350 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1949 
be useless. A sharp lookout should therefore be kept for materials 
which may become exposed by the cutting of streams or by road and 
other excavations. But the chances of an archeologist’s happening to 
be on the spot to take advantage of such an accidental find are almost 
negligible. 
Whether or not the highlands served as a route for early travel is 
unknown. They may well have been, and at any rate doubtless be- 
came inhabited a very long time ago. In the interior valleys there 
should accordingly exist remains dating from the very long period 
which elapsed between the first coming of man to Guatemala and the 
rise of agricultural, pottery-making cultures. This stretch of at least 
several millennia is at present entirely unrepresented by identifiable 
relics, not only in Guatemala but throughout Mesoamerica. In many 
parts of the highlands search for evidence of human life during those 
years will encounter the same difficulties presented by the coast. It 
is possible that the oldest sites may have been buried by falls of vol- 
canic ash—incidentally, it is most important that studies be made 
to determine the age of the more recent volcanic deposits. And even 
if not blanketed by the original falls, such sites may well have been 
covered by ash washed down from the higher parts of the terrain. 
For this reason search should be made of areas not so affected, as on 
the northern and western slopes of the Cuchumatanes, in Alta and 
Baja Verapaz, and particularly in the valley of the Motagua and its 
tributaries. That drainage is a most promising region because, owing 
to its aridity, the groundis little hidden by vegetation; many quebradas 
present extensive cross sections through old deposits; and also be- 
cause, in the Motagua country, there have often been found bones of 
members of the elephant family known to have been hunted by the 
early ancestors of the Indians in North America. 
The next major stage in Mesoamerican culture development was 
that which saw the beginnings of settled agricultural life, a stage, 
theoretically, during which maize was first brought under domestica- 
tion. This, again theoretically, should have been an era of small com- 
munities, possessing few of the attributes of the later, more advanced 
civilizations. Pottery, however, was presumably being made. I 
have said “theoretically” because no trace of these postulated first 
farmers has so far come to light in Guatemala or, for that matter, in 
any other part of Mesoamerica. That such a stage must have existed 
somewhere is obvious, because the oldest cultures we can now identify— 
the so-called Archaic of Miraflores and Salcaja in Guatemala, Playa 
de los Muertos in Honduras, Zacatenco and Early Tres Zapotes in 
Mexico—are so highly developed that they can only have been the 
result of a long period of growth. 
Were the above-mentioned Archaic cultures relatively uniform, one 
might suppose that they were introduced in mature form from South 
