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Some Amerasian Pottery Traits in North Asian Prehistory*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Paul Tolstoy*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York, N.Y.

Extract

Asiatic origins have, at one time or another, been suggested or at least considered for a number of traits connected with the manufacture and decoration of the earlier New World pottery. The well-known paper by McKern (1937) is among the most explicit statements on the subject. Griffin (1946; Sears and Griffin 1950a) has held similar views for some time. Like McKern, he has primarily in mind traits of the Woodland pattern of eastern North America, although he also mentions some non-Woodland traits among those which have counterparts in the Old World (1946, p. 45).

Since McKern's paper, the distribution in time of the traits involved has become a lot better established. With the help of the still suspiciously regarded radiocarbon dates, our perspective on ceramic history in the United States has been extended over a span which appears to be that of some four millennia. Among the more significant additions to the Asiatic half of the distributional picture first place must be given to recent Soviet work in eastern Siberia.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1953 

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Footnotes

*

The writer wishes to thank J. A. Ford and G. F. Ekholm of the American Museum of Natural History, for reading and commenting on the manuscript of this paper, as well as Mary Kawai, graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, for help in consulting Japanese material.

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