The cemetery covers the period between the eighth and fourth centuries b.c. The graves vary considerably in the amount of grave goods they contain, from very poor graves to warrior graves containing weaponry (mostly axes and spears) to so-called princely graves containing body armor, helmets, weapons, horse-riding equipment, decorated bronze vessels (situlae), buckets, and great quantities of personal ornaments and ceramic vessels. Grave goods, especially those imported from or influenced by the Etruscan culture, indicate a distinguished and well-stratified community with very rich individuals at the top that flourished between the seventh and fifth centuries b.c.

Peter Turk

See also

Celts; Etruscan Archaeology

References

Wells, P.S. 1981. “The Emergence of an Iron Age Economy.” Bulletin of the American School of Prehistoric Research 33.

Stone, Doris Zemurray

(1909– )

Doris Stone was one of the pioneers of Central American archaeology. She was educated at Radcliffe College and conducted fieldwork in Honduras and costa rica while she was research associate for the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University and for the peabody museum, Harvard University.

Born the daughter of Samuel Zemurray, an early developer of the banana trade in Central America, Stone spent parts of her formative years in Honduras and Costa Rica. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, she was able to attend classes offered by Alfred M. Tozzer, Harvard’s specialist in Mayan archaeology. She was not encouraged to continue studying archaeology after receiving her undergraduate degree in 1930 and returned to New Orleans, her home town.

Stephen Williams (1986) identifies an unpublished study of Ulua Valley figurines that was filed at Tulane University in 1930 as Stone’s earliest known written work. In that same year, she donated a pottery figurine found near La Lima, Honduras, to Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Williams speculates that the figurine paper was completed for Tozzer’s senior research course. The date of the manuscript makes this theory plausible, but there is no sign of it in Tozzer’s papers, now in the archives of the Peabody Museum, or in the manuscript holdings of the Tozzer Library at Harvard University. It was not until much later that Stone was actively encouraged by Tozzer. Her early research was sponsored by the Middle American Research Institute (MARI) at Tulane University, of which her father was a supporter, and she was appointed an associate there in 1930. By 1934, she was publishing field reports based on her own work in Honduras in the MARI-affiliated journal, Maya Research. MARI also published her landmark comparative study of the Ulua marble vases (Stone 1938) that was based on collections in multiple institutions, including both MARI and the Peabody Museum.

When Honduran archaeology received renewed attention during the 1930s, Stone, already in the country, was instrumental in encouraging the interests of first MARI and later the Peabody Museum. Stone’s own approach centered on identifying linguistic groups described in the sixteenth century with archaeological remains, which encountered some resistance on the part of the director of the Peabody’s Honduran expedition, william duncan strong. Despite the reservations of Harvard archaeologists about Stone, which is well documented in Tozzer’s correspondence at the Peabody, by the end of the 1930s she had established herself as an authority on Honduran archaeology. Although Tozzer, in his “Foreword” to her first monograph on Honduran archaeology, went so far as to state that “her indefatigable energy, her enthusiasms and her intuitive impressions have, at times, been handicaps” (Stone 1941, v), he acknowledged that the handicaps he ascribed to her “have all contributed to the ultimate success of her work.” He cited as the foundation of her strength as an authority on Honduran archaeology Stone’s laboring “for long periods and in all possible seasons” in the country. The same claim to authority was featured by Stephen Williams in his introduction to her general study of Central American archaeology: “her numerous journeys on mule