Fuel & Flame

Who, or what, went whichaway?

The question has long agitated Americanists--the scholars and experts who specialize in the prehistory of the Western Hemisphere and who explore the origin and development of such high civilizations as the Mayans and the Incas.

Almost all Americanists agree that the original South and Central American Indians migrated from Asia. The majority thinks that they brought with them only the rock-bottom culture of nomadic hunters and thereafter built their own glittering cultures independently, without help from across the Pacific. The contrary view is that Asian cultures kept trickling over the ocean, materially helping the Indians develop their advanced civilizations.*

Peaked Gables. Last week the old argument was again alive--and this time because of findings made by wealthy Emilio Estrada of Guayaquil, Ecuador, who dabbles deeply in archaeology even while running a thriving auto and appliance business. He has interested himself in Ecuador's northern coastal region because of vaguely oriental objects previously found there. In 1956, after learning diggers' techniques from Archaeologists Clifford Evans and Betty Meggers of the U.S.'s Smithsonian Institution, he began concentrating on the coastal town of Bahia de Caraquez where, according to ancient legends, a people called the Caras landed from the sea.

A full-dress excavation last year produced a wealth of pottery objects with an oriental look. There were models of houses with peaked gables that looked as if they might have come from Japan or Indo-China. Headrests looked equally Asian, and so did a drawing on a pottery spindle weight that showed a stylized porter carrying burdens on the ends of a pole, as many Asians do. Many sitting figurines had a vague resemblance to statues of Buddha. Carbon 14 tests showed that the objects were made about 250 B.C.

How To Sit Down. According to Estrada, no similar oriental-looking objects have been found elsewhere in Central or South America. His theory is that a small group of people from across the Pacific found their way to Ecuador, perhaps were shipwrecked near Bahia and founded a colony there. Some of their imported cultural traits, such as a liking for headrests and peaked gables, persisted for a few generations before dying out.

Around Estrada's recently published discoveries, the old argument is brewing anew. Unconvinced, Anthropologist Matthew Stirling, long with the Smithsonian, says that headrests are worldwide, and people living in similar climates are apt to have similar house designs. As for the Buddha-like figurines: "There are only a few ways," says Stirling, "for a human being to sit down." Harvard Anthropologist Gordon Willey is also skeptical. Says Willey: "The high American civilizations from Mexico to Peru had been rolling for 1,500 to 2,000 years before this possible Asiatic migration."

* The theory expounded by Thor Heyerdahl in his bestselling Kon-Tiki that the cultural traffic went t'other way, from Peru to the South Pacific, is dismissed by most experts.

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