Peopling of the New World from Data on Distributions of Folklore Motifs

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a catalogue of folklore and mythology has been created which now contains approximately 50,000 abstracts of texts from all over the world, with information on the distributions of more than 2000 motifs from almost 1000 traditions. In this chapter, we describe this databank and use it to analyse the distribution of motifs across the New World as well as distributions of selected motifs worldwide. Our results support the hypothesis of a coastal route from Beringia to the territories beyond the ice sheets at the early stage of the peopling of America ca. 15–17,000 years ago. Not only do stark differences exist between sets of motifs recorded in North America, on the one hand, and in Central and South America, on the other hand, but these sets find parallels in different regions of the Old World. The Central-South American set has analogies in the Indo-Pacific belt of Asia, especially in Melanesia. Motifs in North America rather often find parallels in continental Siberia. Because all groups of migrants, from the earliest to the Inuit Eskimo, penetrated North America, but few crossed the deserts of Northern Mexico and the Central American bottleneck, the North American folklore traditions accumulated a greater variety of stories and images and are amongst the richest in the world. South American traditions, in contrast, are more homogeneous. Besides this North–South American dichotomy, other regularities in the geographic distribution of folklore motifs in the New World are revealed. In particular, they are related to the presence of different sets of motifs across the South American southwest and east; to the east and to the west of the Rockies; across the North American northwest and across the main part of the continent. These patterns of distribution of motifs can be correlated with archaeological data.