ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA — NELSON 491 



logical order, all the special contrivances made and used by the Amer- 

 ican aborigines — their tools, utensils, weapons, ornaments, ceremonial 

 objects, and whatever else of designed handiwork has been preserved 

 in shape suitable for comparison with a like array of cultural traits 

 from the Old World. Paired off in this way, trait by trait, the two 

 markedly similar outputs of art and industry would visibly demon- 

 strate three important desiderata, viz: (1) The approximate stage 

 or level in the evolution of technological processes back to which our 

 American activities extend; (2) what actual inventions had been 

 made in the Old World prior to that level being reached; and (3) by 

 inference from Old World conditions the approximate geologic date 

 at which the invasion of the American Continent must have taken 

 place. As it is, the desirable comparisons can be submitted only in 

 the most general terms. 



In approaching this subject it is in order to remark that from the 

 time of the first discovery of our widely disseminated living tribes 

 their obvious localized cultural peculiarities and varying stages of 

 general development have been noted and commented upon until, 

 not long ago, Wissler and others, as before stated, tentatively divided 

 their entire habitat into as many as 15 distinguishable culture areas, 

 some of which were and are in large part special adaptations to 

 differing geographic environment. Insofar as any chronological 

 interpretations were placed upon this distributional phenomenon, 

 it was tacitly assumed that the highly developed centers of culture 

 were of relatively late origin, while the primitive centers were cor- 

 respondingly older and represented the ancient conditions out of 

 which the advanced cultures had sprung. When later on, about a 

 century ago, archeological investigations began in earnest, it was 

 soon discovered that in some ethnological culture areas the surviving 

 trait peculiarities extended on into the prehistoric past with only 

 minor modifications, while in other localities there were indications 

 of complete or partial changes, in the form of new and altered fea- 

 tures. In the latter situations it was natural to proceed as before 

 in devising chronologic arrangements — genetic connections for the 

 whole localized culture complex were assumed and schemes of rela- 

 tionship worked out by placing the crude and generalized trait 

 groups at the bottom and the refined or specialized groups at the 

 top. By such simple methods of seriation tentative chronologies 

 have been built up, for instance, for Peru and parts of Middle 

 America. Nothing like a reliable history of culture could be estab- 

 lished in this way, however, and it has remained for archeologists 

 of the last three or four decades to demonstrate here and there the ac- 

 tual time order of cultural events by strictly observing and recording 

 the sequence of artifact phenomena as laid down in the stratified 



