NO. 1 CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA 123 
action to European mistreatment or a continuation of aboriginal prac- 
tices is uncertain, but historical references to the Arua emphasize their 
hostile behavior. 
In summary, it can be said that the Amazon Basin was repeatedly 
invaded in aboriginal times from the west and north by groups bring- 
ing different and at least on one occasion more advanced cultural 
traits. Although pottery characteristics are most easily recognized, 
many other elements were undoubtedly introduced temporarily or 
permanently, in restricted regions or broadly diffused throughout the 
area. What can be reconstructed of their history seems to show that 
the Tropical Forest pattern was the most effective adaptation to the en- 
vironment, with the result that features too advanced or otherwise 
uncongenial to this way of life were slowly but surely lost with the 
passage of time. Although details of expression were undoubtedly as 
variable through time as they are through space on the ethnographic 
level, evidence remaining in the archeological record indicates that 
the Amazon Basin was an area of relative cultural stability from the 
first introduction of pottery until the arrival of European colonists, 
and in remote areas even up to modern times. 
CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN BRAZIL 
Like the Amazon Basin, the central and southern parts of Brazil 
have received little attention from archeologists. The work that has 
been done, mostly in the last decade, is directed mainly toward three 
problems: The antiquity of man in the Lagoa Santa region, the age 
and chronology of sambaqui or shell-midden culture, the pottery-pro- 
ducing sites of Tupi-guarani origin. 
Most of the available data concerning Lagoa Santa are more con- 
jectural than factual. Although Peter Wilhelm Lund's first report on 
the area was published in 1839, the contemporaneity of man and ex- 
tinct mammalian species is still being disputed. The Confins find 
would point to a relatively great antiquity of man if we accept the re- 
search by Walter, Cathoud, and Mattos (1937). This conclusion has 
been disputed by Hurt (1960) on the basis of a carbon-14 date of 
3000 ± 200 years for Lagoa Funda Cave (Crane, 1956). More recent 
dates obtained by Hurt (1962, p. 1), however, tip the scale again in 
favor of antiquity for Lagoa Santa man. One of the carbon samples 
from Lagoa Santa Rockshelter No. 6, excavated by Hurt, gives an 
average age of 10,024 d= 127 years according to the new value of 5,730 
years for the half-life of carbon-14. 
On the basis of caves he examined, Walter established three cul- 
tural periods for the Lagoa Santa area. The oldest, represented by the 
