Early Cultural Relations in Central America

Abstract

AMONG communications dealing with the archælogy of Central America presented to the Twenty-seventh International Congress of Americanists, which met in Mexico City on August 5–15 (see NATURE, Aug. 19, p. 319), there were several, it would appear from a preliminary report issued by Science Service of Washington, which brought forward suggestions and advanced conclusions of considerable interest in reference to the cultural relations of, and cultural successions among, the early inhabitants of Mexico and the adjacent regions. Dr. Alfonso Caso, president of the Congress, for example, in describing the results of his excavations on Monte Alban, not only argued for the common origin of the culture of that site with that of the not far distant ruined city of Mitla on the evidence of architectural affinities, but also put forward the conclusion that three stages of development are to be distinguished, which can be linked respectively with the Archaic culture of Mexico, dating from before the Christian era, the Toltec of Teotihuacan, and the Aztec. Further, Dr. A. V. Kidder, reporting on his excavations in pit-tombs near Guatemala city, assigns their builders to a period corresponding with the middle period at Monte Alban, or when the great Toltec civilization of central Mexico was approaching its decline. It would appear that the pottery from the Guatemalan pit-tombs provides a key which links the tomb builders with other early cultures of tropical central America. Some light was also thrown on the development of agriculture among the early peoples by Dr. Pablo Martínez del Rio, who advanced the theory that agriculture may have had a more rapid rise in the New World than in the Old, on the ground that differences in methods of seed selection and cultivation speeded up results for the Indian farmer, so that it was not necessary to postulate, as some botanists have done, an extremely long period of development.