384 Philip Ainsworth Means, 



southwardly shift of the high-cultured people of the west coast 

 of South America. In the face of all this, then, the onus pro- 

 handi rests upon him who would maintain that the South Ameri- 

 can populations are older than the North American or Middle 

 American.^ 



Let us, then, assume for the purposes of the present discussion 

 that Man entered America from the north and slowly spread 

 southward. The primary migrations of Man in America have 

 a southward trend. His secondary migrations often do not. 

 In the Middle American region (Mexico, Yucatan, Guatemala, 

 Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama) we 

 have a number of very high cultures. Those of Mexico and 

 Yucatan are, in many respects, as high or higher than those we 

 have been studying. Up to about 752 A. D. all is vague and 

 uncertain as to cultural events in Mexico. In or about that year, 

 however, the Toltecs founded Tula.^ More important for us 

 is the culturpil type described by Tozzer as "archaic." It is 

 much older than the Toltec culture and much more widespread. 

 Indeed, we may say that the archaic type occurs scatteringly 

 from the valley of Mexico down to Panama.* It will perhaps 

 be proved to be the ancestor of most of the later high cultures 

 of Middle and South America. At any rate, the meager seven 

 centuries from the founding of Tula to the Spanish conquest 

 is obviously not long enough to account for the development and 

 wide distribution of the calendar-system and the various related 

 dialects in Middle America. We must assume that the people 

 of the archaic period flourished long before the time when the 

 earliest high cultures of Middle America began to develop their 

 own peculiarities, peculiarities which, however, never succeeded 

 in blotting out the fact that all the cultures had a common origin.^ 



^ This is not the place to go into the question of geologically ancient man 

 in America. Those .who wish to do so are urged to read Hrdlicka, 1912, 

 and the numerous works listed in the Bibliography of that publication. 

 All that it is necessary to say here is that Hrdlicka has shown the extreme 

 unlikelihood of the existence of any of the morphologically primitive types 

 of men in America. 



^ Tozzer, 1916, p. 464. 



* Tozzer, 1916, p. 466; Spinden, 1915 ; see Appendix for discussion of 

 "archaic type." 



° Means, 1917. 



