208 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL. 65 
bone spur tip only, was found by Peabody and Farabee in a mound 
in Mississippi.* 
Beyond Coahuila the spear thrower has not been recorded south 
of northern Arizona and southeastern Utah, except from caves on 
the upper Gila.? In the Utah-Arizona dictrict, however, the atlatl 
was in very common use among the Basket Makers; but it has never 
yet been reliably reported from any true cliff-dwelling or pueblo site. 
The extreme northerly occurrence of the two-finger spear thrower 
is from the guano caves of Churchill County, Nevada;* while the 
farthest west is from Santa Barbara, California, in the form of a 
speciinen collected by Vancouver and now in the British Museum.* 
What conclusions are to be drawn from this very extended yet 
partially disconnected range? It can hardly be believed that so 
peculiar and highly specialized a device could have originated inde- 
pendently in the several different regions. It is possible that it spread 
outward from Mexico; to Florida and the Gulf coast, via the Antilles; 
to Utah via northern Mexico and the Rio Grande, and from Utah 
north and west into Nevada; to California via the lower Colorado 
River and the coast, perhaps thence inland to Nevada. Further ex- 
ploration of caves, where the atlatl, being a wooden implement, is 
only likely to be preserved, may serve to fill some of the gaps in 
these seemingly improbable migration routes. — 
A second supposition, and in some ways a more reasonable one, is 
that the spear thrower was an implement of very wide distribution 
in early times, that it was superseded throughout most of its range by 
the development or introduction of the bow, and that it persisted 
only in certain regions where local conditions favored its retention. 
That the spear thrower is a device not out of place in very primitive 
forms of culture is shown by its appearance in the French caves and 
among the aborigines of Australia and New Guinea; that it was 
capable of persisting into much higher civilizations is proved by its 
use among the Nahua and Maya. 
Porrery 
We found potsherds and whole vessels in each of the three Basket 
Maker caves examined; they were in every case, however, of the 
wares typical of the cliff-dwellings and pueblos of the region; and 
they occurred in all instances in the surface sand overlying the 
levels from which the Basket Maker remains were taken. In the 
Basket Maker débris of occupancy and in the cists proper no single 
sherd was recovered. The only pot which might be assigned to that 
1 Peabody Museum Papers, vol. 111, no. 2, pl. xx. 
2 Hough, 1914, p. 21, and pl. 20, fig. 2. 
3 Information from Mr. Loud of the Affiliated Colleges Museum, San Francisco, Cal. 
* Krause, 1905, fig. 37. 
