NEW WORLD PREHISTORY — WILLEY 565 



vessels whicli date from just a few centuries before the beginning of 

 the Christian Era. Tlius, the Nuclear American rather than the 

 Woodland, tradition has chronological priority in this trait in the 

 New World [50]. Again, as with so many other problems that perplex 

 Americanists we can only refer to this without coming to any con- 

 clusions as to the tuning and direction of the flows of possible dif- 

 fusions. Nuclear American and Woodland ceramics may in some 

 vv-ay be related, but at the present state of knowledge they appear to 

 have different origins and substantially separate histories (pi. 4). 



VILLAGE FARMING IN NUCLEAR AMERICA 



Braidwood and others have stressed the importance in the Old 

 World of the threshold of the village-farming settled comnmnity 

 [1, refs. ; 51]. Although in its beginnings the agricultural village had 

 a subsistence base that was no more adequate than, if as ample as, that 

 of some of the food-collecting communities, this base ollered the 

 potential in certain Old World localities that led, eventually, to civi- 

 lization. In the New World a similar development was repeated m 

 Nuclear America. 



In the New World the line between incipient cultivation and vil- 

 lage farming has been drawn at that theoretical point where village 

 life is, in effect, sustained primarily by cultivated food plants [52]. 

 In archeology this distinction must be made by an appraisal of the 

 size and stability of settlement as v.ell as by direct or indirect clues as 

 to the existence of agriculture. In Nuclear America the earliest time 

 for which we can postulate the conditions of village farming is the 2d 

 millennium B.C. For example, in Middle America in the Tamauli- 

 pas sequence the change-over from incipient cultivation to established 

 cultivation takes place at about 1500 B.C. [53], Elsewhere in Middle 

 America the Imown sequences begin with the village-farming stage, 

 as at Early Zacatenco [54] (Valley of Mexico), Las Charcas [55] 

 (Guatemalan Highlands), Ocos [56] (Pacific coast of Guatemala), 

 and Mamom [57] (Maya lowlands) [58]. In Peru the village-farm- 

 ing level is reasonably well defined with the appearance of maize in 

 the Cupisnique phase and the shift of settlements back from the coast 

 to the valley interiors. The date for this event is shortly after 1000 

 B.C. [59] ; this suggests that the horizon for village farming may 

 have sloped upward in time from Middle America to Peru (fig. 1). 

 For the Intermediate area, where I have noted the earliest occurrence 

 of pottery in Nuclear America, the threshold of village farming is 

 difficult to spot. In Ecuador, the phases succeeding Valdivia have a 

 different ecological setting, being inland in the river valleys rather 

 than on the immediate shores [60]. Perhaps, as in Peru, this cor- 

 relates with the primary economic importance of plant cultivation. 



