Henn's (1984) interesting review underscores one of the hazards of impatience: the audience that expects the prelude to subsume the fugue always risks disappointment. Henn's disappointment with our work in the Sacramento River Canyon springs in part from his failure to distinguish some important stages in the conduct of inquiry, and he is led, at our disadvantage, to review our achievement of goals to which we did not aspire.

Since more than a half dozen years ago, when catastrophic floodwaters scoured the western Nevada countryside and washed to light an unparalleled archaeological record of absolutely unexpected richness, the U.S.D.I. Fish and Wildlife Service has pursued an aggressive program of cultural resource management at Stillwater Marsh. Almost without precedent in the western states, F&WS has sponsored salvage operations, reconnaissance, survey, mapping, testing, excavations, modeling, and far-reaching research designs, all while engineering what must be one of the niftiest programmatic agreements that archaeologists and Native Americans ever have enjoyed. Now the protagonist of all that work has summarized part of the results in a lovely, nontechnical tract produced for a general audience, an exemplar of what agencies ought to do to repay the public footing the bill.

I would apologize for the frankly agnostic tone of this paper did I not believe that the limitations of the data strongly support agnosticism and that a more assertive statement now would likely demand greater apology in the future. Since such figures are only beginning to be recorded adequately in the northern Great Basin, and since rumor has it (somewhat more confidently than the published literature) that the data bank will bulk fairly large, it seems enough to have brought this single example to attention. I urge strongly, however, that such figures discovered or reported in the future be examined for astronomical, geographic, or ethnographic referents, and that the coordinates and bearings of all possible alignments be recorded with as much metric precision as possible before the cows and the dune buggies and the attrition commanded by natural forces erase them. The history of petroglyph studies offers probably adequate proof that the data bank will never grow large enough for the facts to speak for themselves, but the much smaller data bank on large, complex stone alignments barely enables us at present to ask any questions that are at once both interesting and answerable.