492 ANNUAL, REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 5 



refuse deposits. This work, if not absolutely finished anywhere, 

 has at least been carried a long way forward, especially in the South- 

 western United States, including California ; it is well under way 

 in the Eastern States; and has recently been begun also in Mexico, 

 where it offers and has already yielded promising results,^® 



And what, it will be asked, are these results in which so much 

 confidence appears to be placed? Briefly, the answer is twofold: 

 We have, for one thing, made certain that some of our refuse deposits 

 do nearly everywhere record definite modifications and, as a rule, 

 advancements of the culture process; and, for the other, we have 

 made almost equally certain that the earliest developmental stages 

 represented by the bottommost levels of debris are not truly 

 primitive. 



More specifically, concerning the first point, it has been reported 

 by many observers over a long period that within the ceramic areas 

 of both North and South America there exist refuse deposits, some 

 of which contain pottery while others do not.^^ Such a condition 

 warrants the inference that the two occurrences are not of the same 

 age, though it scarcely indicates which is the older. This question 

 is settled, however, by the fact that refuse deposits have been ex- 

 cavated in scattered sections of the United States, from the Atlantic 

 to the Pacific, the lower levels of which register the positive absence 

 of ceramics and the probable absence also of maize culture with its 

 associated features, while the upper levels yield all of these elements, 

 occasionally, as in the pueblo area, strung out in a long succession 

 of graded steps marking presumably the whole period of human 

 occupation.^^ Whether or not anything similar has yet been found 

 in South America is uncertain; but, in any case, the condition un- 

 doubtedly exists stratigraphically, as it is known to do geograph- 

 ically. The essential significance of this preceramic culture stratum 

 seems to be that most of the United States at one time, like most of 

 Canada today, was inhabited solely by a roaming population which 

 lived entirely off the natural products of the land, and that the maize 

 complex with its pottery, as well as certain flaked, chipped, and 

 ground-stone implements, by slow stages crept over the country from 

 the south and had already reached the St. Lawrence or its approxi- 



s^Vaillant, G. C, Excavations at Zacatenco. Anthrop. Tapers Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., 

 vol. 32, pt. 1. 



" Personal observations by F. G. Speck and N. C. Nelson at Tadoussac, Quebec 

 I'rovince ; Rau, Charles, Smithsonian Contr. Knowl., vol. 25. p. 225, 18S4 ; Hawkes, E. W. 

 and Linton, R., Pre-Lenape culture in New Jersey, Amer. Anthrop., vol. 19, p. 487, 1917 ; 

 Linn6, S., op. cit., pp. 52, 59, 271. 



=* Harrington, M. R., The rockshelter of Armonk, N. Y., Anthrop. Papers Amer. Mus. 

 Nat. Hist., vol. 3, pp. 125-36, 1909 ; Nelson, N. C, Contributions to the archaeology of 

 Mammoth Cave, Ky. (1917) and Chronology in Florida (1918), Anthrop. Papers Amer. 

 Mus. Nat. Hist., vol. 22, pis. I and II ; Harrington, M. R., Tlie Ozark Bluff Dwellers, 

 Amer. Anthrop., vol. 26, no. 1, p. 12, 1924; Roberts, F. H. H., Jr., Bull. 92, Bur. Amer. 

 Ethnol., pp. 1-9, 1929. 



