It is a splendid thing for man of the present to take time to stabilize his mind to contemplating the achievements of tribes inhabiting our continent as a prologue to the affairs of the present. Where is the brash critic to persist in the claim that the natives of America have no original elements of “civilization” either from the early or late past, or in the present? The Cherokee have provided an answer. Contemporary literature has amassed the evidence nor alone in the series of volumes from the University of Oklahoma Press, but in prose and poetry known throughout the nation. It offers a compendious chapter in the epic of America. Each additional study adds a paragraph of importance to the whole. The study to follow contributes a detail of existing knowledge of the art-crafts of the Cherokee. As such it will prove to be another source reference to the Cherokee way of life in art and its expression in concrete form. The utilities have been and still are to Indians a means of finding outlet for their aesthetic urges. Art and crafts are merged in the output. Other fields lie open for further attempts to perform its functions in national life by issuing successive publications dealing with its cultural material, thus laying foundations for that basic teaching we fondly call Americanism. FRANK G. SPECK Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1952 ROOT RUNNER BASKETRY The association of root-runner basket forms in America would show a number of instances of use of a “Rod” as a one rod foundation for coiled baskets occurring originally in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and on the plains.[1] This technologically simple form of basket building material has implications bearing upon the age and area theory that challenges attention on a wider scale. Apart from the coiling process, a single rod construction appears in the Southeast in wicker work. What conclusions a broader study of single rod basketry (to which class the root runner series belongs) in any of its constructional forms, whether in coiling or wicker work, would lead to is quite beyond the purpose of this article.