ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA — NELSON 487 



ferring to Australian shell-heaps — is only 40 feet. The value of 

 such comparison is, however, vitiated somewhat by two facts. For 

 one thing, even if our American shell-heaps exceed, let us say, those 

 of Europe in all dimensions, it must be remembered that the latter 

 were abandoned some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, while the former have 

 been occupied practically to the present day. For the other, Ameri- 

 can shell-heaps reveal only Neolithic culture traits, while those of 

 Europe carry, for example, flint-working back to the Azilian 

 (Mugem, Portugal) and even to the Solutrean (Altamira, Spain) 

 phases of the industry. In other words, the shell-mound phenomena 

 of Europe and America are not quite the same either culturally or 

 chronologically. 



When we turn to the comparison of inland culture deposits, the 

 case is still more unpromising. At Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico 

 I once laid bare in an old, weathered, fi-ee-lying rubbish-heap a 

 stratified section fully 16 feet in height,^® and Dr. Kidder at the 

 Pecos ruins in the same State has excavated a similar deposit, 

 originally pitched over the edge of a cliff against which it rested 

 as talus, measuring fully 20 feet in depth.^'' Some of our Ameri- 

 can caves in the Alleghany Mountains, in the Ozarks, in the Sierra 

 Nevadas, and in the southern reaches of the Rocky Mountains have 

 yielded debris formations of appreciable thickness, especially in the 

 last-mentioned locality, otherwise known as the Cliff Dweller region 

 of the Southwestern States. The extreme depth so far recorded I 

 am unable to learn on short notice from the many active workers 

 in the field, but it scarcely exceeds the 40 or more feet registered 

 by the shell heaps.^° But this New World record ig definitely ex- 

 ceeded by that of the Old World on two separate counts: First, by 

 the greater depths of the strictly corresponding Neolithic and later 

 culture deposits of recent geologic date, and, second, by supple- 

 mentary Paleolithic strata of Pleistocene date for which we have 

 as yet no counterpart. By way of illustration, it may be cited 

 that at Knossos, in Crete, the Neolithic stratum alone was 21 feet 

 thick, and adding the later prehistoric accumulations representing 

 the Bronze and Iron Ages, the total depth of culture debris was 

 over 38 feet; ^^ at the Anau kurgan sites in Russian Turkestan the 

 stratified rubbish rose to a combined total of 170 feet, of which 45 

 were taken up by the Neolithic level ; ^^ and one mound at Susa, in 

 southern Mesopotamia, according to the lowest of many published 



>8Nat. Hist., vol. 21, p. 14, 1921. 



1* Kidder, A. V., An introduction to the study of southwestern archaeology, pp. 18, 31, 

 New Haven, 1924. 



2» Requests sent to several working archeologists for figures resulted in nothing definite. 



21 Evans, Sir A., The Palace of Minos at Knossos, p. 33, London, 1921. 



" Pumpelly, R., Explorations in Turkestan, Carnegie Institution Publ. no. 26, p. 50 and 

 pi. 5, Washington, 1904. 



