Viewing page 25 of 42

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:55:15]
{SPEAKER name="Gordon Ekholm"}
--so, extremely interested in this subject, and I'm working at the present time on a further study of, um, wheeled animals, attempting to provide what I think is a much more complete explanation of their origin, which I am quite convinced is through diffusion from Asia, where some of the wheeled animals are found.

[00:55:46]
The, um, any event that seems to me that up to the present, although many people have written about these wheeled animals and their possible relationship to invention diffusion have been completely unsatisfactory as explanation.

[00:56:10]
{SILENCE}
Um--


[00:56:25]
{SPEAKER name="William C. Sturtevant"}
Just testing on voice level. I think this is about the same way we talked previously. How much do you want of this?


[00:56:37]

{SPEAKER name="Shirley Gorenstein"}

Just another sentence or two.


[00:56:38]

{SPEAKER name="William C. Sturtevant"}

Another sentence? Okay, here we go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.


[00:56:42]

{SPEAKER name="Shirley Gorenstein"}

Okay.
{SILENCE}


[00:56:47]
{SPEAKER name="Shirley Gorenstein"}
Friday, April 23rd, 1971, American Museum of Natural History. The second interview with Gordon Ekholm for the Oral History Project at the Smithsonian Institution.
[00:56:58]
I'd like to begin this interview by asking you a major - the major question, and that is: I wonder if you could trace for me the history of your interest in diffusionism.


[00:57:11]

{SPEAKER name="Gordon Ekholm"}

Once I got really interested in diffusion I um, well, on looking back on the history of my interest in this, I find that before I did anything especially in the subject, there were certain trends running up, more indicating that I was getting more and more interested in them.

[00:57:37]

I think the wheeled animal subject, which we discussed previously, was one in which got me interested in larger theoretical problems of new world prehistory. Formerly, I had been involved in the more or less, in a way, pedestrian kind of archeological work -

[00:58:06]

working at sites, the development of sequences, and so on, without much consideration of larger theoretical problems. The specific interest in--