The Asiatic Origin of the Huichol Still

A MERICANISTS have long been in the habit of ascribing the culture traits of primitive New World groups either to indigenous development or to post-Conquest borrowing from Europe. Other possibilities-with the minor exception of traits thought to have accompanied early migrating groups from Siberia across Bering Strait-have hardly been explored. That so little attention has been paid to late modifications of native cultures by African Negroes and by Asiatics is a serious omission, the more so since abundant evidence is available to indicate that such influences have been both widespread and profound. For more than forty years one of the intriguing puzzles in American ethnology has been the problem of the origin of the distilling apparatus used by the Huichol Indians of west-central Mexico. Carl Lumholtz,' who discovered this odd contrivance (Fig. 2), explained that it was different from all other stills with which he was familiar in that the receiver for the condensing vapors was suspended inside the boiler He rightly characterized the still as the most primitive in America and hazarded the guess that it was pre-Columbian. Diguet2 concurred in this opinion. Seler,3 however, preferred to regard it as an item borrowed from Spanish-Mexican mestizo culture. Here the matter stood until I937, when Hommel4 and Montell5 published descriptions of Mongolian stills with internal receivers and Montell commented in passing on their similarity to the Huichol design. I became interested in the problem in I938 in connection with work on the geography of aboriginal intoxicants in Mexico and Central America.6 If the Huichol still was to be regarded as an aboriginal New World invention, a great deal of explaining would be necessary, for nowhere else in

Ancient history · Geography · History · Latin American history and culture

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