Abstract
ARGUMENTS for the diffusion of culture are so frequently a matter of inference, resting on a balance of probabilities, that any instance of the effect of extraneous cultural influence, which rests on well-attested historical evidence, is a welcome accession to the material of discussion. An instructive lesson may be derived from a letter from Mrs. Wishaw, the well-known authority on Spanish archaeology and cultural history, appearing in The Times of January 24, in which she directs attention to the relation between the pillow-laces of Buckinghamshire and those still made on occasion at Niebla in the Province of Huelva, which derives in the English county from the interest taken in it by Katherine of Aragon, the consort of Henry VIII. Not only does Mrs. Wishaw record a tradition still current in Huelva connecting the Spanish princess with the Andalusian lace; but she also points out that at the present day this lace retains in its motifs the prehistoric Egyptian five-petalled lotus and the birds of life on either side brought to Andalusia by Coptic workers, who introduced the art into Spain in the eighth century A.D. under the rule of the Yemenite Arabs. Thus we have a tenuous if well-attested line of connexion between ‘prehistoric’ Egypt and Britain, which might well have been called in, in default of documentary evidence, to support the famous prehistoric blue faience Egyptian bead (now assuredly crushed under the weight that has been laid upon it!), and to ‘prove5 the existence of a culture complex in Britain. The moral would seem to be that an attitude of caution is necessary towards the bold hypotheses of cultural movements, which carry no intrinsic evidence of the chronological relation of their component elements. An analogous instance is the resemblance between the arts of early China, Polynesia and Central America, to which attention has been directed, where the time gaps may aggregate as much as two thousand years or more.
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Culture Contacts in Buckinghamshire. Nature 137, 181 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137181b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137181b0