52 ANTHROPOLOGY IN AYESTERN HEMISPHERE AND PACIFIC ISLANDS. 

 ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF ABORIGINAL AMERICAN CULTURE. 



There are students who admit the migration of early man to America, 

 yet hold that for all purposes American culture is autochthonous; Powell 

 believed that man came to America before he had acquired articulate speech. 

 Other students, who hold the idea of great antiquity, even autochthony, of 

 the American aborigines, believe there is evidence of the influence of Old 

 World culture in America in pre-Columbian times. 



A dogmatic assertion of the complete autochthony of American primi- 

 tive culture would appear premature in view of our present insufficient 

 knowledge. The foremost living student of primitive American culture says : 

 "It seems highly probable that the western world has not been always wholly 

 beyond the reach of members of the white, Polynesian, and perhaps even 

 the black races." Among the similarities in culture-form which are the 

 most striking and have the greatest presumption of transmission are the 

 gouge or stone adze and the banner stone of New England and farther north, 

 which resemble those of northern Europe; forms of pottery and implements 

 in the West Indies and Brazil, which resemble manufactures of the Medi- 

 terranean region; certain objects in Panama, which suggest the metal works 

 of Benin, in Africa; correspondencies between the architecture of Yucatan, and 

 those of Cambodia and Java; and adzes and pestles of the American north- 

 west coast, which resemble those of the Pacific islands more than those of 

 eastern America. These and like phenomena should be made the objects 

 of painstaking research on the problem of the extra-American origin of 

 culture. The solution of this problem would contribute not only to the 

 present subject, but to the anthropological world-problem of culture simi- 

 larities—whether similar cultural expressions in isolated areas had a common 

 origin, or independent origins, or are due to transmission. 



Though research may prove the extra-American origin of parts of the 

 culture of the American aborigines, it seems probable that most of that cul- 

 ture originated in the Western Hemisphere. Some of these beginnings of 

 culture have already been found, as has been noted, but most of them are 

 still unknown and await research. America "can be expected to furnish a 

 fuller reading of the early chapters of human progress than any other part of 



the world." 



In the spread of culture the Western Hemisphere holds several problems 



of almost continental extent. 



Boas speaks of the large fundamental problem of the "pecuhar unity of 

 culture types" seen among the tribes extending from near the extreme north 

 to near the extreme south of the Americas. 



There is the problem of the relations between the various American cul- 

 ture centers. 



Studies of culture-spread between the different tribes in contiguous or 

 nearby areas, such as are now being worked out among the tribes of the 

 Great Plains, should be prosecuted broadly. 



