Viewing page 30 of 42

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [01:07:02]
{SPEAKER name="Gordon Ekholm"}
suggest that we should allow ourselves to speculate further, and
[01:07:06]
particularly to speculate about the whole question of diffusion into the new world.

[01:07:17]
One can well ask, of course, why American archeologists have been, in the past, disinclined to consider the, seriously, the question of trans-pacific, trans-pacific or inter-oceanic contacts as having some importance in the origins of the new world cultures.

[01:07:36]
Probably, there are multiple reasons for this. One, is that from the time of the first discovery of the new world there has been a great deal of wild speculating as regards contacts. Many of these speculations were done by persons not expert in archaeological subjects, of course. And archeologists have spent a great deal of time trying to cut down many of these wild speculations. And they have gotten into a habit, or they did get into a habit it seems, of discrediting or discarding these speculations that were made mainly by amateurs.

[01:08:44]
Another aspect of it, it seems to me, is the kind of false scientism that is, was found in much archaeology. There has been a long time, for a long time, an attempt to--
[01:09:06]