The origin of the Native American has long been a primary concern of scholars. Such ancestry, and the relation of the Indian to inhabitants of other regions of the world, has been a major fascination to non-Indians. In the past, most of this was expressed via the socio-religious avenue of examination, with theories ranging from Atlantis, Phoenicia, Babylonia and Scandinavia to the Lost Tribes of Israel.
As long as the American scholar continued to face toward Europe, this continued apace. But as interest in Latin America—and more recently the Orient—increased, other theories have enjoyed attention, most particularly that of pre-Columbian contact across the Pacific Ocean. This has been highlighted by the research of such individuals as Heine-Geldern, Ekholm, and Heyerdahl; and as scholars became more familiar with the long ancestry of the American Indian in the New World, the tremendous cultural development which obviously took place, and the astonishing visual similarities to civilizations in the Orient, they have become more willing to take a second look at trans-Pacific contact as a reality, as removed from theories of other-than-OId World ancestry.
Asiatic Influences in Pre-Columbian American Art is another of several titles which have appeared within the last half-dozen years to explore this subject. Paul Shao brings to bear several specialized skills which other scholars have lacked: as a Chinese, he can handle the lore and literature directly, rather than depend upon translation; as a photographer, his collection of visual evidence is prodigious; and as an artist, his esthetic judgment strengthens his arguments. It is perhaps most unfortunate that the results reflect almost solely visual parallels, rather than supporting data from other cultural fields which might more effectively influence doubters.
Certainly many of his illustrations suggest the development of transPacific influence, and that a knowledge of “another world” may well have existed in prehistoric times. And while this reviewer admits to accepting the premise of such contacts, however irregular, it is also true that to offer carefully-selected and isolated art examples as “proof’ exposes the author to attack, since an equal number of direct opposites can be introduced to vitiate the theory.
What the book does offer the readers of this journal is a portfolio of art motifs drawn from throughout the New World and the Orient, juxtaposed to suggest interrelationship, in order to support a theory of pan-Pacific contacts. Unfortunately, many of the points depend upon the author’s own drawings, rendering them suspect to selective choice and interpretation, and many seem irrelevant to the theory. Many of the photographs, while perhaps originally excellent, are poorly reproduced, and are often too muddy to allow careful inspection. There is little here which is new to the specialist, although to the historian there may be food for thought in these intriguing comparisons—if not making one a convert at first sight.
The emphasis is primarily upon Middle America (and most especially the Maya), and one would hope for a wider range of examination, with perhaps less reliance upon visual interpretation in favor of greater comment upon custom, history and tradition. Although this is an impressive collection, one comes away with a curious feeling of disappointment, not that Paul Shao fails in his effort to gather together a good selection of illustrations. The difficulty, as this reviewer sees it, is two-fold: the lack of absolute examples represented by archeologically-extracted specimens of such trans-Pacific interrelationships, and secondly, that it is no longer sufficient to present a series of visual images which appear to be the same, or remarkably similar, to support the theory. One can argue with equal conviction that the “elephant” may simply be a stylized tapir.
But this is not the point. The fact remains that there is still much that we do not understand about the first Americans, and there has been more emotion than scholarship given to the problem. This will not be solved by Biblical quotations, or upon the art battlefield of “look alikes.” What must be done is to bring to bear all of the academic disciplines—literature, history, geography, art and anthropology—to find the answer. Shao has taken an interesting step in that direction, but the road into the inner secrets of our ancestry is still long; perhaps this is the path of Lao Tze.
