Other facts are consistent with this interpretation.

One is forced to admire Quimby's enterprise (1954, American Antiquity, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 317-31) in attempting not only a characterization but a mapping of the paleogeography of North America at 7 stages between 8500 B.C. and 500 B.C. Among other things it shows a healthful awareness that the physical environment cannot be considered a constant even in the relatively short time span generally accepted for the New World archaeological record. Fruitful investigations can be pursued through coordinating the geological, climatological, paleoecological, and archaeological evidence over extensive regions, and this tentative essay may provide a needed impetus.

On the other hand, certain of the hypotheses presented in this paper seem to me to demand immediate examination before they become established dogma to burden subsequent investigations. I shall not question the eclectic use of 2 main chronological frameworks, those provided by Antevs and by radiocarbon dating, though the former, at least, is hardly established fact (Burma 1950).

I read Aschmann's comments with great interest, welcome the opportunity to reply to them, and wish also to add some comments I have received by letter from others.

I used the terminology of Antevs, but not his chronological framework, which is quite different from that presented tentatively by me. In fact, I feel certain that Antevs would be much rougher in his assessment than Aschmann.

My grievous remark on climate stems from ignorance and my impression that the cool periods followed the glacial advances. Among the implications of such an idea are that somehow additional precipitation in high latitudes caused the glacier to grow and this in turn somehow produces in varying degrees a cool climate locally, probably somewhat dependent upon the magnitude of the icecap. I suppose that such factors as prevailing wind direction, tracks of high and low pressure areas and positions of large bodies of water are among the variables that would have to be considered.

The evidence for locating the find of sheet copper, reported by R. E. Smith (1944) and commented on by John L. Sorenson in American Antiquity (1954), has proved thoroughly unreliable.

Since the publication of the above find, which included 11 pottery vessels and other artifacts, I have learned that the pottery most probably did not come from San Miguel Ixtahuacan at all. Nothing even vaguely similar has been unearthed from that vicinity. It is much more closely related to material from the Salcaja-Momostenango region, as I pointed out in the article. Therefore, if the informant and original owner of the collection gave inaccurate information as to the provenience of the collection, he ma'y also have been in error as to copper being found in one of the above pre-Classic vessels.

This material was published in order to preserve the lot as a whole for students, because without regard to its provenience the pottery appeared to be a homogeneous collection, presumably found in a single grave or various graves of the same ceramic period.

True burins that are directly comparable with a number of Old World types have recently appeared as prominent elements of a number of colleotions from the American arctic. Their areal distribution from Alaska (Giddings 1951) to Greenland (Knuth 1952; Meldgaard 1952) and possibly Labrador (Harp 1951: 215; 1953: 41), in a variety of coastal and inland sites, shows that the trait was not a novelty nor a figment of chance, but an integral part of several North American flint complexes. In certain instances, and particularly at the Alaskan sites, they are accompanied by other implements typologically similar to Old World Paleolithic and Mesolithic forms (Giddings 1951); elsewhere, they are found in complexes that may be more distinctively American (Knuth 1952; Meldgaard 1952; Harp 1951). Oddly enough, basal grinding, parallel flaking, fluted points, and other early American traits such as Oblique and Eden Yuma points, are more conspicuous in the “Mesolithic” Denbigh Flint complex than they are in stages found farther east, for which there is less evidence for close connections with the Old World. However, Harp reports a fluted point in a Newfoundland assemblage (1951: 209).

The current status of archaeological investigation in the northern Puget Sound region is one of demarcation and elucidation of problems. Lately, the approach has been toward the accumulation of descriptive information on sites and artifacts. The San Juan Island group, at the southern extremity of Georgia Strait, is increasingly important in this process. The extensive cist or cairn burial development at Armadale Valley is merely one of a number of adjacent sites in the intricate complex of headlands and inlets formed by Westcott, Garrison, and Mitchell bays of the northwestern portion of the San Juan Island.

The major group of cairns lies atop a low rocky bluff, overlooking Westcott Bay to the east and the narrow but protected thoroughfare of Mosquito Pass to the west. Immediately below the site, at the base of the bluff is a deep and extensive shell midden.

The rectangular clay bowl with a ring base shown in Figure 108 was unearthed in the area of the Old Line (Linea Vieja) in Costa Rica. It is 8.5 cm. high, 13.0 cm. wide, with an overall length of 18.5 cm., and is made of a well-fired clay painted in red. We consider this find most important as it appears to confirm the influence of foreign cultures in the area of the Old Line on the Atlantic side of the Republic of Costa Rica.

The receptacle of this bowl has lateral ornamentation consisting of 2 distinct groups. The first group, at the lower part of Figure 108 a, depicts the legs of a man with calves and feet in an upright position. This peculiar detail was probably used in order to secure the esthetic arrangement of the border decoration. We see the male genitals and on the thigh of each leg the figure of a bird.

The Aleut burial cave described in this report was found by the authors during field work in July, 1952. As the site was left entirely undisturbed, the information may be useful to parties programming future work in the Aleutian Islands area. Further, it may be possible on the strength of this description alone to relate the burial occurrence to known cultural traits. At the very least it will point out the existence of an intensely interesting isolated feature. The cave is located at the base of a steep sea cliff on Kanaga Island at latitude 51° 43’ 44” N. and longitude 177° 31'10” W. (All locations are from the Army Map Service map of Kanaga Island, Sheet no. 3 of 5, scale 1:25,000.) A small kitchen midden was noted a short distance south of the cave.

Well before the Spanish conquest the Incas were drinking their chicha out of big wooden cups, usually called keros. The earliest ones have simple incised designs only, but later an elaborate art developed involving lively representative designs executed in lacquer inlay in several colors. The lacquered keros continued to be made almost throughout the colonial period for use by the caciques and other comparatively wealthy Indians, and numerous specimens are known depicting people in 17th and 18th century costumes. Most of the specimens in our museums were not excavated but were acquired from descendants of the original owners who had kept them as heirlooms over a period of several centuries. While it seems not unlikely that the lacquer technic was developed before the Spanish conquest, we have no really satisfactory proof of its age, since all the pieces found in indisputably preconquest archaeological context are of the unpainted incised type. No wooden keros of any type have been found in any context suggesting a pre-Inca date for them.

A body of literature has grown up on the archaeology of the American Arctic region in recent years concerning a core and blade industry. Nelson (1937) and Rainey (1939), who were among the first writers to note the evidences there of this industry, called attention to the occurrence of “prismatic flakes” in association with prepared flint cores. The first use in the Eskimo area of the equally singular term, “lamellar flake,” to my knowledge appears in Wintemberg's (1939: 89-91) paper on the Dorset Culture, wherein we find the term “lamellar flakes” used in ostensibly the same descriptive sense as “prismatic flakes.” Leechman (1943: 370) discusses “laminate blades” at a later date in the Cape Dorset sites under the heading “narrow flaked blades.” Although Johnson (1946) still later refers to “prismatic flakes,” the die was cast and the term “lamellar flake” was adopted and accepted by some in Arctic archaeology.

The custom of pressing textiles against the wet clay in the process of pottery making has a wide distribution, extending from the Eastern Woodlands in the United States to the heart of Asia. The archaeological specimens of this type of pottery enable us to reconstruct the textile technics where the textiles themselves no longer exist.

In my attempts to do such textile reconstructions from pottery impressions I have used a number of different methods: (1) water-based clay, (2) clay made with similar temper and color as the original pottery, (3) plasticene, and (4) latex mold. For the present I will limit myself to the last of these, the latex-mold method of textile reproduction. Due to the special qualities a of the latex the mold that is produced can be stretched to twice its original sire; this has the advantage of making the textile impression easier to study.