In the Winter 1974 issue of The Journal of California Anthropology, Christopher Drover described his preliminary work on a method which uses growth rings from two species of archaeologically recovered Chione for deriving seasonality data, or the season(s) when food resources were exploited. Drover's method draws heavily on Barker's (1970) and Berry's (1972) studies of growth periodicity in Chione clams. The method is based on the idea that in both C. undatella and C. fluctifraga, the pelecypods' mantles generally contract and cease the secretion of calcium carbonate during the colder winter periods. When a shell's growth is relatively inactive, a semiopaque concentric annual groove will be externally visible. A winter death should be marked by such an incipient groove ("major groove," "disturbance groove," or "annual groove") at the ventral margin of a shell. Death at other seasons, it is argued, can be estimated from the shell's growth since the last winter groove was formed.

This report describes a game string and rabbit stick discovered cached together in the Borrego Valley of San Diego County. Perforated ceramic discs forming parts of the game string inspire the speculation that similarly shaped objects, including the so-called "spindle whorls" recovered in coastal southern California sites, functioned as procurement technology. Experimental archaeology does not support the hypothesis that the game string, along with the attached discs, functioned as a bola. Ethnographic notes on game strings and curved throwing sticks are also presented.

Native American athletes achieved their greatest recognition in modern sports during the period from the turn of the century through the 1920s (Oxendine 1988). Among the notables were several Californians. For instance, Antonio Lubo, Elmer Busch, and Peter Calac all served as gridiron captains under Coach "Pop" Warner at Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Koerper 2000), where at various times they were teammates of the legendary Jim Thorpe (Peterson n.d.; Steckbeck 1951). Calac was Luiseno, Busch was Pomo, and Lubo was a Santa Rosa Mountain Cahuilla.

Ornamental employment of Chestnut Cowry (Cypraea spadicea) shell artifacts in southern California prehistory included inlay work set into the rims of mortars and bowls. These and other observations are marshaled to develop circumstantial evidence pointing to a linkage of cowry shells with sex-based symbolism. More direct evidence from J. P. Harrington's notes connect the cowry symbolically to the vulva.

Rancho Park North: A San Dieguito - La Jollan Shellfish Processing Site in Coastal Southern California.Russell L. Kaldenberg. El Centro: Imperial Valley College Museum Society Occasional Paper No. 6, 1982, 216 pp., 50 figs., 37 tables (paper).

Prehistoric Sites in the Prado Basin, California: Regional Context and Significance Evaluation. Susan K. Goldberg and Jeanne E. Arnold. Los Angeles: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1988, xi + 132 pp., 4 figs., 8 tables, gratis (paper).

The primary purpose of this study is to describe these specimens and discuss their cultural associations, temporal placement, and the possible agents and routes of trade for the exotic effigies. Set against the near absence of Late Prehistoric anthropomorphic figurines from elsewhere in Orange County, these dozen artifacts, as well as figurines of the Northern Tradition found at CA-ORA-58, have important implications for the political and economic role of the Banning-Norris site, as well as its identification with the historically recorded village of Genga (Koerper et al. 1996).

Circumstantial evidence indicates that a number of southern California steatite effigies and effigy pipes of unusual composition (e.g., Burnett 1944) are probably forgeries, being either fantasy pieces or good pieces creatively altered for sale to antiquities dealers, collectors, and museums. A recent article by Georgia Lee (1993) focused on Robert Heizer's attempt to ferret out the hoaxers, and included correspondence among several scholars. Also reproduced were letters written by Herman F. Strandt, one of the three alleged culprits in this archaeological whodunit. The three, Strandt, Arthur R. Sanger, and O. T. Littleton, had all collected from sites and dealt commercially in artifacts. Whether Strandt, Sanger, and Littleton, either individually or as conspirators, faked prehistoric effigies is a question left unresolved by Lee (1993).

Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates for nine shell beads and two shell ornaments are used to test the application to Orange County of a temporal sequence developed for the Santa Barbara Channel region. Olivella cupped, Olivella oblique spire-removed, Olivella end-removed, Mytilus disc, and Megathura small square ring and Megathura oval ring beads/ornaments fell within time ranges predicted by the bead/ornament chronology developed by Chester King (1981, 1990) for the Chumash area. Olivella biplicata barrels and caps seem not to have been occurrences of King's Late Middle or Late periods in Orange County, but rather there appears to have been a switch to Gulf of California Olivella dama shells for local barrel and cap manufacture.

The diversity of functions proposed for chipped stone crescentics is mirrored by the variety of their shapes. Some crescentics are simply of lunate design (e.g., Tadlock 1966), while others (often called "eccentric crescentics") incorporate notches, "spurs," "legs," and tangs onto an underlying crescent form (Rogers 1966; Jertberg 1978,1986). Malcolm Rogers (1929) believed that crescentics of San Dieguito age served as hunting amulets. Other suggested functions include lateral bird bunts, surgical instruments, skinning or slicing tools, ornaments, specialized scrapers, waterfowl points capable of glancing off water, and tools for peeling and stripping (Davis and Panlaqui 1978:61). Crescentics are generally thought to be of early Holocene age (Wallace 1955; Tadlock 1966; Warren 1968).