They included labretifery, tattooing the chin of adult women, certain uses of masks, a certain style of conventionalizing natural objects, the use of conventional signs as hieroglyphics, a peculiar facility in carving wood and stone, a similarity of angular designs on their pottery and basketry, and of artistic representations connected with their common religious or mythological ideas.  Many singular forms of carvings and the method of superimposing figures of animals one upon another in their totem poles are found from Alaska to Panama, except in California.  These distinguishing features of an incipient culture are found nowhere else in North America, even sporadically.  Dall therefore concludes that “they have been impressed upon the American aboriginal world from without,” and on the ground of affinities, attributes their origin to Oceanica.[780]

Cyrus Thomas, on the basis of the character and distribution of the archeological remains in North America, concurs in this opinion.  He finds that these remains fall into two classes, one east of the Rocky Mountain watershed and the other west.  “When those of the Pacific slope as a whole are compared with those of the Atlantic slope, there is a dissimilarity which marks them as the products of different races or as the result of different race influences.”  He emphasizes the resemblance of the customs, arts and archeological remains of the west coast to those of the opposite shores and islands of the Pacific, and notes the lack of any resemblance to those of the Atlantic; and finally leans to the conclusion that the continent was peopled from two sources, one incoming stream distributing itself over the Atlantic slope, and the other over the Pacific, the two becoming gradually fused into a comparatively homogeneous race by long continental isolation.  Yet these two sources may not necessarily include a trans-Atlantic origin for one of the contributing streams; ethnic evidence is against such a supposition, because the characteristics of the American race and of the archeological remains point exclusively to affinity with the people of the Pacific.[781] John Edward Payne also reaches the same conclusion, though on other grounds.[782]

[Sidenote:  Lack of segregated districts.]

The one strong segregating feature in primitive America was the Cordilleras, which held east and west apart.  In the natural pockets formed by the high intermontane valleys of the Andes and the Anahuac Plateau, and in the constricted isthmian region, the continent afforded a few secluded localities where civilization found favorable conditions of development.  But in general, the paucity of large coast articulations, and the adverse polar or subpolar location of most of these, the situation of the large tropical islands along that barren Atlantic abyss, and the lack of a broken or varied relief, have prevented the Americas from developing numerous local centers of civilization, which might eventually have lifted the cultural status of the continents.[783]