52 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 182 



"Wliile digging a septic tank farther down the hill, Mr. Martin 

 came across the remains of fires, two hearth areas, 7 feet beneath the 

 present surface. He wondered about them but not being too inter- 

 ested, the charcoal contents were destroyed. A further record of 

 early times went the way of the dodo. 



Next in the chronological scale comes "Yuma man." Sauer (1944, 

 pp. 538-539) has this to say about him : 



Yuman man lived well into postglacial time, and his ai-rival has been thought 

 to present no difficult time problems. However, recent studies in Nebraska are 

 indicating a greater age for the culture of Yuma hunters than has hitherto 

 been accepted. . . . 



The Nebraska investigators agree in considering the Yuma hunters to have 

 been plainsmen contemporary with the Folsom ijeople of the Rocky Moimtain 

 border. There is little doubt that the Yuman culture survived well after the 

 Folsom one had disappeared. The evidence, however, is becoming formidable 

 that Yuman goes back as far as Folsom. The Yuman people fashioned the fine 

 leaf blades that have so often been compared with the Solutrean blades of 

 Europe, but in their art the New World craftsmen clearly surpassed those of 

 the Old World. On the record as it now stands, Yuman predates Solutrean by 

 an uncomfortable margin. The origin of Yuman culture is most perplexing. 



Pre-Folsom hunters must also be considered. . . . 



These early hunting remains are found in localities that at present are semi- 

 arid to arid but at the time of occupation were humid. The sedimentary and 

 biotic evidence indicates that they belong to a well developed pluvial period, and 

 I know of no climatologic basis for postulating a postglacial pluvial period. 

 Except Sandia, they have not been determined stratigraphically as pre-Folsom, 

 but they are as old and the points are cruder than, and suggestive of Folsom. 

 Nothing resembling the fluting of the Folsom points appears in European arche- 

 ology and it has been thought, therefore, that this may be a New World inven- 

 tion developed out of more generalized points of an earlier, also western hunting 

 culture. 



The problem of antiquity is raised by yet other finds of early man. Gladwin 

 has pointed out the position of ancient non-projectile and non-blade-making 

 cultures to the south and east of the main range of the ancient hunters and has 

 suggested justly that their position farther inside the New World indicates that 

 they preceded the hunters. Such material lacks the sharply diagnostic qualities 

 of Folsom and Yuma,^ is decidedly more primitive, and belonged to people that 

 were gatherers rather than hunters. It is difiioult to see how such apparently un- 

 warlike folk could have forced their way through a wide development of tough 

 hunting peoples and taken their stations beyond them within the continent. . . . 



To this bystander it seems that the fight, first joined at Trenton in New 

 Jersey in the eighties, has been won at last, and that Abbott and Putnam are 

 vindicated. Pleistocene m<tn can no longer be denied [writer's italics] ; it is only 

 a question as to how far back his title extends in America, and that will not be 

 settled by p]nropean records. What does it matter that a skull of Cochise I or 

 Minnesota man can be brought within "the range of the modern American 



« Wormington (1957, pp. 1-3, 107) discusses the use of the term "Yuma or Yuman" and 

 states : "In more recent publications the term 'Yuma' is being less and less frequently used, 

 although there is some persistence of the regrettable practice of putting the word in 

 quotation marks and then continuing to use it in the same unwarranted fashion. This 

 certainly does nothing to clarify the situation, and it is to be hoped that this term will 

 be abandoned altogether." 



