494 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1935 



most important of all, the oldest items recovered in the line of flint- 

 chipping are far from primitive, or at least from anything compara- 

 ble to the pre-Solutrean of Europe. The same is true even if we go 

 to Alaska, the main front entrance to the American Continent and 

 which by many is regarded as harboring a culture derived from that 

 of the Upper Paleolithic of Europe. The similarity seems real 

 enough, at least so far as bone work is concerned ; yet the associated 

 chipped stone work, say, from Point Barrow and other well-known 

 archeological stations, is of much more modern stamp. Indeed, the 

 very chipped-stone items recovered from the supposedly late post- 

 glacial formations at Trenton, N. J.,*'* at Melbourne, Fla.,*^ and at 

 Folsom, N. Mex.,"*^ are of full-fledged Neolithic design and work- 

 manship, the like of which were not achieved in the Old World, 

 according to the latest archeological time-reckonings, until some 

 7,000 or 8,000 years ago. 



It may be objected that the New World Neolithic need not have 

 waited on that of the Old World ; that it might have developed inde- 

 pendently. To this the most natural answer is that it obviously had 

 to wait, because there are in America no known rude preliminary 

 stages of flint working corresponding to those characterizing the 

 Upper Paleolithic of west Europe and north Africa, and from which 

 our rich and highly developed American Neolithic flint industries 

 could have been derived. But this ready old answer may no longer 

 suffice, because, for one thing, it is becoming increasingly evident 

 that the mentioned Upper Paleolithic of MediteiTanean Africa and 

 Atlantic Europe is not even directly ancestral to the succeeding local 

 Neolithic and need not therefore be considered as the necessary 

 forerunner of our American Neolithic. In the light of the more 

 recent archeological discoveries covering the Old World as a whole, 

 the so-called " Caspian flake industry ", with its several successive 

 stages, characteristic especially of North Africa and the very similar 

 contemporary Aurignacian, Magdalenian, and Azilian-Tardenoisian 

 developments at home in west Europe, appear as unique specializa- 

 tions such as have not arisen at all uniformly in other parts of the 

 Old World any more than in America. In place of these flake 

 industries we find another tradition, a core industry, familiar to us 

 through a succession of stages called pre-Chellean, Chellean, Acheu- 

 lian, Mousterian perhaps, Solutrean, Campignian, and Neolithic. 

 This still obscurely related succession really seems to constitute the 



^ Volk, E., The archaeology of the Delaware valley. Papers Peabody Mus., vol. 5, 

 1911 ; Spier, L., The Trenton ArgiUite culture. Anthrop. Papers Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., 

 vol. 22, pt. II, 1918. 



*i Gidley, J. W., 45th Ann. Kept. Bur. Amer. Ethnol., pp. 7-8, 1927-8. 



" Figgins, J. D., Antiquity of man in America. Nat. Hist., vol. 27, pp. 229-39, 1927 ; 

 also various papers read by Barnum Brown but apparently not yet published. 



