diffusionism

[Mike Cleven]

At 07:37 PM 12/21/99 -0400, The McDonald Family wrote:
>At 05:35 PM 12/21/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>>Jeff writes:
>>
[Linda's original post snipped]
>
>Speaking from the perspective of a (hopeful) Anthropology major and major
>History buff, the idea of pre-Columbian cultural contact doesn't seem
>entirely unrealistic. For the past centuries our history books have been
>focused upon the idea that Columbus was the first person to cross the
>Atlantic. (Never mind the Pacific.)

Entirely the point - the Atlantic bias on North American history is still
with us; the term "pre-Columbian" is pretty much a non sequitur on the
Pacific Coast and has no useful relevance; "pre-Cook" might be more like
it, or "pre-Bering" or "pre-Martinez" or whatever.  I usually use
"pre-Contact", since this part of the continent remained in isolation from
the colonialist goings on to the south and east; overland contact with
other native culture-regions certainly was going on; but little information
about the white man or "what was coming" had reached the Coast or Plateau
by the 1790s, as native reactions to the arrival of white men in the region
demonstrate.

The whole idea of a Pacific crossing, or at least circumAlaskan navigation
(to coin a term; maybe circumAleutian), has eluded anthropologists and
historians of North America because of the concentration of attention on
the Atlantic and on the supposed Bering Land Bridge route; all the while
the obvious fact that people could have come from any (or all) directions
seems to have escaped them as too obvious.  There is a new idea that the
old glacial-era coastal plain might not only have been a major migration
corridor from Asia (if such a migration did in fact occur, which no one has
exactly proven) but also a major location for human settlement, perhaps
even "civilization" that the oceans have since swallowed up.  This is far
from the pale of the conventional ideas surrounding the Bering Land Bridge
or the Egyptians or Phoenicians or whatever; but it's really much more
conventional as far as Pacific America goes - and a lot more geographically
straightforward than people having to pick their way through a maze of
valleys and frozen forest between the mouth of the Yukon and the Great
Plains.....


 It wasn't until the discovery of the old
>Viking settlement in Newfoundland that this theory was decisively proven
>wrong. Most of the pro-Columbians have had to pare down their initial
>position to the statement that Columbus was the man who established
>permanent and wide-ranging contact between the Western Hemisphere and
>Europe, which is sadly true. :(

The way I usually put it is something like "imported European political
claims and systems of legitimacy and imposed them upon other
peoples/countries"; this is esp. in the case of the Spanish.  Columbus'
impact was in importing imperialism; fishing tales and legends on both
shores of the Atlantic indicate that people were already crossing the
Atlantic, perhaps in relative numbers; it was imperial government that
Columbus brought with him, as represented by the infamous
cross-and-flag........

>I think it probable that there has been a much longer tradition of
>transoceanic contact in the Pacific basin rather in the Atlantic basin --
>the trade links spanning the north Pacific, from China at one extreme to the
>Pacific Northwest at the other, are a matter of record. I seem to recall a
>report that the sweet potato may have arrived in Polynesia and Asia prior to
>the formal establishment of trade links between the Wester Hemisphere and
>Asia via the Spanish galleon trade between Mexico and the Philippines. Can
>anyone confirm this?

Well, the Manila galleons that left Acapulco had to know where they were
going, didn't they?  And there must have been contact between the
Phillippines and Spain in the other direction, as I don't recall them being
colonized via the Pacific.  I think what you might be talking about is that
the sweet potato appears to have been in Polynesia and Asia already at the
time of anyone's colonization (unless Magellan or da Gama dropped some
along the way, perhaps); this may have been due to occasional contact with
Polynesia from Central and South America, with the root moving on to Asia
from there....

The Asian influence in Acapulco is very interesting; there is a pureblood
Japanese community from the turn of the century, plus a heady local ethnic
mix of various kinds of Indian/Mestizo, Latino/Hispanic, black, Filipino,
Polynesian and Asian; called 'tropicale', it's not quite like anything
else.....

Later

M