24 ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH OUTSIDE AMERICA. 



culture. The vast majority of the students of American culture, however, 

 conclude that the movements of people which produced these outbursts of 

 development came from some other part of the American continent. It 

 has only been possible to reach this conclusion by ignoring certain factors in 

 the movements of peoples about the earth's surface of which we already 

 have some knowledge. 



There are many features of human culture which point strongly to 

 the vast extent of the influence which can be exerted by relatively small 

 numbers of migrating peoples.^ If the influences which produced the out- 

 bursts of activity of American culture had been necessarily the work of 

 vast migrating hordes of peoples, there would be much reason to agree with 

 the conclusion that American culture is wholly an independent growth, but 

 if stimuli to special developments can be apphed by small bodies of wanderers, 

 perhaps no more numerous than the occupants of a single vessel, rnany of 

 the objections to the complexity of American culture wholly lose their force. 



A second factor which has been ignored by the upholders of the unity 

 of American culture is the extent to which arts, even the most useful, can 

 disappear. We know that an object such as the canoe can disappear among 

 islanders to whose welfare it would seem to be absolutely essential, ^ and if 

 such a means of transport can thus vanish much of the evidence which has 

 been trusted to disprove the complexity of American culture loses its validity. 



These two considerations are sufficient to show that the unity or com- 

 plexity of American culture is no subject for dogmatic statement. The whole 

 problem of this unity or complexity will have to be reconsidered from the 

 beginning, with open and unbiased minds, and, if this be so, one conclusion 

 is obvious. If we are to consider the complexity of American culture, even as 

 a possibihty, it is evident that the problem can never be solved by the study 

 of American culture itself. No problem concerning the possible relation of 

 one culture to others is ever going to be decided by an examination, however 

 minute and accurate, of one culture alone. It is only through the comparison 

 with cultures elsewhere, both of the present and of the past, that we can 

 expect any solution. 



If with this necessity in mind we study the possible relations of the 

 American to other cultures, we find on one side of America cultures so ad- 

 vanced that it would seem hopeless to seek in them for any traces of influence 

 which may have reached America in early times. The vast changes in the 

 culture of the American continents initiated by the voyages of the Spanish 

 navigators were probably not the first results of influence from the east, 

 but, if such earlier movements westward from Europe ever took place, they 

 must have been in so remote a past, and the cultures from which they sprang 



'I have considered this subject fully in a paper shortly to be pubhshed in "Essays and Studies pre- 

 sented to William Ridgeway." 



2See a paper on "The Disappe.aranec of Useful Arts," in the "Festskrift tillegnad," Eduard Wester- 

 marck, Helsingfors, 1912, p. 100. 



