300  SMITHSONIAN    MISCELLANEOUS    COLLECTIONS  VOL.    96 
the  characteristic  "  double  F  "  motive,  and  the  t'ao  t'ieh  and  other 
animal  designs  that  continued  to  dominate  Chinese  art  for  well  over 
a  thousand  years." 
In  attempting  to  trace  the  beginnings  of  Chinese  art,  the  sinologist 
is  faced  with  a  problem  very  similar  to  that  presented  by  the  sudden 
appearance  of  Old  Bering  Sea  art.  Here  in  China,  just  as  at  Bering 
Strait,  we  find  an  ancient  and  highly  developed  art  style  for  which 
there  are  no  known  direct  antecedents,  even  though  occasional  affini- 
ties may  be  traced  and  general  similarities  in  spirit  detected.  As  they 
appear  today,  both  Shang  and  Old  Bering  Sea  art  (at  least  styles  2 
and  3  of  the  latter)  seem  thoroughly  indigenous  in  their  respective 
localities,  but  this  might  not  be  true  if  we  had  knowledge  of  the  stages 
leading  up  to  them,  particularly  the  stages  antecedent  to  the  Shang. 
Students  of  early  Chinese  culture  have  frequently  been  impressed 
with  resemblances  between  Shang  art  and  what  in  a  general  sense 
may  be  termed  "  Pacific  "  art,"  but  the  significance  of  these  general 
resemblances  is  obscured  by  the  fact  that  the  Pacific  examples  usually 
mentioned,  such  as  Maori,  Melanesian,  Northwest  Coast  Indian, 
are  all  modern,  whereas  the  comparable  Chinese  art  dates  from  the 
first  or  even  the  second  millenium  B.  C.  If  we  bring  Eskimo  art  into 
the  comparison,  however,  we  are  not  faced  with  this  particular  di- 
lemma, for  the  parallels  in  this  case  are  found  only  in  the  art  of  the 
Old  Bering  Sea  culture,  the  most  ancient  form  of  Eskimo  culture 
thus  far  known.  The  fact  that  both  of  these  old  art  styles  employed 
the  elevated  eye  design  and  that  there  is  also  at  times  a  vague  and 
general  resemblance  in  spirit,  leads  one  to  wonder  whether  closer 
resemblances  may  not  be  shown  when  we  know  more  of  the  pre- 
historic art  styles  of  the  intervening  areas.  On  the  basis  of  the  in- 
formation at  present  available  it  would  not  seem  unreasonable  to 
anticipate  that  either  in  China  or  somewhere  in  the  coastal  area  be- 
tween Manchuria  and  Bering  Strait — perhaps  in  the  Amur  Valley — 
there  will  yet  be  discovered  an  art  which  may  have  possessed  more 
features  in  common  with  both  Old  Bering  Sea  and  Shang  and  which 
may  provide  us  with  the  source  from  which  the  two  styles  may  have 
derived  at  least  some  of  their  elements. 
A  fact  to  be  borne  in  mind  in  connection  with  the  possible  relation- 
ship between  the  elevated  eyes  of  Shang  and  Old  Bering  Sea  art  is 
that  in  the  case  of  the  latter  we  have  a  local  prototype  in  the  smaller 
"  Hamada,    1926;    Siren,   1929;    Exhibition  of  Early   Chinese   Bronzes,    1934, 
pi.  1-7;  Karlbeck,  1935,  pi.  1-7. 
"Fenollosa,  vol.  i,  pp.  3-9;  Exhibition  of  Early  Chinese  Bronzes,  p.  85. 
