[Various (1971)] since been done; it was appropriately festooned with sentiment. Despite the short notice Dr. Ritchie's well-earned departure was signalized by an appropriate recognition of its significance to Dr. Ritchie, who has happy plans for his leisure, and to NYSAA. As editor of The Bulletin I had an inkling, perhaps premonition would be the better words, that something was in the wind when Dr. Ritchie wrote me early in January that he was planning "a brief article summarizing the main outlines of New York archeology as I see it today and probably to be entitled 'Early Man to Iroquois: A Synopsis of New York Prehistory.'" The length of the article, or the amount of the effort, exceeded his expectations (after all, this is what "The Archeology of New York State" is all about) and he later wrote to say that he was restricting the scope of the article to the Archaic. I had the feeling that this was a summing up of and a final statement on what has been his contribution to not simply New York but to American prehistory. The excavations which engendered the concept of the Archaic as a hunting-gathering pattern of subsistence, and as the period prior to the introduction of ceramics during which that was the kind of life most American aborgines lived, were conducted in New York.