Diffusion - Cultural similarities between Old and New Worlds - Atlantis ?

[Bianca]

The physiques and faces among the thousands of Indian-
American tribes, not to mention their correspondingly
numerous cultures and languages, differed greatly, attested
by the first Europeans to arrive after 1492, and by the
thousands of sculptures and drawings that have survived.
Negro African features are common in pre-Columbian
civilizations of Central America, among the Olmecs, Mayans,
Guatemalans, and Caribbean folk. Japanese features are not
absent there, either, nor are European features
indistinguishable among the Indians of Northeastern North
America. Historian Vine Deloria thinks that Cro-Magnon
man, found in France, might have been of the Indians of
Northeastern North America.

Generally, Indians hardly presented a pure type
or closely-related set of types; they were as different amongst
themselves as the Caucasians, to whom belong all the
Europeans, the North Africans, East Indians and Near
Easterners, as well as most North and South Americans
today. Lacking the theory of the Bering Crossing, scholars
would probably not have lumped the Indians into a single
American sub-race of the Siberian sub-race of the
Mongolian Asian Race.

When "Kennewick Man" was found sticking out of an embankment
of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Oregon in 1996,
by college students at a boating festival, then turned over to
anthropologists, who identified him as a Caucasian, and
released him to a radiocarbon dating laboratory at the
University of California, that estimated him as 9,300 years old,
and then became subject of a lawsuit by Indians who
claimed his bones as a Native American under the
1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act,
so that he could be given a proper sacral burial,
one could imagine the next step to be
the script for a musical comedy.
Had Indians the right to a "white" man's bones,
or was "finders, keepers" the rule?

If the facts be as attested, it becomes apparent
that either more than one race found its way to America -
a contention of this chapter - or that radiocarbon dating
is often far off the mark - which I also contend,
or both - to which I say amen.
Anyhow, the U.S. Corps of Engineers seized the bones,
to the despair of both Indians and anthropologists,
then relented to allow anthropologists to make the
final determination of race. If adjudged mongoloid,
the bones would be transmitted to the Department of the Interior
for deciding which of five claimant tribes should receive them.

Evidence is scant, we insist: anthropology has not
systematically resurveyed the comparative evidence;
archaeology has yet to dig in the right place. And maybe a
human population was eradicated in a catastrophe, a flood
truly of Noachian proportions, with super-hurricanes and
mega-fires and meteoroid falls. Of course, if all of mankind
were young and the separation of the continents were recent,
then the Indians that we have come to know as part of us
were the original and perpetual residents. We ought to rescue
these hypotheses from the wastebasket and place them on
the table for future studies.

[Bianca]

A favorite topic of debate among early anthropologists and
historians, never fully settled, was the relative contribution of
diffusions of invention and independent inventions in the
acquisition of culture. Did various peoples invent their own
languages? Or did language originate in one people and one
spot and diffuse with them or from them among the whole
human race? Alphabets - and writing systems, too: are all of
these descended from a single proto-system, as John de
Francis proposed in 1989? Certain inventions seem so
complex and peculiar that diffusion is to be
preferred in explaining their presence at
two widely separated points in space.

Furthermore, no design, practice, or myth is so simple as to
evade the fecund differentiation brought about by the
mathematics of permutations and combinations. A few
sounds can make a thousand languages; similarly, a few
differences of construction materials, weather, habits,
perceived needs and learning techniques will prevent any two
walls in the world from being identical, and therefore any
two walls that seem to be almost identical will almost surely
have originated at the hands of closely connected people, no
matter where they may be at the time of construction.

Now let us direct inquiries to pre-Columbian American
history. Pan pipes are found in America and Asia. Corn is
found abundantly in America, but also discovered in Africa
and India. Palms and gourds crossed the Pacific Ocean, sweet
potatoes may have, too. Cotton may be New World or Old
World in origin. The pig, dog, chicken, and rat seem to have
originated in Asia before transfer to America. The specialized
fishing technique using cormorant birds as assistants
probably crossed the Pacific at some point in time. The
magnetic compass of China had its counterpart in Olmec
Mexico, and one cannot say which was the older, both well
over 2000 years. Once more we note: overall and through the
ages, many different peoples take turns at being
innovative at long-distance traveling and exploring.

Myths, symbols, even religious practices from the Old World
and the New can resemble one another closely. The couvade,
a custom whereby the husband goes to bed on the eve of his
wife's accouchement and acts as if the pains of childbirth
were his own, was found both in the new world and the old.
The swastika, the pentagram, and the eight-pointed star were
old world and new world symbols. Sacred ball-games were
played all over the world.

Gods of Meso-America resembled in key instances
divinities of Greco-Roman and Egyptian religion; the gods
that correspond to planets even share behavioral
peculiarities. The Roman god Mars is the same brutal warrior
operating under different names among the Aztecs,
Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans, and is identified
as connected to the planet Mars.

Traditions of a world flood that left unique survivors are
found everywhere. Various forms of writing are to be found
in America. The Cuna proto-writing of Panama, an
ideographic scrawling on wood and bark, resembles the
writing of Easter Island and the ancient script of the Indus
Valley of India. The Grand Traverse stone, an inscribed piece
of slate, found in Michigan in 1877, has recently been
expertly translated to reveal a money transaction written in
Latin of the period 100 B.C. to 100 A.D.

In Mexico, representing the ancient Central American
civilizations, there were to be found pyramids, of both the
stepped ziggurat type and the smoothly ascending kind.
Could these have been designed in ancient times both by
Americans and Near East peoples, Egyptians and
Babylonians? Or were they so close intrinsically,
mathematically, and in time that there would have been
most likely a mutual or diffused invention? Should the
Cambodian pyramid puzzle be entered here, too? No answer
is yet acceptable. On a Mayan dig at Acajutla, Mexico, of
1914, statuettes of the Egyptian divinities Osiris and Isis
were found, and remain as embarrassments to
conventional theory.

Central Americans seemed to have been expecting the coming
of white-skinned strangers; they said some of these had once
come out of the sea to help them; they might even have
come from the sky, it was believed. A white-skinned hero or
god was prominent in Central American millennialist thought,
like the expectation in some quarters throughout European-
American history later on, especially among Protestants, of
the Second Coming of Christ. Some scholars have discovered
that the god-hero may have been black- and yellow-striped in
color, or a Black American god, who is the god of the planet
Venus (and one recalls the Black Hindu goddess Kali,
also representing Venus).

The expected event was dreaded, it must be added. The
Mexican Aztec King Montezuma half-believed and feared
that Hernan Cortez was the heroic embodiment of this god,
a delusion that damaged greatly his nation's ability to resist
the Spanish conquistador.

Many writers have exploited irresponsibly this god-trait and
god-belief, implanting it upon their favorite candidate for
early arrival in America. The legendary sinking of Atlantis,
indicated as a continent of White race, would have allowed
proto-European survivors to escape both to Egypt and
Greece, as Plato reported, and to America, as Brasseur de
Bourbourg and many another would have it.

In Brazil were found artifacts and inscriptions of indubitable
Phoenician origin. A Phoenician origin has been claimed, too,
for the Melungeon Indians of the United States, whose
appearance was allegedly Semitic, and who claimed to have
come from across the seas, but this is most likely incorrect.
At Fort Benning, Georgia, inscriptions in Cretan along with a
picture of a distinctive double-headed Cretan
axe have been uncovered.

Cotton Mather, the illustrious Puritan elder, wrote in 1690
that the Indians, descending from the Canaanites who were
begat by the disreputable Ham of the Bible, were affected by
his Biblical curse, hence had a dubious future even in this
New World - just one more example of the infinity of
historical falsehoods that have encouraged genocide, in
America as elsewhere.

Ham (probably a tribe) begat the Canaanites,
the Canaanites begat the Phoenicians,
the Phoenicians begat the Carthaginians, and
these, equally good sailors, sailed to
Britain and Sierra Leone (this we think we know) and,
if to there, why not to America?
Peralta, writing before the Plymouth landing,
deplored the cannibalism and idolatry of
many Indian cultures and thought they must be sprung
from Canaanites, driven from the Promised Land by
conquering Jews. Later, other writers believed the
Carthaginians, who also practiced child sacrifice and idolatry,
became disaffected when compelled by Greeks and Romans
to desist in their religious practices, and
departed for America in search of freedom of religion,
setting an unflattering precedent for certain later dissenters.

In Tennessee, Jewish inscriptions and Roman coins have been
found together, leading some to believe that the scattering of
the Jews by the Romans after their incessant rebellions had
led a band of Jews here. (Actually the Diaspora or
spreading of Jews to far-flung homes had begun
voluntarily long before this, through preceding
Hellenistic and Roman times.) A burial ground at
Bat Creek, Tennessee, was considered by the expert American
semiticist, Cyrus Gordon, to contain Hebrew inscriptions, which
may relate to the nearby Roman coins.

The Jewish experience in legendary American history is
extensive. In the 1580's Peralta was also bringing the
Ten Lost Tribes, driven from Jerusalem in 583 B.C. by
Nebuchadnezzar the Assyrian, to Central America. They
spread throughout the Americas afterwards: so the story goes.
In 1775 James Adair, who had consorted intimately with the
Chickasaw Indians and fought with them against the
Cherokees, published a discourse to claim
Hebrew origins for the Indians.

The idea was big in Colonial New England.
Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism in the
early nineteenth century, was a Vermonter, and so was
his successor as President of the Church, Brigham Young.
Perhaps his Yankee ancestry might help to explain
why the Book of Mormon declares that the Indians are
descended from survivors of the Assyrian holocaust.
Since the Mormons later became one of the most
powerful and progressive religious sects of America, and Jews
have been associated with America from its dreamlike origins
in Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries up through the
first settlements and into the present, our allusions to these
theories of pre-Columbian events seem to be pertinent.

[Bianca]

Tennessee appears to have hosted other remarkable peoples
in times past. One large group of burials conveyed to the
grave-digger the bones of little people, too battered
by the rigors of life to be children, and therefore
a race of pygmies, the least unlikely source of which
would have been the Aetas tribe of the Philippine Islands.
The Cherokees, a highly remarkable Indian nation,
held a tradition that a pygmy people existed nearby at one time.

Connections have been made with the Hindus and Indo-
Chinese. These, too, had been building stepped pyramids of
colossal size. And in India, 700-year-old temples were
found to contain representations of ears of corn.

Other resemblances between Southeast Asia and Mexico
include the trefoil arch; sanctuaries built inside temples, the
sacred tree and cross; a god holding a lotus flower; certain
pillar constructions; a method of vaulting; diving gods;
serpent gods; wire bells; and phallic ornaments.
Von Humboldt, in his early nineteenth century travels,
found many coincidences, among them
similarities between Mexican and Hindu calendars.
A triple-headed Amer-Indian vase,
found in 1820, was claimed to represent the
triple Hindu deity - Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

A fine story has been concocted of the enormous fourth
century fleet of Alexander the Great, intended for the
invasion of India and points East, which was left stranded by
his untimely death in 323 B.C., and disappeared from
history. We are left to imagine that, lacking better to do and
believing like Ptolemy and his later follower Columbus in a
small round world, its admirals might have sailed it Eastward
through the South Seas, ultimately entering upon the Pacific
Ocean and encountering Polynesia, leaving there strains of
Caucasian blood, and passing thence to the Americas.
Additional hints of veracity: similar peaked helmets; similar
metal-working techniques; the close identity of the Indian
game of pachisi and the ancient Mexican game of patolli.

Lately, as I mentioned above, tests of blood types and blood
chemistry - blood is a veritable encyclopedia to the
knowledgeable reader - have been used as indicators of
degrees of racial affinity among persons and groups. (A
startling example was the offering of genetic proof in support
of the theory of the origin of mankind from central African
prototypes.) In connection with the Americas, Japanese
blood chemistry has been shown to relate strongly to
Ecuadoran, Mayan and Zuni (United States) peoples. And
Japanese and Ecuadoran artifacts dated to 3000 years ago
closely resemble each other.

Further, there exists a strong Chinese cohort that plausibly
finds the story of American West Coast explorations
in the voyages and accounts of a renowned surveyor,
Shu-Hai, sponsored by the Chinese Emperor. Around
220 B.C. another Chinese explorer, Hsu Fu, is supposed to
have settled in America. Even earlier, a group of Buddhist
monks is said to have carried its religion to Fusang,
another name for America, and made converts there.

[Bianca]

The Roman case is fairly strong, especially when abetted by
the several Romanized peoples, evidence of whom is to be
found in the New World. At least forty-one finds of Roman
coins have been publicized, beginning in 1533, these in
places as far apart as Tennessee, Panama, and Venezuela.
Pompeiian house walls, uncovered in modern times from
their burial by Vesuvian ash of the first century, carry
paintings of New World pineapples. Roman bronze and iron
pieces were dug up in Virginia in 1943.

Digging far South in the Toluca Valley of Calixtlahuaca,
José Garcia Payon found a bearded Roman head of terra cotta
dated back to about 220 A.D. Whether it had arrived by way
of the Orient or the Occident is not known, but its
authenticity is not disputed.

The earliest claims for African settlement are more logical
than evidential. Ivan Van Sertima has argued that the
Nubian conquerors of Egypt in the seventh and eighth
centuries B.C., one of whose kings, usually called Ethiopian,
appeared on the battlefield of Troy, were explosively
expansive for a brief period, and probably crossed the ocean,
entered the Caribbean Sea and merged with the Olmecs of
Gulf Coast Mexico. Olmec statues, I have adduced above, are
distinctly Negroid of features, and could readily have
coincided in time with this Nubian period.

Much later on, Mandingo and Songhay expeditions of trade
and colonization across the ocean are legendary. Skeletal
similarities, the importation of cotton to Africa from the
Americas, and a few other indications, all uncertain, have
been introduced to the discussion. A strong legend has Abu
Bakr II, Emperor of Mali, despatching two
expeditions to America in the years between
1307 and 1311. Their fate is unknown.
The Gulf Stream, with its potential for assisting
westward travel, was well-known to the
West African peoples.

It is strange that scholars have credited the Polynesians with
having reached and settled islands over thousands of miles of
the Pacific Ocean, while they have uniformly resisted the
idea that Africans would have had many occasions to reach
the Americas as readily.

Why they would wish to discover and settle new lands is
scarcely answerable. On other occasions, they would not have
had anything to say about the wave and wind that carried
them. Also, African rulers, like European rulers, could
ultimately see a profit in forcing some of their people to go
overseas; for the most part, even less than European
hoi polloi did the African common people
see much point to changing their life style and
to dwell in a poorer part of the world.

[Bianca]

Slightly better documented than the expeditions of Abu Bakr
II is the story of St. Brendan whose curachs left Ireland in the
Fifth century with the Holy Cross to explore a large maritime
region that included Barbados, the Bahamas and the Azores.
We have his "Navigatio" to peruse.
From 1275 to 1759
various maps circulated, bearing the "mythical"
Island of St. Brendan, some of them drawn by an
Irish monk working in Northern Europe.

Other Celtic brethren from Wales claim that in the same age
as St. Brendan, the explorer Madoc voyaged to America,
from which came an epic poem as supporting evidence (it is
well to remind oneself that modern "science" had written off
the Trojan war to Homeric legend, until Schliemann, an
amateur archaeologist, uncovered what was a reasonable
facsimile of a Trojan-Achaean conflict). Perhaps it was from
such Fifth Century Celtic sources that a
Merovingian Gaul of the 600's who called himself Aethicus
told of a round-the-world trip, traversing the
Atlantic Ocean. His fanciful story inspired many
a would-be explorer for a thousand years.

Harvard scholar Barry Fell, a New Zealander by birth,
built up over many years a Celtic-Iberian case,
involving copper mines, institutional correlations
in laws and practices among Celts and Algonquins,
architectural similarities, and a script called "ogam"
said to be commonly used in ancient times on
both sides of the ocean. Far to the West of Ireland there
began to appear with Dalorto's map of 1325 an Island of
"Brazil." Where it came from and went no one knows.

More famous in historical cartography was the Island of
Antilles (perhaps the same?) and this island, too, was far to
the West and during the 1400's was reputed to be the haunt
of Portuguese fishermen. It was drawn in Vizzigano's Map of
1424 and Bianco's Map of 1436. The renowned mapmaker
Toscanelli recommended to Columbus that he use it as a
stopover on his way to the Far East, and Columbus
planned to do so.

For the years 1380 to 1433, customs records
from England show the importation of beaver skins - they
could only be American, probably Canadian Micmac,
given their peculiar packaging - brought in by Basques of the
Iberian peninsula, who wandered far and wide as fishermen
and traders. It is claimed that the Bretons, famed for
seamanship, fished off the shores of America, but the first
hard evidence of a French-Breton presence there is Jacques
Cartier in 1504. Bristol merchants poked around the
Western seas regularly before Giovanni Caboto was hired by
the King to do the job right. Before him by a few years,
Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, is said to have reached the
American coast.

[Bianca]

But not even many a swallow can a summer make. It is
important to give a special meaning to geographical
discovery. Like a scientific discovery, or, I should say, like
other scientific discoveries, a geographical discovery is to be
understood as a recorded event that is replicable, here by a
deliberate, successful, follow-up voyage. Such was the voyage
of Columbus, well-recorded, and then promptly emulated by
other voyages. Like some other scientific discoveries, such as
penicillin, the discovery may be serendipitous: Columbus
thought that he was reaching the Old Indies.

But this still does not make an "Age of Discovery," no more
than a single scientific discovery makes a "Scientific Age." For
this we need a large diverse set of cultures prompted to act
by the initial successes. And we need a large lasting effect
upon both sides of the discovery, the discoverers and the
discovered. It is scarcely to be doubted that the Vikings
discovered and reported to their confined culture their
American findings, so that their directions could be
successfully followed by a subsequent expedition.

However, the Norse world, and its connecting links with the
European World, and the European World itself, were
not ready to treat such discoveries as big news,
full of promise, revealing a great set of cultures
ripe for exploitation by the new technology
of the Europeans. That is why



                C H R I S T O P H E R   C O L U M B U S   D I S C O V E R E D   A M E R I C A



http://www.grazian-archive.com/History/P01_C02_.htm

[Bianca]

I am by no means recomending this book, but I thought it interesting:





Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2006.10.46

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John Boardman, The World of Ancient Art.
 
London:  Thames and Hudson, 2006. 
Pp. 406; figs. 651, maps 12.  ISBN 0-500-23827-8.     


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reviewed by Mary B. Moore, Hunter College of the City University of New York (mbmoore@mindspring.com)
Word count: 2291 words


John Boardman's (hereafter B.) interest in the spread of Greek culture began with his book, "The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade", London 1964 (new and enlarged edition, 1980).

This investigation expanded with his Mellon Lectures, "The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity", delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1993 and published in 1994.

The parameters of this study went as far east as India, south and west to Egypt and North Africa, then north to Italy and Spain with a little of the rest of Europe included at the very end.

Now B. has extended his horizon by taking us around the world and it is quite a wonderful trip.

[Bianca]

The Preface sets the stage, namely that this book is an account of ancient art worldwide, but is not a theory of ancient art.

Rather, the focus is on how art is dictated by the problems and opportunities that encourage the development of human life and how environment determines the shapes of societies and the art they produce.

An important point is that peoples sharing comparable climates, resources and environments have much in common with one another no matter where they live.

Three geographical areas comprise the book: 1) the temperate zones of Europe and Asia in the Old World, Central and South America in the New; 2) the northern steppes, forests and deserts of Asia, Europe and North America, the homes of hunters and gatherers, later of pastoralists and nomads, eventually of farmers; 3) tropical South America, Africa and Oceania, the shortest section of the book.

The chronological limit for the Old World is when Christianity and Buddhism begin to spread and for the New World when Europeans arrive.

The preface closes with observations about the general dearth of world histories of art and the remark (p. 15) that "this is not meant to be in itself a 'picture book' so much as an illustrated history." The copious illustrations and the lean but pithy text bear this out.

[Bianca]

Chapter I, focused on Early Days and the Primitive, sets the stage.

B. discusses the diffusion of human life from Africa to Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, a time that witnesses the earliest creations of small images in stone, horn or bone and the beginning of painting on the walls of caves.

This is a long period of time that ends with the transition to a Bronze Age which leads to a sophisticated urban society with its greater possibilities to share knowledge through observations of local environment, also by travel and commerce.

The development of agriculture inevitably leads to a more "non-mobile" way of life. But B. is quick to point out that the "Neolithic Revolution" is not his subject.

[Bianca]

Chapter II takes us on most of our journey.

This is the core of the book and the longest chapter for it embraces the greatest geographical span--from China to Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire in the Old World, Mexico and Peru in the New.

In the first part of this chapter, B. focuses on the one common factor, environment, a temperate one offering the greatest possibility for communal living, developed agriculture and controlled irrigation, also for the extraction of available mineral resources.

B. asks if there is a connection among peoples separated by geography, language and common views. The answer is yes.

Organization is a factor in building cities, which require special buildings for administration and commerce, arable land and houses, sanctuaries and places of worship, fountain houses and baths, parks and roads, also workshops to produce goods, especially those made of metal.

Cities also require the visual arts as a means to create images that define a nationality or class, record events and, at times, promote propaganda. The representational arts may be divine or secular, illustrating the actions of gods, adventures of heroes, and events of daily life, or artists may create images of monsters that reflect the dangers of a world not completely understood.

In short, the figural arts are a means of communication in all societies and visual story-telling is practiced by all the cultures surveyed in this chapter. Artists are often innovative and imaginative but, with the exception of the Greeks, they are nearly always anonymous. In these early societies, figural arts shape and preserve a form of permanence in society that the spoken word and human memory cannot; thus, visual narrative is an essential form communication.

These general remarks apply in different ways to the sections of this chapter that follow.

[Bianca]

Our journey begins in China, unified by geography and language, where gradually foreigners became important and, in the fifth century B.C., part of the Great Wall was built to keep nomads out.

With the coming of Buddhism, temples were required. Painting and calligraphy developed as major forms of artistic expression, and lacquer and silk were primary materials in the minor arts.

Then we move to India and Central Asia (all Map I), which embrace a hunting/pastoral nomadic society on the Steppes to the north and a more agrarian one in the rich Indus valley to the south. Influences from Persia, Greece and, later, Rome appear in the visual arts, but never were the local traditions obscured in the rendering of forms.

Soon, we travel westward to Anatolia and Early Greece (Maps 3 and 7).

B. discusses the links between these two geographical regions and emphasizes the rich and imaginative artistic legacy they have left us.

Next comes Egypt (Map 4), the most distinctive and long-lived society, determined by the predictable annual flooding of the Nile.

Like China, Egypt was unified by culture, language and art.

B. gives a certain primacy to Greece in this part of our trip because of its emphasis on man's response to his environment and his ability to express strong feelings and subtle thoughts in literature and art, in other words, the human condition. In Greece, it was especially the short-lived glory of Athens in the fifth century that produced the wonders we admire so much today and, together with the legacy of Rome, formed the basis of western civilization.

The next part of our travel takes us in two directions, first east to Persia and the Hellenistic kingdoms, then west to Italy and the Roman world (Maps 3-4 and 6-8).

This may seem puzzling at first, but it is important to remember that not just the Greeks established colonies in the western Mediterranean, but peoples of the Near East did as well, in particular the Phoenicians, who colonized much of North Africa, especially Carthage.

Also, Alexander the Great conquered lands from India to the Aegean, so there are various subtle links here that might escape a less astute scholar than B. The Hellenistic kingdoms embraced three large areas: the Antigonids ruled in Macedonia, the Seleucids in Anatolia and Syria, and the Ptolemies in Egypt.

In terms of artistic endeavor, this is the most diversified, eclectic period discussed in the book.

Italy and the Roman world receive a rather brief discussion, with emphasis on the inventiveness of the Romans as architects of extraordinary buildings and creators of works intended for public display, frequently reflecting the themes of an emperor's administration and often propagandistic.

[Bianca]

Next, B. takes a detour and asks if we can justly admit discussion of the arts of the New World on the same footing as those of the Old World, noting that modern histories emphasize how different they are.

B. remarks that it is not just a question of the arts, but aspects of life and technology, noting that the New World did not have the wheel and never developed a bronze or iron technology, yet there are monuments in stone that rival those of the Old World and there was ample production of food to support large populations living in close proximity.

He stresses that in the New World all of the arts are readily paralleled in the Old, not at the same time, but at similar stages of cultural evolution. B. reviews a number of similarities and dissimilarities, as well as material and intellectual concerns.

His principal aim in this section is to see what was shared in matters of perception, design and execution and what was not.

[Bianca]

Now we cross the Atlantic to visit the New World, namely Central and South America (Map 10).

The formative phase occurs on the Gulf coast, then moves inland to central Mexico, home of the Mayan culture, dominant in the first millennium, followed by the Aztecs, who ruled in the 12th-14th centuries.

These cultures built major centers containing enormous structures that have more to do with ritual and burial than with administration.

Human sacrifice seems to have played a major role.

The principal modes of figural decoration were formal and hieratic on the one hand, realistic on the other, and some of the Aztec images are truly terrifying.

Farther south, in Peru, the Incas were demonstrating skill in handling massive masonry and ingenuity in textile production.

[Bianca]

In Chapter III, we travel to the northern climate, both east and west, where artists were fulfilling many of the same functions as their southern counterparts, with roughly comparable results, in a variety of mixed styles and subjects (Maps 1-2, 6 and 9).

The question is the degree to which an artistic tradition could be adapted to something quite foreign without losing its essence.

B. gives us the well known example of how the Classical tradition survives in the artistic hands of non-Greeks, how it is misunderstood sometimes, and how a subject well known in one culture may change into something quite different in another, the origins perhaps discerned only by a trained historian.

This section of the book embraces the lands from Mongolia and eastern Siberia westward across the Atlantic, all having in common forests, deserts and grasslands. People living in this environment and climate were controlled much more by the seasons than people in more temperate zones; they were nomads and forest-dwellers rather than builders of cities.

Artifacts tend to be small so they can be transported easily, and the subjects were often animals. B. notes that nomads move with a purpose (they are never tourists) and are often influenced by peoples they encounter.

In the upper Balkans, central and northwestern Europe, the most important people are the Celts who occupied the westernmost area.

In North America, the early hunter-gatherers are more elusive, but their art is similar to the Asian animal style.

Materials are natural ones (wood, bone, ivory); metalwork is rare. Pottery and textiles changed little over centuries.

[Bianca]

Chapter IV, the last leg of our journey around the world, takes us to the tropics.

The arts in this part of the world present a special case and the term "ancient" rests on the assumption that essentially African and Oceanic art had changed very little over the centuries. B. observes that there is a certain unity from continent to continent, and the styles are rather sophisticated in terms of execution and design, though not in terms of technology.

In South America (Map 11), the geography is complicated, though mainly torrid rain forest in the regions included in this chapter, and in the Amazon basin there were a large number of separate cultures. All the necessary techniques known to the Old World were discovered independently in the New.

Animal and human subjects were treated in an original manner. B. notes that in Africa, the south Sahara was damper in antiquity than it is today (Map 5). He singles out the clay figures in Nigeria, the style of which echoes throughout the continent to the south, and the Sahara rock paintings, which often depict animals now extinct.

In all of these cultures, weaving of cloth assumes importance, and the colorful results are noteworthy.

Finally, we reach the small islands of the South Pacific whose people depend on the sea for their livelihood (Map 12). They are superb hunter-gatherers, and their culture is basically Neolithic.

B. remarks that it is nearly impossible to distinguish African wooden sculptures from much of Oceanic. The massive stone sculptures of Easter island are a hallmark of this region.


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