If ... a man should report to the Chinese police that some copper bells, a vertical loom, some tripod trays, and a roll of bark cloth had been stolen from his house, and if, after broadcasting the details, the American police should find all these articles in the possession of a man in America, where such things had hitherto been unknown, would the authorities be satisfied with the explanation that the possessor had independently invented each item? I am inclined to think that, if I should happen to be the attorney for the defense, knowing that my client had recently come over from Asia, a plea of insanity might carry more weight with the jury than my client’s explanation.
He argues his point still more vividly:
If a Scotsman uses a split-bamboo trout rod, a waterproof silkline, and a barbed hook, it is not necessarily a case of diffusion if a man in Saskatchewan is found to be fishing with a willow twig, a piece of string, and a bent-pin, since each item is dependent upon the others. But if in addition to their fishing tackle, the Scotsman and the man in Saskatchewan are found to possess a shot-gun, a flask, a brier-pipe and bagpipes, then it would look like a case of diffusion since no one item of the assemblage is dependent upon any other.[9]
Dispersion as Well as Diffusion
The difficulty of this second step in the diffusionist’s argument lies in the fact that it is hard indeed to find a complex of traits in one American locality that resembles exactly a complex of traits in a single Old World one. If the traits are all together in Peru, some may come from one place in the Old World and some from another. Or, if we take a group of traits from a single Old World locale, we find them spread out widely and separately in the Americas. An excellent example of this may be drawn from Oceania and South America. Dixon writes of the diffusionists:
When in South America, they say, you find not only coca-chewing, plank canoes, and tie-dyeing, but also terraced irrigation, Panpipes, and the blow gun—all traits widespread in the western Pacific and southeastern Asia—how can you deny that their occurrence is due to diffusion, or believe for a moment that so many similar and parallel inventions could take place? The challenge is a formidable one. Is there anything that can be said in reply?
Dixon points out that these Oceanic traits are not found together in the New World. The plank canoe is confined to the Santa Barbara Islands and southern Chile; tie-dyeing, to the arid coasts of northern Peru; coca-chewing, originally to the Andean highlands and the tropical forests along its eastern border; terraced irrigation, to the Andes of Peru and Bolivia; the blow gun, to the upper Amazon and Orinoco forests, the Antilles, and the eastern United States; the Panpipe, to the Amazon-Orinoco drainage and southward through Bolivia to northern Chile and the Peruvian coast, and to one or two isolated spots in Ecuador and Colombia. “With one exception the only area where the distribution of any two of these traits is found to overlap lies in the Andean highlands and the tropical forest area to the eastward. Only tie-dyeing and the Panpipe are found together on the coast.” Further, the two traits we find on the coast are separated in the Old World. Tie-dyeing is found specifically in Indonesia “and known in Melanesia only in degenerate form in one small area, whereas the Panpipe is primarily Melanesian and almost unknown in Indonesia.”[10] He seems to be ignorant of double Panpipes connected by a cord which are found in the hinterland of Burma and also in Panama and South America.[11]
No opponent of diffusionism is so blind as to deny the importation of some culture traits by the migrants from northern Asia. Kroeber concedes the fire drill, the spear-thrower, stone chipping, twisting of string, the bow, the throwing harpoon, simple basketry and nets, hunting complexes, cooking stones in vessels of wood, of bark, or of skin, body painting and perhaps tattooing, the domestication of dogs.[12] But, except for these and a few other examples, most anthropologists deny that the American Indians, early or late, brought any objects of their culture from the Old World. Alfred V. Kidder has phrased very neatly their antagonism to “non-stop journeys by bag-and-baggage culture carriers.”[13] This phrase is aimed at a weak chink in the diffusionist’s armor—the fact that Old World traits found, say, in the Southwest, Middle America, or farther south leave no trail across Alaska and down through Canada and over the Great Plains.
In addition, the opponents of diffusion like to point out that certain things in the Indian culture of the northern part of the New World are like certain things in the Indian culture of the southern part, while in between lies a very large area—Middle America and Peru—of entirely different culture traits. Here we find none of the northern and southern things. Nordenskiöld observes that, while some of the identical northern and southern traits may be due to the stimulus of similar cold climates, there are numerous traits that have nothing to do with temperature and humidity. He doubtless feels he is delivering the coup de grâce when he writes:
It is a very characteristic fact that incomparably greater similarity exists between civilizations as far apart as those of the Calchaquis of Argentina, and the Pueblos of North America, than between the culture of any Indian tribe and that of any people in the whole of Oceania.[14]