408 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1936 



None, however, can be reconciled with scientifically acceptable 

 theories of human prehistory. 



Anthropologists are generally agreed that America was peopled 

 from Asia by mongoloid immigrants who wandered across Bering 

 Strait to Alaska before the invention of writing. There is no evi- 

 dence whatever that Egyptians, Hebrews, or any other advanced 

 peoples sailed across the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans bringing civiliza- 

 tion to America. The supposition that the first civilization sprang 

 up on now sunken continents in either ocean does not accord with 

 geology and is totally unsupported by any archeological evidence. 

 The notion that America was the cradle of all world civilizations 

 is equally untenable, for the facts of archeology show that Old and 

 New World civilization developed in complete independence of one 

 another. Had any Old World peoples visited America in sufficient 

 numbers to make all the petroglyphs assigned to them by various 

 writers, they could not have failed to leave abundant evidence of 

 their presence in the form of such other types of archeological re- 

 mains as houses, tools, weapons, etc. But nothing of the sort has 

 ever been found. 



Even the theory of far-flung Aztec migrations must be barred from 

 serious consideration, for petroglyphs of the United States have 

 nothing in common with either the art or writing of Middle Amer- 

 ica; nor is there any other archeological evidence to show that the 

 Aztecs ever went north of the Valley of Mexico. The rare occur- 

 rence of a particular figure, such as the plumed serpent, in both 

 Middle America and North America, is explainable as the diffusion of 

 an idea, like the spread of modern styles in clothing in the civi- 

 lized world. 



An extremely popular explanation of petroglyphs, entertained 

 largely by overoptimistic minds, is the legend of buried treasures, 

 in name of which an unbelievable number of archeological sites have 

 been looted and precious records of early man destroyed forever. 

 These legends are most common in the southeastern and southwestern 

 parts of the United States, where, it is supposed, early Spanish 

 treasures were buried and marked by petroglyphs. The accuracy of 

 these tales is shown by the fact that the same elaborate fable will be 

 told in identical form of a dozen different localities. Whether, how- 

 ever, the hope be that petroglyphs mark buried wealth or are treasure 

 maps, the quests have always been fruitless despite untold hours of 

 laborious digging. And they will always be futile, for extensive 

 archeological and ethnological researches have shown that the In- 

 dians north of Mexico knew of no stones more precious than tur- 

 quoise nor metals more precious than copper. 



It is commonly supposed that petroglyphs are some kind of long- 

 lost art of writing, the meaning of which will be known when the 



