94 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 146 
southeastern Mexico. In this diffusion, the Machalilla and Chorrera 
Phases of the Ecuador coast (Estrada, 1958; Estrada and Evans, 
this volume) must surely have played an important role. Even more 
striking is the case of rocker stamping, which in Mesoamerica is most 
closely associated with the Olmec Culture of southern Mexico. 
Whether the emphasis on large felines, raptorial birds, and serpents 
in Olmec and Chavin art is coincidental or the result of diffusion is 
an unsettled point. As has already been stated, condors, serpents, and 
very possibly large cats were depicted as early as 2000 B.C. The 
condor (Bird, 1962, fig. 4) is treated in this early art in a manner 
very similar to that in Chavin stone carving, so that the possibility 
of independent adoption in Peru or even of a south to north diffusion 
of these themes cannot be ruled out at present. 
On the other hand, Smith (1962) has recently reviewed Olmec 
art and has found much evidence of Olmec elements in the figures cut 
into the stone slabs of the platform at Cerro Sechin in the Casma 
Valley, and in a number of small specimens, mainly of turquoise, at- 
tributed by Larco Hoyle (1941) to the Cupisnique Phase of gen- 
eralized Chavin Culture. It is interesting that several of these speci- 
mens are from Lambayeque, well to the north of Cupisnique in the 
Chicama Valley drainage. Coe (1962) has independently pointed out 
what appears to be an Olmec design on a jar from the same period at 
Kotosh. In view of this evidence, we see the real possibility that Ol- 
mec may have directly or indirectly influenced the northern coast of 
Peru at a time prior to the full development of classic Chavin art as 
known from Chavin de Huantar, in the northern highlands, and at 
such places as Cerro Blanco in Nepena Valley and at Moxeke in 
Casma Valley. At any rate, after more than a thousand years of set- 
tled agriculture, something sets off a florescence of art, bringing with 
it the first indications that the communities of a region are united in 
common economic, religious, artistic, and architectural endeavors. 
Temple centers of the Chavin horizon were built, from what is 
known of settlement patterns on the coast, to serve small, "scattered 
house" villages subsisting on an as yet far from fully developed agri- 
cultural system. The Chavin florescence on the Peruvian coast is in 
some ways comparable to Caldwell's (1958) conception of the nature 
of Hopewell Culture in the Ohio Valley — a culture that had reached a 
level of ''forest efficiency" that did not include reliance on developed 
agriculture, but which had the resources to devote much labor and 
wealth to what seems to have been a cult of the dead. On coastal 
Peru, "river mouth efficiency" gave way to the beginnings of "up- 
river efficiency," stimulated by the introduction about 900 to 800 B.C. 
