199. The Several Provincial Developments: Mexico
Since the calendrical and graphic achievements enumerated, together with temple sculpture, lie in the fields of science, knowledge, and art, and since they show a definite localization in southern Mexico, in fact point to an origin in the Maya area, they almost compel the recognition of this culture center as having constituted the peak of civilization in the New World.
This localization establishes at least some presumption that it was there rather than in South America that the beginnings of cultural progress, the emergence out of primitive uniformity, occurred. To be sure, it is conceivable that agriculture and other inventions grew up in Andean South America, were transported to Mexico, for some reason gained a more rapid development there, until, under the stimulus of this forward movement, further discoveries were made which the more steadily and slowly progressing Peruvian motherland of culture failed to equal. Conjectures of this sort cannot yet be confirmed or disproved. Civilization was sufficiently advanced in both Mexico and Peru to render it certain that these first beginnings now referred to, lay some thousands of years back. In the main, Mexican and Peruvian cultures were nearly on an equality, and in their fundamentals they were sufficiently alike, and sufficiently different from all Old World cultures, to necessitate the belief that they are, broadly, a common product.
Still, the superiority of the Mexicans in the sciences and arts carries a certain weight. If to this superiority are added the indications that maize and cotton were first cultivated in the south Mexican area, in other words, that the fundamentals of American agriculture and loom-weaving seem more likely to have been developed there than elsewhere; and if further the close association of pottery with agriculture throughout the western hemisphere is borne in mind, it seems likely that the seat of the first forward impetus out of the wholly primitive status of American culture is to be sought in the vicinity of southern Mexico.