Robert F. Heizer

The Natural World of the California Indians

This information-packed guide describes patterns of village life, and covers such subjects as Indian tools and artifacts, hunting techniques, and food.

Agriculture and the Theocratic State in Lowland Southeastern Mexico

Shifting cultivation, which is the technique commonly followed by tropical agriculturists, while wasteful of land use in requiring a long fallowing period, will support variable population densities depending upon crops grown, farming tools used, and soil fertility. Twenty persons per square kilometer is accepted as the density for the region around the Preclassic La Venta site which was begun about 800 B.C. and abandoned about 400 B.C. The occupation area of the La Venta culture group is believed to lie between the Coatzacoalcos and Tonala rivers and amounts to about 900 square kilometers, thus yielding a population figure of about 18,000, of which 3600 are family heads. The total man-days of labor required to build the La Venta site is estimated to be 1,100,000, and the four major rebuildings of the site features are suggested as having been done at completion of 52 and 104 year calendar rounds.

Preliminary Report on the Leonard Rockshelter Site Pershing County, Nevada

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.

The California Indians : a source book

General Surveys Archaelogy Historical Accounts of Native Californians Ethnology: Material Culture and Economy Ethnology: Social Culture Reference Bibliography Index

The Colossi of Memnon Revisited: Recent research has established the source of the stone of the two 720-ton statues at Thebes

The only areas that are likely to have furnished the original stone for the Colossi of Memnon are near Cairo (Gebel el Ahmar), Aswan, and possibly Silsileh. Neutron activation analysis of samples from the colossi shows them to be distinctly different from samples obtained from the three known quarries near Aswan and from the quarries near Silsileh and Edfu, but very similar to samples obtained from Gebel el Ahmar. Petrographic analysis of colossi and quarry samples also provides strong evidence that the colossi came from Gebel el Ahmar. The blocks used by the engineers of Septimius Severus to reconstruct the north colossus were shown by neutron activation analysis to have originated from a deposit other than Gebel el Ahmar. The composition of these blocks conformed with samples taken from the quarries 8 and 9 km north of Edfu (the quartzite deposit closest to Thebes) and from the Aswan quarries. Petrographic analysis associated these reconstruction blocks with Edfu but not with Aswan. Neutron activation analysis of other artifacts in the area of the colossi indicates that they also came from Cairo rather than Aswan.

The Background of Thomsen's Three-Age System

IT IS GOOD CUSTOM, but not always good history, to attribute to one person the credit for a great, new, and original idea. The man usually given the honor for devising the concept of the three major technological stages of mans culture is Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, who was curator of the Museum of Northern Antiquities (later the Danish National Museum) from 1816 to 1865. Thomsen first outlined, in 1836, in the preface to his museum guidebook 1 the division of human history, as evidenced in implements, into three chronologically successive ages: Stone, Bronze, and Iron. This Three-age theory represents an effort to formulate a chronology of mans past in terms of industrial stages rather like the socioeconomic stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

Archaeological Dating by Chemical Analysis of Bone

THE THEORY underlying a chemical dating system is quite simple. It rests upon the assumption that within human or animal bones, subsequent to burial, certain chemical changes occur in a progressive manner such that there is a continuous accumulation or depletion of substance. Chemical anaylses will then provide a series of figures with which the corresponding times and dates can be equated. Throughout the past several years the writers have been engaged in an attempt to determine whether the above theoretical approach can be justified in practice. They have subjected to various types of analysis several hundred bones from a series of nearly thirty archaeological sites within the state of California and have supplemented this series with shorter ones from the southwestern states, from New York, and from Kentucky. The results, from the standpoint of dating, are presented here. In order to construct an adequate dating system based upon chemical data two prerequisites must be satisfied. First there must be a continuous numerical scale, derived from the chemical analyses, according to which the data from a series of sites may be arranged. Such a scale, ranging from the earliest to the most recent times, will give us by itself the relative sequence of the sites. Secondly this scale must be tied, at least at two points, into the flow of chronological or clock time in order that we may get the absolute sequence of the sites and, by interpolation, thus permit the investigator to fix a date for each site. In so far as our investigations have taken us there is nothing in the chemical data per se which will permit the satisfaction of the second prerequisite. On the other hand different lines of approach make the task possible. With respect to the most recent period there is historical or protohistorical information which enables us to set the lower time limit, as it were, of the latest material. For the prehistoric period we are now in possession of sufficient key dates obtained by the radiocarbon method to pin down a minimum of sites with considerable accuracy. Dating by carbon-14 must therefore be the significant point of reference as far as absolute time is concerned. Since chemical determinations of bone from our group of California sites is the most extensive of which we have knowledge, it will serve as a test series. There are twenty-eight sites, for two of which (SJo-68 and Mnt-282) we have

The Direct-Historical Approach in California Archaeology

THE field of California archaeology has long been considered an example of unproductive and timeless culture. This judgment has hardly been a fair one, yet the fault lay not with the anthropological public but rather with the local archaeologists, since field work was rare, intermittent, and unplanned. No scientific institution has ever found it possible or deemed it advisable to institute a long-term archaeological survey of the area. However, the past ten years have seen the recording of sufficient data to demand a retraction of the older viewpoint which offered little promise in future work. In 1929, David Banks Rogers published his volume on the archaeology of the Santa Barbara region;1 Olsons preliminary report followed a year later.2 Both treatises are in essential agreement as to the type and succession of prehistoric cultures on the Santa Barbara coast.3 In 1929, Schenck and Dawson produced their report on the archaeology of the northern San Joaquin Valley which rather hesitantly advanced their view that there had been certain cultural change in the Stockton-Lodi area.4 In the area immediately to the north (the Cosumnes Valley) the Sacramento Junior College began, in 1933, a long-range program with the aim of defining the archaeological configuration in the lower Sacramento Valley. Their careful work is still in progress and, as time has progressed, this institution under the direction of President J. B. Lillard has accumulated a great mass of data and collections upon which only preliminary reports have appeared.5 Complete and full recording of single site excavations are in part completed, but it is difficult to find publication outlet. The broad archaeological outlines are emerging; when these have been further tested and their horizontal, i.e. distributional, extensions can be estimated, there may be more demand for complete site-by-site archaeological reports. Beginning with W. R. Wedels work on the San Francisco Bay shell mounds in 1935, the University of California at Berkeley has been continuously active. Its interests have coincided with those of the Sacra-

Magnetometer Evidence of a Structure within the La Venta Pyramid

The pyramid at La Venta, Tabasco, Mexico, was surveyed in May 1969 with a high-sensitivity difference magnetometer. The general pattern of the magnetic map is one of low (10-gamma) radial anomalies, which reflect the ridge and gully topography of the pyramid, with a larger magnetic high area (+30 gammas) centered 25 meters south and 10 meters east of the center of the pyramid. The anomalous region near the top has been interpreted with the aid of computer-calculated anomalies from three-dimensional rectangular blocks. The major high is probably associated with a basalt structure that rises to within 1 to 2 meters of the surface. A possible form for this structure was found to be a 10-meter-square horizontal platform with walls along its northern and eastern margin.

Curved Single-Piece Fishhooks of Shell and Bone in California

NOTWITHSTANDING the numerous published works which have specifically or incidentally treated with the curved fishhooks of California, there is available at present no single source which draws together the accessible information and cites the relevant bibliography. The present article seeks to remedy this situation and seems justified on the grounds of making available the California data to local workers and to those who are further interested in the near identity of some of the California types with those of the Chilean coast in South America, on the one hand, and with those of the Oceanian area, on the other. Within North America the distribution of single-piece curved bone fishhooks is spotty, and a theoretical problem of historical community of these various occurrences also awaits analysis. Curved hooks of shell and/or bone occur in California in archaeological sites on the Santa Barbara Channel islands (San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz), on the islands farther south and more distant from the mainland shore (San Nicolas, San Clemente, San Miguel), and on the coast from Point Concepcion to Santa Ana. Bone hooks are known from the lower Sacramento Valley, and again from coastal shellmounds in Humboldt County in northwestern California. These three areas of curved fishhooks (south central coast, Central Valley, and northwestern coast) appear to represent isolated occurrences, similar objects being thus far unreported or absent in the intervening regions. The materials for shell fishhooks consist primarily of abalone (Haliotis) and mussel (Mytilus). A third shell, Norrisia, was used rarely for hooks on Santa Cruz, San Nicolas, and San Clemente islands. All shells used for making hooks are iridescent, the luster, no doubt, acting as a lure for the fish. Bone was employed more rarely for making hooks and, because of its dull luster, we may be certain that bait or a lure was attached to these. Even stone was occasionally employed to make fishhooks, as attested by the reference to chipped and polished stone examples by Nelson (1936, p. 202) and Bryan (1931, p. 183). Shell and bone circular hooks vary in size from one-quarter inch to about three inches in diameter. The method of manufacture of the curved shell fishhooks of the Santa Barbara region has been adequately treated by several authors (Robinson, 1942, pp. 60-1; Heye, 1921, pp. 135-6, P1. XCIX; Rust, 1907, P1. 31; Rau, 1884, Fig. 212; Irwin, 1946, p. 19; Schumacher, 1875; idem, 1877, P1. 22; Yates 1900, Fig. 378; Gruvel, 1928, pp. 102-3, Fig. 87; Woodward, 1929, pp. 45-6, P1. 22). A question may be raised here concerning statements by some of the authors quoted above who refer to the use of the pumpdrill or bowdrill for perforating the shell discs preparatory to shaping the hook. The pumpdrill or bowdrill may have been, anciently, a part of Chumash culture, but there is no clear evidence for its presence either in older or more recent times. The palm-rotated shaft drill illustrated by Nelson (1936, Fig. 3, b) would serve very well for drilling the shell ring fishhook blanks. Several authors who have treated the south central California coast hooks have segregated them on the basis of shape, depending upon the form of the shank and tip. Table 29 presents a concordance of type designations employed by other authors. Shell hooks of Types 1 and 2 (it is not possible to segregate the number of each from the printed descriptions) are of very general distribution on the mainland and island sites.