(c) Venezuela.
(d) Island of Marajo, Brazil.
The ancient gold work of Costa Rica and Panama also reflects the technique of archaic art, although most of it, to judge by the religious significance of many of the subjects and designs, was made long after the Archaic Period. Just as the pottery figurines were built up by the addition of ribbons and buttons of clay to a generalized form so the patterns for gold castings were made by adding details in rolled wax or resin to a simple underlying form of the same material.
In Colombia and Venezuela archaic art is common in arid and mountainous territory. Local developments confuse the issue of time. Various cultural successions took place here, the Quimbaya, Sinu, and Tairona Indians having developed civilizations with possible Mayan affiliations in some features. The archaic figurines of Colombia are decorated with designs made by the process of negative painting through the medium of wax. This process is pretty generally distributed from central Mexico to northern Peru. The indications are that it was invented long before the rise of the Mayas, and once invented remained popular.
As regards Venezuela the figurines of men and women from the Eastern Andes are often strikingly similar to those of Mexico, especially in such matters as eyes made by double gougings. As a rule, these figurines are painted. Around Lake Valencia they are made without paint, but in combination with pottery designs showing the beginnings of conventionalization. Here there is added the circumstance that wild Carib tribes, coming down the Orinoco, drove the earlier inhabitants out over the West Indies. This flight must have taken place centuries before the coming of the Spaniards.
The archæology of the lower Amazon is best known from the remains found on the Island of Marajo where female figurines exhibit close similarity in pose to specimens from Venezuela and Mexico. This culture of Marajo seems to have been disrupted before the coming of Europeans. But it may be significant that crude fetishes representing women are used at the present time by tribes on the margins of the old Amazonian culture area. The earliest level at Ancon, Peru, yields ware recalling northern products. Nude females, apparently of somewhat later time, however, are in standing rather than sitting pose. It seems, then, that the trail of dissemination of agriculture and the ancillary arts can be followed across the northern part of South America and southward along the Andes to Peru. The greatest similarities must be sought in the oldest objects and some leeway granted in the case of marginal survivals.
It is proper to speak of agriculture, pottery-making, and weaving as the great civilizing complex. Few inventions could break down the ordinary boundaries of language and environment, as these had done. Yet, after the discovery of America, the horse, introduced by the Spaniards, spread rapidly through native tribes, modifying their lives greatly. It is capable of demonstration that with the horse went two types of saddle—the pack saddle and the riding saddle. Similarly in the first rapid spread of agriculture went pots and woven garments.
Two maps of the New World are given herewith: the first showing the extent of the Archaic Horizon and the second the final distribution of pottery among the American Indians and the final distribution of agriculture. The agricultural area is subdivided according to, first, the arid land type where irrigation is generally practised; second, the humid land type; and third, the temperate land type. The first type of agriculture appears to be the earliest and the range coincides, for the most part, with the range of the archaic pottery art.