The American Southwest: A Problem in Cultural Isolation

Abstract

One of the seminar topics scheduled for the summer of 1955 by the Society for American Archaeology was “The American Southwest: A Problem in Cultural Isolation.” The assignment was to “… examine the assumption that these Southwestern cultures resulted from local acceptance and development of generalized and/or specific traits which can be isolated in distant cultural contexts at earlier times than their climactic developments can be observed in the Southwest.”