60 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 1S2 



recent times, except for sheet-wash erosion of humus and tiny soil particles, ac- 

 celerated by plowing in the past century. [Witthoft,' 1952, pp. 467^68.] 



The majority of the Shoop tools were manufactured from Onon- 

 daga chert, a type found extensively in western New York and the 

 Ontario Peninsula. Very few finished tools were made on the spot 

 and most of them appear to have been transported into the area. 



Witthoft (1952, p. 471) said that— 



the flints found at this site are the most weather-resistant of any used in the 

 area. . . . Nevertheless all of the chips and tools from the site are very deeply 

 weathered compared to any tools of the same stone known from other industries. 



Recently, the Gordon Collection, the basis of the Shoop site report 

 and now in the U.S. National Musemn, cat. Nos. 402467-402547, was 

 examined for this change in the exterior nature of the objects. Only 

 seven specimens, cat. Nos. 402496, 402535, 402536, 402539, 402543, 

 402544, and 402545, showed any signs of weathering and these were 

 very slight, except that a crude chip, cat. No. 402543, was covered 

 with a creamy yellowish- colored coating. All of the other objects 

 in the collection appeared as bright as though they were manufactured 

 recently. 



Contrariwise, McCary (1951 b, p. 11) reported that there was some 

 weathering on the implements from the Williamson site that were 

 manufactured from a "variegated chert with cream, brown, blue, and 

 red dominating." Those manufactured from the yellow and brown 

 chert showed little change, if any, on the exterior surface, as neither 

 of these flints is plentiful in the area. 



Two other Early Man sites from Alabama have been recently re- 

 ported upon by Soday (1954) and Kleine (1953). The Quad site 

 contains an assemblage of artifacts which resemble, in part, the Clovis, 

 the Lindenmeier, the Parrish, and the Shoop, and other archaic ma- 



' I concur with Witthoft and his feeling toward the use of the Midwestern Taxonomic 

 System in the Eastern Woodlands today : "I lind myself using terms from this set, such 

 as component and focus, hut merely as rough levels apart from their strict classificatory 

 sense. In the East, with only few exceptions, cultural classifications following the Mid- 

 western Taxonomic System are not the results of application of a special technique but are 

 the archeologist's impressionistic orderings done up in a scholastic form ; the soundness of 

 such orderings is a factor of the common sense of the archeologist, and would never result 

 from the blind application of statistical methods to trait lists, which we so often identify 

 with tills routine of analysis. Since I am here dealing with only a few scraps out of the 

 whole culture of a long-extinct community, I use other terms which may need clarification 

 even though they have been in general use for some time. . . . 



"I prefer to use the term 'culture' in the archeology for the total recoverable remains 

 and traces of a set of nearly identical communities ; this is a 'focus' in the Midwestern 

 System. An Industry Is a series of objects which seem to be the result of one consistent 

 manufacturing pattern. Most cultures include a variety of Industries, as a bone-tool 

 industry, a pecked-stone industry, a pottery industry, and perhaps several chipped-stone 

 Industries. A site may have been occupied by a number of different communities at 

 diffeient times, and so may include several components, each of which is thought of as a 

 unit in the archeological history. A component is the local, precisely deliuable unit of a 

 culture. An assemblage is the total of objects found at a single site, and the term car- 

 ries some Implication of unity, although it does not necessarily mean they are to be 

 considered as of one component. . . ." (Witthoft, 1952, pp. 464-465.) 



