14 Their mean tendencies are briefly as follows: subbrachycephalic (undeformed males 80.2 on the north coast, 80.3 on the central coast), high-vaulted, medium short faces, medium nasal apertures, and medium high orbits. Most characteristic is a well-filled occipital region with lambda position high. Male stature was about 160 cm. or slightly less.
It will be noted here and in Footnotes 17 and 18 that description of putative racial types in terms of their mean tendencies leaves much to be desired. Upon scanning these mean tendencies, the reader's immediate reaction is that the Coastal, Intermontane, and Western Sierra types are not so different after all. The validity of this reaction is freely admitted, yet metrically the statistically significant differences (<3XP.E.) between each pairing of the three series ran 41-59%, using 22 measurements and indices. The presence of these differences, in both the male and female series, makes it more difficult to ascribe them to sampling errors.
The great difficulty in making brief and meaningful descriptions of racial types is a dilemma in research upon human skeletal material. This dilemma is strongly felt by those working on the racial history of North America—a much better known area than the west coast of South America. That we physical anthropologists cannot deliver a cogent description of a series of skulls, let alone a racial type, indicates to me that some of our basic concepts, methods, and even techniques need a major overhaul. To those of my colleagues who object to this view, I will admit that (1) we do describe series in terms of metric constants and morphological attributes, and it takes a number of printed pages to do so, (2) we also describe a series or a racial type in terms of how they differ from other series or types. But we apparently cannot adequately describe them briefly in terms of themselves,without distorting their true biological character.
