AMERICAN CULTURE HISTORY

AMERICAN CULTURE HISTORY By ROBERT H. LOWIE revolutionary T o ME the most last decade are achievements in American culture his­ tory within the (1) the demonstration of implements contemporaneous with extinct mammals; and (2) the shifting of interest to South America rather than Mexico or Yucatan as the probable site for the development of the higher civilizations. To be sure, any on~ of the discoveries under the first head can be ex­ plained without assuming geological antiquity. But the cumulative force of parallel findings in diverse regions is very strong. In the shell heaps of Tierra del Fuego neither Lothrop nor Gusinde was able to establish a stratifica­ tion, yet from the extent of the middens and the agreement of their con­ tents with the inventory of the historic Yaghan both authors infer that this tribe has occupied the Cape Horn archipelago for a very long time. As Gusinde concludes, Viele J ahrhunderte zuruck sind jene Schichten gelegt worden, die sich heute zuunterst der machtigen Muschelhaufen finden. If the unstratified remains at the very margins of the hemisphere suggest a residence of many centuries to so cautious an investigator, how much stronger is the evidence since Mr and Mrs Bird's discovery of five distinct cultural layers near the Strait of Magellan, where the lowest artifacts are accompanied by bones of extinct ground sloths and horses!l The case for antiquity is strengthened by arguments of another order. How rapidly can human beings acclimatize themselves to six or eight radically distinct habitats? Penck, who raises the issue, holds that a guess of 25,000 years errs on the side of excessive caution. 2 Even if this figure seems exorbitant, the order of magnitude of 15,000 years no longer daunts us. Yet Kidder, who accepts such an estimate as reasonable, points out its perplexing implications. s The whole trend of recent study, he states, is to shorten the scale fOJ; higher New World civilizations. How, then, are we to fill the void between, say, 15,000 B.C. and 1,000 B.C.? Kidder is also keenly aware of our old archaeological scandal,-our in­ ability to confront the Elliot Smith school with anything but faith so long as there are no antecedent American stages for the high cultures of Yucatan and Mexico. Kidder escapes the dilemma by pointing southward, which at first blush seems like passing the buck. Actually his illuminating essay 1 Martin Gusinde, Die Yamana (Modling bei Wien, 1937), pp. 608--611. Junius Bird, BefOf'e Magellan (Natural History, 4, 1938). p. 16. sq. 'Albrecht Penck, Wann Kamen die Indianer nach NOf'damerika? (International Congress of Americanists, 23, New York, 1930), pp. 23-30. a A. V. Kidder, Speculations on New World PrehistOf'Y (Essays in Anthropology in honor of A. L. Kroeber, Berkeley, 1936), pp. 143-151.