Robert
Wauchope (1909-1979) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist with a specialization
in Latin American, Mesoamerican, and the Southwestern United States.
A few years ago, I read the following which stood out as he had a rather positive view of the works of Thomas Staurt Ferguson on parallels between the Old and New Worlds:
Ferguson ([Old Fold, One Shepherd]
1958) has listed 290 “elements of culture” common to Egypt, Asia Minor, and
Mesopotamia, on the one hand, and Middle America, on the other.
These imposing lists of resemblances
between Asia and prehistoric Mesoamerica, reinforced by the equally close
parallels between Ecuador and Japan reported by Estrada, Meggers, and Evens
(1962), keep open to discussion the entire question whether there were
accidental, sporadic, or even regular contacts across the Pacific between the
peoples of the Old World and the New World, a possibility that most American
anthropologists have in the past tended to deny. (Robert Wauchope, “Southern
Mesoamerica,” in Prehistoric Man in the New World, ed. Jesse D. Jennings
and Edward Norbeck [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964], 360, comment
in square brackets added for clarification)
Further Reading:
John Gee, “The Hagiography of
Doubting Thomas”
Daniel C.
Peterson and Matthew Roper, “Ein Heldenleben? On
Thomas Stuart Ferguson as an Elias for Cultural Mormons”
Daniel C.
Peterson, “On the
New World Archaeological Foundation”
