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dependence on the Old World Oikoumene. For a certain distance
beyond Bering Strait, yes, to a limited degree. But for North America
as a whole — still more for the two Americas jointly — no. Instead,
the Western Hemisphere has its own counterpart of the Oikoumene:
its Nuclear belt with its twin climaxes in Mexico and Peru. It is to this
Nucleus that non-Nuclear native America stands in a relation of
backward dependence, like that of the extra-Oikoumenical regions
toward the Oikoumene in the other hemisphere. Only in the northern
and northwestern parts of North America do influences out of the
American Nucleus and influences out of the Old World Oikoumene or
Nucleus meet and overlap. In short, the Americas had sufficient of a
hearth of growth and development of their own to free their native
cultures from major or permanent dependence on Europe-Africa-
Asia. If there ever was such dependence, in any degree of
§3^8 MAIN AREAS OF NATIVE CULTURE: NORTH AMERICA
785 consequence, it must have mainly underlain and preceded the
birth of higher culture in America. It would therefore be a rather
remote thing, a sort of set of embryonic influences, difficult to define
and establish as real— in its then rudimentary form. That is as much
as it could have amounted to if there was a direct dependence at all.
But as we shall see when we follow the prehistories of Mexico and
Peru back as far as they are traceable (§320, 328), the earliest
discovered forms there do not specifically resemble any particular
ancient culture of Asia. And equally lacking is any evidence of
turning points within this continuous prehistory of Mexico and Peru
that are marked by the injection of Asiatic or Oceanian traits, or
even of sudden acceleration of growth which might reasonably be
attributed to transpacific stimuli. No specialist in American
archaeology at present sees any place where there is room for a
significant Old World influence in the unfolding of his story. The
various theories "explaining" the cultures of Mexico and Peru as
derived from China, India, Farther India, or Oceania are all views of
non-Americanistic scholars or the speculations of amateurs. For
somewhat similar reasons, the romantic voyage in 1947 of the
sailing raft Kon-tiki, with its crew of Norwegians, from Peru to the
Polynesian Tuamotus cannot really prove anything of fundamental
signiiicance as to derivations. It does strengthen the possibility,
suggested before, that the sweet potato reached the Pacific islands
from America, and especially that the transmission was in pre-
Spanish times rather than by the Spaniards themselves. The gourd
— also a bi-hemispheric cultivated plant — may have gone the same
way; or perhaps the opposite way where the currents flow from west
to east in other latitudes. But isolated items like these cannot
establish the flow or origin of whole cultures. Whether or not, or
how far, remote cultures have connections must be judged by
preponderance of the mass of specific evidence, not by piecemeal
bits. What the Kon-tiki re-establishes is that transpacific voyagers
could have survived. This is a fact already admitted, in the last
section but one, for junks drifting the other way. What is most
relevant in this connection, however, is what was said there as to
culture spreads' occurring mostly by continuous contact of peoples,
rather than through occasional migrants or population movements.
318. THE MAIN AREAS OF NATIVE CULTURE I NORTH AMERICA The
hundreds of tribal cultures in native America segregate themselves
into several dozen provincial areas of reasonably uniform culture —
the exact number being a function of how finely one wishes to
discriminate or on the contrary to effect gross consolidation. These
provincial areas tend to coincide with areas of some degree of
environmental uniformity, usually climatic and vegetational. Beyond
that, they in turn segregate themselves into about ten basic major
culture areas — six in North America and four in South America.
Most of
^86 AMERICAN PREHISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY §31^
these ten, it is true, subdivide into two or three regions or subareas
— making a total of just about twenty such — as to the distinct
identity of whose culture there is practically unanimous agreement.
In fact, ethnological disagreement begins largely on how warranted
and how significant it is to break down these subareas further into
the provinces first spoken of. It is also largely a matter of judgment
whether one could not just as well start with the twenty units of
culture here called subareas as the basic areal units, instead of the
ten grand areas referred to. But the latter scheme — ten grand
areas of culture subdividing into about twenty subareas — is the
more expedient in organization, or at least more convenient to
apprehend, and it will be followed here. The six basic areas in North
America are Mexican or Meso-American, Southwest, Intermediate,
Northwest Coast, Eastern-Northern, and Arctic Coast or Eskimo. The
four in South America are Andean, Circum-Caribbean, Tropical
Forest, and Marginal. Easily the richest and most advanced
aboriginal cultures are the two first named in each continent, the
Meso-American and the Andean, especially an intensive subarea or
focal climax within each. Together they form the bicontinental
culminant core or Nucleus of advancement for the whole hemisphere
in native times, which has already been discussed. From this
culmination the other areal and subareal cultures were increasingly
stepped down roughly in proportion to their distance from it. It is
perhaps worth repeating that, basically, it is this situation of the
climax of development around the junction of the two continents,
and the fading-away toward their extremities, which inevitably gives
the impression that the whole main growth of ancient American
culture was autonomous and autochthonous. Had the growth been
chiefly derivative, dependent on Asia, the peak or climax would
presumably have lain somewhere near Asia in western North
America, and the cultural lowering would have been progressive
from there outward and south. There was in fact some sort of such a
logically expectable peak on the Northwest Coast; and there seems
every reason to believe that — apart from a fairly favorable natural
environment — ^the existence of this peak was largely due to more
diffusionary cultural import and stimulus from near-by Asia to it than
other American areas received. But the significant fact is that this
Northwest Coast peak was definitely minor and underdeveloped
compared with the great Meso-American-Andean Nucleus. In the
enumerative characterization of the areas, and their subsequent
more detailed consideration, the natural order of presentation will
accordingly be from Mexico and the Andes outward, respectively, in
each of the two continents. In North America, what is sometimes
roughly called the Mexican area contained the Maya, the Toltec, and
the Aztec as its most outstanding nationalities. However, this culture
area did not include all of Mexico, and it did include Guatemala and
at least parts of other Central American republics. The term "South
Mexican-Central American" would therefore be more accurate and
has sometimes been used. But it is cumbersome; and Meso-
American has been sug
§3^8 MAIN AREAS OF NATIVE CULTURE: NORTH AMERICA
787 gested and employed as a convenient coinage that runs no risk
of being confused with terms of other meaning, such as "Middle
American" or "Central American." Meso-America segregates into two
subareas : a true nucleus or focus of High Culture (lA), and a
Subnuclear region (iB on map, Fig. 41, overleaf). The presence of
the arbitrary permutating ritual calendar discussed in § 250 can be
taken as a convenient criterion of the extent of the subarea of High
Culture. With this were associated the invention of position numerals
and zero (§ 189), of such steps toward true writing as had been
achieved in America, masonry temples and step pyramids, true stone
sculpture and a richly symbolical decorative art, large-scale human
sacrifice and bloody rituals (§ 252), conquest states imposing
tribute, and rulers of high rank and power. The Subnuclear western
and northern parts of Meso-America show some of these traits in
reduced measure, but they always lack the elaborate and precise
calendar and astronomy and the efforts at writing, and usually a
good many other traits as well. To the southeast, beyond
Guatemala, Meso-America is carried by some authorities along the
Pacific side of the narrowing continent as far as northern Costa Rica
around the Gulf of Nicoya. Others assign this tongue rather to a
Circum-Caribbean area that is mainly South American (M in Figs. 41,
42). The Atlantic slope southeast of Guatemala is not thus in doubt:
a few dozen miles beyond the last great Maya ruin of Copan one
enters aboriginal cultural South American territory of the Circum-
Caribbean area. The Southwest is so named from its position in the
United States, but includes parts of northern Mexico. It is a generally
arid and elevated region. Much of it, especially the lowland, is actual
desert, fertile only in irrigable spots; but in its middle altitudes
summer rains make maize-growing possible in many stretches.
Farming and nonfarming tribes were therefore frequently
juxtaposed. As might be expected, the farmers showed the greater
number of trait resemblances to Meso-America, such as masonry
and elaborate symbolic rituals. However, there is no continuous
sloping-ofi northward from the Meso-American culmination to the
Southwest: this latter had, and has, its own smaller climax in parts
of New Mexico and Arizona. The Southwest splits into two subareas:
a southwestern lowland and a northeastern plateau.
Archaeologically, these were dominated by the so-called Anasazi and
Hohol^am developments, which will be outlined below. The
Intermediate area is fairly so named because of its position between
two areas of more characterized and richer development — the
Southwest and the Northwest Coast. Along the Pacific coast west of
the Sierra Nevada the environment was gende and favorable to
subsistence; and a California subarea is therefore usually set off. As
against this, the much larger Intermountain subarea, comprising the
Great Basin and" the Columbia and Fraser plateau, provided much
less natural food and almost no maize-farming opportunities. The
population was therefore sparse, and it remained simple in its
customs.
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'Mr 2-\S0. •: 2B y V.H WE S T SUBAREAS I A Hiqh Culture 1
B Subnuclear 2 A Hohokam Sphere 2 B Anasazi Sphere 5 A California
38 intermountain 5 A Eastern 5B Northern 5 0 Plains 2 A AGR.||B Q
^ xa M'O iAN Meso-American >' n^ y^ influence r\^^v CN^ FIG.
41. AREAS OF NATIVE CULTURE IN NORTH AMERICA
§31 8 MAIN AREAS OF NATIVE CULTURE: NORTH AMERICA
789 The Northwest Coast is unusually well marked off, ecologically
and culturally. It extends from Cape Mendocino in northern California
through the panhandle of Alaska to the glaciers and Copper River. It
consists of a narrow strip of dense, wet-climate, coniferous forest
along a rugged, indented shore line rich in sea foods. The population
on the rivers, bays, and islands was one of the densest in the world,
for a nonfarming, nonherding society (§ 163). Technology, art, social
structure, and ritualism were elaborate and original. They showed
some transpacific resemblances, as mentioned in § 315 and 317,
generally attributed to convergence or accident, and more certain
influences from East Asia. In contrast, specific similarities with
Nuclear America, or even with the Southwest, were surprisingly few.
Quite evidently, the Northwest Coast area represented a secondary
form of cultural creativeness, probably due at least in part to
stimulations from proximate Asia, but resulting in a largely
independent and distinctive cultural growth. The Eastern-Northern
area covers a good half of the continent, mostly wooded except for
Arctic tundra and a strip of open country at the foot of the Rockies.
Three subareas have to be distinguished : Eastern, Northern, and
Plains. The Eastern is a region of deciduous forest, in clearings of
which maize and squashes could be grown. Agriculture is in fact the
determinant of the Eastern subarea; but it was definitely more
supplemented by hunting and gathering than in the Southwest. Also,
Eastern-subarea farming seems to have been derived from Mexico
by a separate route, not via the Southwest. The Northern subarea
begins where the frostless season is too short for plans of tropical
origin such as maize to be cultivated. With hunting, fishing, and
gathering enforced, and winters long and severe, population had to
be thin-sown to survive, arts were few, and luxuries fewer. This is
prevailingly the region of the transcontinental coniferous forest that
stretches from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to Alaska — in fact
continues across most of Siberia as the taiga. By contrast, the third
subarea is open country : grassland Plains merging into scrub in
Texas and northeastern Mexico. This region was generally not
farmed by the Indians, even though considerable parts are farmed
by us.^ After horses became available two to three centuries ago,
the Plains changed from a marginal to a favorable habitat on
account of the increased availabiUty of bison, and the culture was
rapidly enriched. But this was definitely a late phenomenon. The
Arctic Coast is the area of the Eskimo, that famous people distinctive
in physique, in speech, and in customs, and venturing to live farther
north than any other. Though they also hunt caribou where they
can, and fish in lakes and 8 In technical considerations, the western,
drier, short-grass, nonfarming High Plains are distinguished from the
lower, moister, tall-grass Prairies in which there was some native
farming and which today comprise parts of our intensive wheat and
corn belts. As drawn on the map in Figure 41, the Plains cultural
subarea has been made to take in the former nonagricultural tracts
of the Prairies as well as of Texas.
790 AMERICAN PREHISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY § 3^8
rivers, their main subsistence is from sea mammals, and their
characteristic distribution is accordingly littoral. The ingenuity with
which they wrest a narrow survival from their extreme environment
makes them a deserved favorite in cross-ethnic interest. The culture
is as unique as it is limited; and while it contains elements that
reappear at the far end of South America, it is obvious from the
environment why it could hardly contain many of the traits that
characterize the advancement of Meso-America and Peru. 319.
SOUTH AMERICAN AREAS In the Smithsonian's great Handboo\ of
the South American Indians, the continent is divided into four main
areas, each with its type of primary native culture. These four areas
are the Andean, the Circum-Caribbean, the Tropical Forest, and the
Marginal. They are shown, with a few simplifications of minor detail,
in Figure 42. The Andean area was part of Nuclear America and
consisted of nearly the whole length of the narrow Cordilleran
system that forms the mountain backbone and watershed of the
continent. As the Andes closely follow the Pacific coast, the
immediate littoral strip is included. The middle of the long Andean
stretch was the most advanced culturally: approximately the
mountain and coast part of Peru ^ and the adjacent plateau corner
of Bolivia. Here alone did empires originate, cities, temples, and
palaces of masonry get built, metallurgy and weaving reach their
peaks. The population may have aggregated nearly as much as in all
the remaining 95 per cent of the continent. We may call this the
Andean subarea of High Culture. The North Andean subarea takes in
most of the highland of Ecuador and Colombia, its northern tip being
formed by the plateau of Bogota, where the Chibcha had developed
a system of little states that ranked perhaps one large step below
the High Culture Peruvians. The South Andean subarea perhaps was
one more step behind, originally. But in late pre-Columbian times it
underwent conquest and influencing from Peru and Bolivia into
northwest Argentina. By the eighteenth century the Araucanians of
Chile had also spread across the Andes into the Argentinian high
plains. It is only here in this subarea that Andean culture managed
to get somewhat inland of its mountain system. Both the North and
the High Culture Andean subareas extended only to the innermost
Cordilleran range. Halfway down the eastern slope of this, the
Tropical Forest culture people took over — except in the south,
where the forest was replaced by open scrub or grassland. The
Circum-Caribbean area is well described by that name. It included
northern South America, all the West Indies, and Central America to
the Mayan ® That is, excluding the eastern part of contemporary
poHtical Peru, which is covered with rain forest and belonged to the
Tropical Forest area.
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..,(^^%2^ W2?^C 1 R C U M- C A R 1 B B,E A N Meso-
American V: j\ f ^S-rrr^r-.^^ influence % 1 } .^J-^ ^H w/^^--^
_^ f Uly---^--'-^^-'^ '"j^ ^y^-%^^ c ;•. ^ ^ m ^v >vY~ '••/..^'
v' /; "^ St-.-^ ^1/ ^'^ 1 SUBAREAS Vl ^ f^ I A High Culture North
Andean South Andean 'M , J 3A /^ '^ C 3B Amazonian Southeast
Brazil 1 f 4A 1; X r.^ 4B Extreme Marginal Chaco Internally Marginal
FIG. 42.. AREAS OF NATIVE CULTURE IN SOUTH AMERICA
792 AMERICAN PREHISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY §319
frontier — almost to Guatemala, in modern political terms. Much of
our customary modern "Central America" was therefore culturally a
part of South America. For Panama and Costa Rica this fact was
recognized fifty years ago. On the Atlantic side, the aboriginal
culture frontier is now generally carried even farther north, through
Nicaragua and Honduras. On the Pacific side, as we have seen, the
situation is more ambiguous. There is a stretch here, from the Gulf
of Nicoya north, which has already been mentioned as claimed for
the Mexican or MesoAmerican area as well as for the Circum-
Caribbean. On both maps (Figs. 41, 42) this stretch is marked off
and designated as "M" to indicate its partial relation also to Meso-
America. The Tropical Forest area is the largest cultural one in the
continent. It consists really of two subareas of similar culture, the
Amazonian and that of Southeastern Brazil, which just fail to meet
each other both in the north and in the south (see map. Fig. 42, 3A
and 3B). Practically all the heavy tropical rain forest of South
America — the largest in the world — is included in the Amazonian
subarea, though it also includes considerable areas of savanna and
scrub vegetation. The Marginal cultures occupy a long, somewhat
irregular belt stretching from Tierra del Fuego almost to where the
equator cuts the Atlantic shore line of Brazil. Roughly, the entire belt
lies along that South Atlantic side of the triangular continent which is
farthest away from the presumable gate of entry of original
immigration at Panama, and from subsequent influencing by the
Andean High Culture of Peru. The Marginal area subdivides into
three subareas: Extreme Marginal, Chaco, and Internally Marginal.
The Extreme Marginal subarea consists of the southern tip of the
continent— southern Chile and most the Argentine. Not only position
but climate here were the most extreme in South America; as
expectable, culture was extremely backward. The Chaco subarea is a
great inland, scrub-covered plain, on and west of the Paraguay River
from 18° to 28° S. The culture is not so much specially retarded as it
is a mixture without much consistent larger patterning. The
Internally Marginal subarea is a classical example of a culture of that
type as discussed in § 175. It is virtually surrounded by the great
Tropical Forest area, toward which it is generally considered to be
culturally retarded. The next dozen sections will outline in somewhat
more detail the history — more strictly speaking, the prehistory — of
these ten grand areas, so far as this has been uncovered by
archaeological excavations and discoveries, or in so far as it can be
reconstructed from comparative inferences of what is known of the
living cultures as these were encountered in each area by Caucasian
discoverers or studied by anthropologists.
§320 AREAL histories: meso-america 320. AREAL histories:
MESO-AMERICA 793 We have seen that native Meso-America in the
larger sense consisted of most of what now is Mexico and of
Guatemala/'' and that it constituted the North American half of
prehistoric Nuclear America. We have also seen that Meso-America
comprised a focus of High Culture at its southeastern end plus a
Subnuclear marginal region in northern Mexico. Use of the
permutating calendar of 260 and 365 days serves as a convenient
criterion of the High Culture. The Subnuclear region consists of a
western agricultural half which undoubtedly served as a corridor of
transmission to the agricultural Southwest area that will be
considered in § 323; and of an eastern half which in all but a few
spots was nonfarming, and which abuts on the nonfarming Plains
region of the Eastern-Northern area (§326). The step down from the
intensive culture of focal Meso-America to the unorganized hunting-
gathering culture of this eastern Subnuclear region was sudden and
sharp — something like a geological nonconformity; and its
suddenness remains unexplained.^^ In what follows, attention will
be given primarily to High Culture MesoAmerica — the region which
in 1520 possessed the highly arbitrary but exact permutating
calendar. This is a difficult region to characterize as a unit, because
its culture early acquired the habit of getting itself expressed in half
a dozen or more parallel "facies" or aspects : forms that were
superficially and stylistically distinct, though mainly interrelated in
origin; concurrent regional manifestations of a basically unitary
pattern. Of such localized expressions, the principal ones were the
following: I. Lowland Maya,^^ of the peninsula of Yucatan plus
British Honduras and the Peten district of Guatemala. The speech
was Maya proper, or closely related dialects like Choi, Chorti, and
Chontal. Culturally, this group represented the Mayan culmination —
in some respects the Meso-American peak. ^° To be exact, part of El
Salvador and a border fringe of Honduras should be included;
perhaps also the southern tip of Texas. ^^ Some authors, like
Kirchhoff and Kidder, delimit Meso-America so as to comprise the
High Culture region plus the agricultural portion of the Subnuclear
region. This procedure substitutes agriculture for calendar as the
defining criterion of Meso-America within Mexico. Agriculture does
not seem too effective a distinguishing mark, since most of South
America, and the southwestern and eastern United States, also
farmed. Moreover, the Kirchhoff inclusion of the agricultural
Subnuclear region in High Culture Meso-America leaves northeastern
Mexico entirely out of Meso-America (that is, out of cultural native
Mexico) without assigning it a specific relationship to the cultures
north of Mexico. Northeastern Mexico might indeed conceivably be
classed with the nonfarming Plains subarea of the Eastern-Northern
area. But no Americanist to date seems to have been ready so to
classify it. ^- The pronunciation is of course via Spanish, "My-yah" in
English, not "Meh-yah." The hu of Teodhuacan, Huastec, Nahuad,
and so on, is of course not a syllabic but an orthographic device for
rendering w, which Spanish lacks.
794 AMERICAN PREHISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY § 3^0 2.
Highland Maya, of upland Guatemala, speaking languages like
Quiche, Cakchiquel, and Mam. In architecture, sculpture, and
science, these Maya were somewhat retarded. 3. Zapotec — and,
toward 1500, Mixtec — of Oaxaca. 4. Along the Gulf coast in
Tabasco and Vera Cruz, a series of peoples known as Olmec,
Totonac, and Huastec, in order from south to north. 5. The
landlocked high basin or "Valley" of Mexico, with adjoining portions
of the eastern end of the "Mesa Central." In the Valley of Mexico
were many towns — pre-eminent among them at the time of
discovery and since, the Aztec capital, now Mexico City; and, more
anciently, Teotihuacan of the giant pyramids." To the north lay
Tollan, today Tula, capital of the Toltec, later than Teotihuacan but
predecessors of the Aztec. To the east, related nations inhabited the
states of Tlaxcala and Puebla, with Cholula as their greatest town —
again with an enormous pyramid. The dominant language in this
whole area was UtoAztecan Nahuatl (see map, Fig. 16, §96). 6.
Northwest and north of the Valley of Mexico was the main area of
the Otomi, a somewhat timid, scattered people without large towns,
who however adhered to the calendar system and must therefore be
included among the civilized nations of native America. 7. In
Michoacan, the Tarasco had built up a military empire that was
holding its own against the Aztec. They were on the whole
somewhat less advanced culturally, but seem still to have used the
standard basic calendar. There were enclaves and borders besides
these seven, but they were of less importance. By far the most
archaeological exploration has been conducted in the first and fifth
of these areas, that of the Lowland Maya and of the vicinity of the
Valley of Mexico. It is also for these two regions that the legendary
histories in picture writing are most abundant and have been
supplemented by native versions or Spanish translations written —
after 151 9 — in the Roman alphabet. Our regional stories will
therefore begin with these two dominant areas. 321. THE MAYA The
Mayan calendar in its fullest "long-count" development of nine-place
denotation is so extraordinarily exact, and so long-range, that for a
number of decades after its decipherment hope was felt that it could
be "correlated" with our Julian-Gregorian calendar by identification
of a specific day in the one with a specific date in the other. As the
Maya loved to inscribe dates and time in^^ The name "Aztec" is
from Aztatlan, a legendary point of origin, and was popularized by
Prescott. Actually, this tribe or nation called itself Tenochca or
Mexica, and named its capital Tenochtitlan, for which Mexico —
"place of the Mexica" — was a loose synonym. In Europe as in
Spanish America our "Aztecs" are still mosdy called (ancient)
"Mexicans," and Nahuatl is known as the "Mexican" tongue.
S32I THE MAYA 795 tervals on their monuments, such a
correlation, if reHable, would have given us absolute dates for that
part of Mayan history for which date inscriptions are preserved; and
from these, Toltec, Aztec, and other Meso-American cultures could
then have been approximately dated by the usual method of
archaeological crossties. Unfortunately, most authorities have lost
faith in the sure identification of Mayan and Christian dates. They
now prefer to pick from among several such possible identifications
— usually 256 '/^ years apart— that one which seems to
accommodate best the majority of all the archaeological facts they
have to deal with. This has led to a preponderant recognition of the
GMT or GoodmanMartinez-Thompson correlation as most probable—
though not as proved. This equation has the Maya do their reckoning
from a mythical, back-projected calendrical zero corresponding to 31
13 b.c. It also sets their highest florescence between their 9. 15.0-
0.0 and 9.19.0.0.0, corresponding to a.d. 731 to 810.^* These
figures represent some likelihood of being the actual chronological
truth: that seems as much as can be said at present. Beyond the
illusion that we already knew the absolute dates of Mayan history,
and therewith by crossties and transference the approximate dating
of other American prehistories, lies another illusion: that it was the
Maya who first domesticated maize, thereby originated American
agriculture, and that this fact somehow got them off to the start of
devising the first native civilization in the hemisphere. It was
tempting to connect pre-eminence in astronomy, reckoning, and art
with precedence in stable food production and resultant economic
prosperity. In favor of such a connection there was for a while a
body of seeming botanical facts. The maize plant, Zea mays, forms a
highly specialized species and genus, incapable of self -perpetuation
in a state of nature, and quite different from even the nearest
genera in its subfamily within the grasses. In puzzlement, it was a
botanist who first suggested that maize might be a domesticated
alteration of Euchlaena or teocintle ^^ — meaning god or god-given
maize in Nahuatl — a wild grass more similar in appearance than
any other to maize, though lacking a cob for its kernels. Now the
area in which teocintle is most abundant is the Guatemala highland
and near-by parts of Mexico. So it was natural to infer that it was the
highland Maya who bred and improved teocintle into maize; and that
with the impetus given them by this new agriculture they went
ahead to make other important inventions — incidentally also spilling
from the Guatemalan upland to the lowland or Peten, where the
earliest Mayan dates are found carved on monuments. i*The GMT
correlation yields the following further equations: 8.14.0.0.0 = a.d.
317; 9.0.0.0.0 = 435; 9.10.0.0.0 = 633; 10.0.0.0.0 = 830; ii.o.O'O.o
=1224; II. 16.0.0.0, 13 Ahau 8 Shul = November 14, 1539. The
basic principles of the MesoAmerican permutating calendar have
been set forth in § 230, and additional features peculiar to the Maya
in § 189. The essential vi'orkings of this calendar are understood
with certainty, even though its tie-up with our dadng is not certain.
Maya dates "rounded" to two places, as in the table that follows,
indicate only the cycle and katun, as defined in footnote 16. ^^ Also
written teocentli and teosinte.
796 AMERICAN PREHISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY § 3^1 After
some thirty years of vogue, especially among Meso-American
archaeologists, this theory was overthrown by new botanical facts
and breeding experiments. Teocintle or Euchlaena was shown to be
not the mother of maize but its daughter — by crossing with a third
large grass, Tripsacum. In short, teocintle was nothing but a weed
hybridized out of cultivated maize by contamination. What the
district of teocintle abundance represented was therefore not the
area where maize was developed but the area where it happened to
get partly spoiled again by meeting with Tripsacum. That threw the
problem of maize origins wide-open again; and by this time
botanists were aware that the number of cultivated varieties of
maize, and their degree of differentiation, were greatest in South
America, and that accordingly the probable source and the
domestication of the cereal must be sought there. A supplementary
hypothesis makes maize out as derived from pod corn, which is
known from occasional reversionary croppings-out, and as derived
from it somewhere near the Paraguayan region. Whether this
particular origin is confirmed or not remains to be seen: some South
American origin does stand as indicated; and therewith the triumphs
of Mayan intellectual and artistic civilization are divorced pretty
completely from maize domestication. In fact the two events now
look as if they had been separated by at least two thousand years,
perhaps considerably more. Another misconception is due to
terminology: the division of Mayan prehistory into "Old Empire" and
"New Empire." These phrases are lifted bodily from the ancient
history of Egypt (§ 292), with perhaps a sidelong rove of the eye at
the Aztec Empire of the century before Cortes. There is nothing to
show that the Maya had an empire or political unity in either the old
or the new period of their history. They seem to have constituted a
series of autonomous city-states, or perhaps tribes with each its own
cult-center town. There is no doubt a certain pleasant poetical
connotation in dreaming about ancient dissolved empires; but for
the Maya the designation is thoroughly misleading, especially for
their older period. So the terms "Classic Maya" and "Late" or
"Retractile Maya" will be used here instead. These names seem
justified because the Classic period contained the definite
culmination of Mayan sculpture, painting, pottery, and calendry,
whereas in the later Retractile centuries not only art and the
calendar but also the territory of the Maya were shrinking or shrunk.
The period of development preceding the Classic, before the full
patterns of the Mayan civilization began to be worked out, may be
called Formative. Monumental date inscriptions that are almost
certainly contemporary, and which are expressed in the "long" or full
nine-place calendrical count with socalled "initial-series" glyphs,
extend over the last three-tenths of the Mayan time cycle 8, the
whole of 9, and the beginning of 10.^'' The few earlier dates that
^® Cycles consist of 20 katuns of 20 "years" each, nominally 400
years; but as the "year" or tun was of 360 days only, the cycle
shrinks to 394 and a fraction of our years.
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5 s ^ ^ JO .-I r: •- o--;:: jJ 3 (J u ?5 c o ^^ s u ^rj N Fi 2
ri 2 U 0b 5 I— 1 TT ►-( "3 _H O O 2 < O _ a o X U pq c w ^ ;: c Ui
o Ui na s a o , 1 u ho -T3 a 3 „^ G c CS s^ 1> C Q ^ Oh r' ^ a hj H
^ W) O -o 6 _4J ri ni u -D ~a I-. ^ fin rt -r) 0 ti, C tan u G Cl, J^ 0
rt 0 « > a. J3 w IX, w 1— 1 0 1— 1 6 r— 1 ON 4 CT\ 00 4 :^ -^
798 AMERICAN PREHISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY § 3^1
occur from cycle 8 may be either contemporary or projected
backward — we cannot be sure which. And it seems quite certain
that the first seven cycles were not historical but imaginary — a way
of filling in back to the beginning of the world, or some such event,
in 31 13 b.c. It has been conjectured, from "internal evidence," that
the calendar was instituted in y-O'O'O'O or perhaps 7'6.o«o«o,
corresponding to 353 and 235 B.C., respectively. Of late the
tendency of Mayan specialists has been to balance the problems of
calendar and dating — which are tricky and pitfall-ridden in spite of
their fascination— with consideration of the humbler results of
excavation: pottery types, sherd counts, refuse-heap sequences. For
the not yet date-inscribing Formative periods, this is of course
anyway the only available procedure. On the basis of Peten pottery,
two Formative periods have been recognized, Mamom and Chicanel.
In the latter, stone buildings were being reared, stucco was used,
and an impressive formal art style had developed. The culture had
already all sorts of Mayan slants, though obviously not yet typical
Classical Maya. Some of the achievements of the Classic period have
already been touched on in other connections — zero and position
numerals in § 189, the permutatory calendar in § 230; and of course
both of these were related to remarkably accurate reckoning of the
appearances of the visibly heavenly bodies. The underlying
astronomical observations must have gone on for many years,
probably centuries. And since the Classic period is by definition that
of the elaborate calendar — it begins with the first long-count date
inscriptions — it follows that the basic Mayan mathematics and
astronomy must have been worked out in the preceding Formative
period. The same probably holds for the writing — which incidentally
remains almost as completely unread as contrariwise the time and
number glyphs have been deciphered and as they automatically
check themselves by their interval additions or subtractions. On the
ground of such analysis as has been possible, it is believed that the
writing contained some phonetic constituents in addition to its
pictographic and ideographic base. Two facts render it improbable
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