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An Old World View of New World Prehistory*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Geoffrey Bushnell
Geoffrey Bushnell*
Affiliation:
Cambridge University, Cambridge, England
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Abstract

A review of problems in American archaeology is organized around the Lithic, Archaic, Formative, Classic, and Postclassic stages of Willey and Phillips. Among the problems raised and discussed are: the inadequacy of the Early Lithic or generalized gathering tool stage, the need for a better definition of the Archaic concept, the difficulty in extending the Archaic stage into South America, the dating and interpretation of the Peruvian Preceramic period, the origin of New World cotton, the possibility of trans-Pacific contacts and the feasibility of ocean travel, the Mesoamerican origin of the Formative stage, the dating of Valdivia culture and the Formative in general in South America, the relationship between Chavin and the comparable cultures in south coastal Peru, the inappropriateness of identifying most of the Mesoamerican centers as cities, the Aztec state as an empire, and the Classic stage as essentially urban, and the possibility of yet finding a Siberian origin for the pressure-flaked bifacial projectile points of the paleo-Indians.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , July 1961 , pp. 63 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1961

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Footnotes

*

An address delivered at the annual dinner, 25th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, May 6, 1960, New Haven, Connecticut.

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