Escape from the Trap
The similarity between the traits of the north and the south which Nordenskiöld points out, and the fact that a different lot of traits were dropped in between the others are grist to Gladwin’s diffusion mill. In 1937, when he wrote Excavations at Snaketown, he was only beginning to see an answer. By 1947, when Men Out of Asia appeared, he had a fairly complete and certainly an ingenious explanation.
His first proposition is that the Mongoloids came late—very late—and that they brought not much more than the brawn and brains which someone else would later direct. His fifteenth chapter begins with the following parody of a baseball score:
Score at the End of the Fourth Inning
NORTH AMERICA 4 Australoid, Folsom, Algonquin, Eskimo SOUTH AMERICA 1 Australoid No Discoveries No Inventions No Mongoloids
By 300 B.C.—two hundred years after the Eskimo—Gladwin is willing to add 1 run to the North American score and make that run Mongoloid. But he does not believe that the Mongoloids reached South America in any numbers, or contributed anything but labor to the culture which Columbus found. They did not make black-on-white pottery in the Pueblo country or red-on-buff pottery and irrigation canals in southern Arizona, create incised pottery, pyramids, carved jade, or a calendar system and hieroglyphs in Middle America, pound bark cloth in Central America, or produce stone fortresses and superb weaving and portrait jugs in Peru. Left to their own devices, the Mongoloids would have accomplished no more in the New World than they had in the Old before the Huns made things unpleasant for them in northern China. Gladwin believes that the people who created the culture of Middle America and Peru came overseas, spreading north and south from the isthmus of Panama. The suggested invasion by water explains the odd fact that many of the traits of northern North America are like some of those of southern South America, and not at all like most of the traits of the area between. Some of these northern and southern traits, says Gladwin, are the property of the Australoids who came far back; others in North America find analogies in China and northern Asia. His overseas peoples thrust themselves and their culture into the central part of the New World, changing or obliterating the Australoid traits that they found there, and isolating those that lay to the north and south. He believes that these people brought with them certain objects and customs from the islands in the Pacific, from southeastern Asia, and from China and points west. Among them is the habit of squeezing a baby’s head between boards to give it an elegant elongation; this head deformation is not practiced in northern Asia, from which the Indians are presumed to have come.
It is hardly necessary to point out that Gladwin’s hypothesis disposes of the question: “Why are there no traces of Middle American and Peruvian traits on the trail down from Alaska?” But we might ask: “Why are there not more of them in the Pacific islands?”
Gladwin has not worked out his maritime invasions too thoroughly; but he sees the Melanesians—who, he believed, reached Easter Island—continuing on to Central America and becoming the Caribs and spreading into South America and the West Indies. He sees the Polynesians taking much the same route and turning into the Arawaks.
What started these South Sea islanders off on their career of civilizing the central part of the Americas? Where did they get some of the traits and some of the physical features that Melanesians and Polynesians do not now possess, as well as their inventive brains? Here Gladwin has a startling and fabulous theory to put forward. Here is where Alexander the Great and his sailors and ships come in.