Let me make some cultural arguments on behalf of identifying the Hopewell artifact Tom Bain offered for us http://www.explorehistory.org/cds/March/materials/act25.htm as a carolina parakeet. The Hopewells would have been *far* more familiar with the parakeet. Falcons would have been *far* more seldom seen. I just finished reading Richter's "The Trees," the first in a well-researched trilogy of the settling of Ohio by Europeans, set in the forest of southern Ohio in the early 19th century. Half a dozen times he mentions "gabby birds," referring to parakeets. At one point, a man setting off on a long trip tells his wife, "I'll catch you a young gabby bird this summer. You kin learn it to talk. That'll make you company." Richter, and no doubt his informants who learned from the indigenous peoples, passes along the fact that humans relished the company of this bird, which like many psittacids was able to learn to use human words, and could be kept in or near the home as a companion. No doubt this bird was far more familiar, and dear, to native Ohioans than the remote and rarely glimpsed falcon. It seems to me an unwarranted interpretation of the culture of the original peoples of this region to say it would have been "natural" for them to revere a rapacious predator that appeared once in a while to raise havoc with the familiar local birds. I admit various cultures have represented death-dealing predators in their art, but probably far more often those that predated humans, like bears, panthers, etc.; how many of these appear in Hopewell art, though? No doubt the Hopewells hunted, but they also spent a lot of their time in agriculture. The were not nomads, but lived in permanent villages, and it would be strange if they gave reverence to migrant hunting species. It would instead seem perfectly natural for them to honor, in their handiwork, familiar and probably admired species like parakeets at least as much as ill-known rapacious birds like the falcon. Do those who think this artifact represents a falcon recognize another one that they think represents a parakeet? Hopewell peoples made representations of turtles, ducks, crows, woodpeckers: why not another familiar creature like a parakeet? I just don't accept attempts to support the "nobility" of the Hopewell and other peoples of the region by associating them with war-like attitudes and representations of raptorious species. As for the sculpture in question, I already mentioned that it would have been impossible to represent the skinny legs of a parakeet in a stone sculpture. And the parakeet has a facial pattern just as well represented by the the carving as that of the peregrine. And speculations about the parakeet's typical postures are, alas, difficult to make so many years after its extinction. Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]