Hints from Asia

The big question among Americanists (experts on New World anthropology) is: How original were the American Indians? The orthodox theory is that the first Indians immigrated from Asia (via Alaska) in the cultural nude and built the civilizations of Mexico and Peru without outside help. A minority theory agrees that the original immigrants were pretty bare of culture, but insists that Indian civilization got plenty of helpful hints from across the Pacific.

Last week the 29th International Congress of Americanists, meeting in New York's American Museum of Natural History, was confronted by a striking exhibit of New World cultural elements which look as if they came from Asia. Assembled by Dr. Gordon F. Ekholm of the Museum's staff, they were intended as a challenge to the convening Americanists. Said he: "I just wanted to see if they could explain the stuff."

Hooks & Cloths. The stuff ranged from fishhooks to architecture, and each New World exhibit has its Asiatic counterpart. In most of Oceania, for instance, the natives used two kinds of fishhook: a barbed, composite gadget made of shell and stone lashed together and a nearly circular barbless hook carved out of bone or shell in one piece. Almost identical hooks of both types have been found together on the northern coast of Chile. Dr. Ekholm believes that patterns so characteristic and so similar could not have been developed independently.

Another exhibit shows bark cloth (tapa). The Pacific islanders made it by pounding the fibrous inner bark of certain trees. So did Indians in Nicaragua and Mexico. The cloth of both hemispheres is the same papery stuff, and the wood and stone pounding tools the two peoples used (shown in the exhibit) are so similar that they might have been made by the same man.

Art & Vice. Totem poles, characteristic of British Columbia, are also made in the East Indies. A common pattern in both regions has human figures alternating on the pole with figures of fish or birds. Dr. Ekholm showed the Americanists carved sticks (miniature totem poles) from both Sumatra and British Columbia and challenged them to tell him which came from where. They confessed that the designs were so similar that they could only guess whether Asiatic or American Indians made them.

In other exhibits are war clubs, blowguns, wooden drums, flutes and grinding stones. Beside each object from the Americas is its Oriental counterpart. The people on opposite sides of the great ocean even shared, and share still, a peculiar vice: chewing narcotic plant materials mixed with lime to release the alkaloids. In southeastern Asia the substance chewed is betel nut; in Peru (where no betel grows) it is coca leaves, the source of cocaine. The little gourds to hold the lime and the decorated spatulas for dipping it out are almost the same in both widely separated regions.

How and when did the cultural elements (art forms, techniques, tools, customs) move across the Pacific? Dr. Ekholm does not know, but he suspects that the early high civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, characterized by agriculture, pottery-making and pyramid-building, set up a cultural tremor that lapped most of the world. Traders, explorers, fugitives and raiders carried the techniques with them, just as their modern equivalents carry the catching customs of modern industrialism. Probably faint cultural ripples, relayed slowly from people to people, and from island to island for thousands of years, finally crossed the ocean.

To document his theory, Dr. Ekholm exhibits a stone bas-relief from India's Amaravati period (about 200 A.D.). At the ends are beasts with fishlike bodies. Out of their mouths sprout lotus flowers, and lotus stems wind sinuously through the carvings.

A bas-relief from the Mayan temple at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, shows similar figures, distorted but still recognizable.. In the Mayan version, the fish-beasts have turned into fish, but conventionalized lotus flowers sprout from their mouths and clumsy lotus stems wind grotesquely. Since the lotus is the symbol of Buddhism, Dr. Ekholm believes that the lotus design may have been brought to Yucatan by a Buddhist missionary. He shows a carving from India of the Buddha seated in a lotus flower. Beside it he shows another stylized lotus flower from Yucatan. In the center, instead of the placid Buddha, is a fierce Mayan god.

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