338 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1951 



contemplated and perhaps even now are under way. The first series 

 of measurements by the Lamont Geological Observatory at Columbia 

 University was announced in Science, vol. 114, No. 2970, in November 

 1951. 



From the standpoint of archeology, most of the dates reported thus 

 far have been fairly satisfactory, but in a number of instances' there 

 appears to be a contradiction between the archeological evidence and 

 the age obtained from the carbon-14 tests. One factor to be consid- 

 ered in this connection is that the older material appears to be more 

 consistent than that of relatively recent times, and even though the 

 error in the method may make a difference of several hundred years 

 in the actual chronology, the results are very helpful and will aid 

 materially in making the syntheses of cultural relationships and devel- 

 opments that are essential to an understanding of past history. For 

 many people greatest interest probably attaches to the archeological 

 remains that fall within what may be called geologic time. The re- 

 sults in this Early Man category are in some respects as surprising as a 

 few of those in other fields, but on the whole they are reasonably 

 satisfactory. 



In the United States the age of the well-known Folsom complex 

 caused considerable comment when the figure pertaining to the type 

 site was released. As a matter of fact, that discussion has continued 

 actively to the present. Unfortunately many of the arguments it 

 produced were not necessary because the announced date was not that 

 of the culture-bearing horizon of the Folsom complex but that of a 

 fire pit in the fill of a secondary channel that had cut through the 

 original deposit of bison bones and artifacts. Such was known at the 

 time when the first announcement was made, but unfortunately the 

 explanation accompanying the date was not clear. If, as the geolo- 

 gists who have examined this site maintained, the cultural stratum was 

 of very late Pleistocene or early Kecent age (Brown, 1929; Bryan, 

 1937), the date of 4,283 ±250 ^ years obviously was wrong or else the 

 geologists were greatly mistaken in their identification of the deposits. 

 Subsequently material from a Folsom horizon at Lubbock, Tex., was 

 tested and a carbon-14 date of 9,883 ±350 years was obtained. The 

 latter more closely approximates the magnitude estimated for Folsom 

 on geologic evidence. The deposits at Lubbock, in the opinion of 

 Dr. E. H. Sellards of the Texas Memorial Museum and his associates, 

 correlate closely with those at the site in the Black Water Draw near 

 Clovis, N. Mex., which Dr. Ernst Antevs has identified as belonging 

 to a pluvial period which he believes corresponds to the end of the 

 Pleistocene and has estimated the age as being from 10,000 to 13,000 



* The errors indicated for all dates are standard deviations based solely on the error of 

 counting random events. Other errors probably are involved and the true error will be 

 somewhat greater. 



