Word: ekholm
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...natives used two kinds of fishhook: a barbed, composite gadget made of shell and stone lashed together and a nearly circular barbless hook carved out of bone or shell in one piece. Almost identical hooks of both types have been found together on the northern coast of Chile. Dr. Ekholm believes that patterns so characteristic and so similar could not have been developed independently...
...Vice. Totem poles, characteristic of British Columbia, are also made in the East Indies. A common pattern in both regions has human figures alternating on the pole with figures of fish or birds. Dr. Ekholm showed the Americanists carved sticks (miniature totem poles) from both Sumatra and British Columbia and challenged them to tell him which came from where. They confessed that the designs were so similar that they could only guess whether Asiatic or American Indians made them...
...when did the cultural elements (art forms, techniques, tools, customs) move across the Pacific? Dr. Ekholm does not know, but he suspects that the early high civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, characterized by agriculture, pottery-making and pyramid-building, set up a cultural tremor that lapped most of the world. Traders, explorers, fugitives and raiders carried the techniques with them, just as their modern equivalents carry the catching customs of modern industrialism. Probably faint cultural ripples, relayed slowly from people to people, and from island to island for thousands of years, finally crossed the ocean...
...document his theory, Dr. Ekholm exhibits a stone bas-relief from India's Amaravati period (about 200 A.D.). At the ends are beasts with fishlike bodies. Out of their mouths sprout lotus flowers, and lotus stems wind sinuously through the carvings...
...Mayan temple at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, shows similar figures, distorted but still recognizable.. In the Mayan version, the fish-beasts have turned into fish, but conventionalized lotus flowers sprout from their mouths and clumsy lotus stems wind grotesquely. Since the lotus is the symbol of Buddhism, Dr. Ekholm believes that the lotus design may have been brought to Yucatan by a Buddhist missionary. He shows a carving from India of the Buddha seated in a lotus flower. Beside it he shows another stylized lotus flower from Yucatan. In the center, instead of the placid Buddha, is a fierce Mayan...