This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This exciting new work collects together for the first time the evidence for hoards, buried treasure and other finds of numismatic material from the Americas. An inventory enumerates approximately 900 coin finds, chiefly from the United States, but also from Canada and most other countries in the Americas. This is supplemented with a listing of 150 finds of American coins outside the Americas. Each entry contains the find spot, date of discovery, date of deposit, detailed description of the contents, and a bibliography. The inventory exploits the numismatic, shipwreck, and archaeological literatures, newspapers, and law reports of treasure trove cases more thoroughly than has ever been done before.

Are humans unique? This simple question, at the very heart of the hybrid field of biological anthropology, poses one of the false of dichotomies—with a stereotypical humanist answering in the affirmative and a stereotypical scientist answering in the negative. The study of human biology is different from the study of the biology of other species. In the simplest terms, people's lives and welfare may depend upon it, in a sense that they may not depend on the study of other scientific subjects. Where science is used to validate ideas—four out of five scientists preferring a brand of cigarettes or toothpaste—there is a tendency to accept the judgment as authoritative without asking the kinds of questions we might ask of other citizens' pronouncements.