CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN NATIVE AMERICA
169. Review of the method of culture examination.—170. Limitations on the diffusion principle.—171. Cultural ranking.—172. Cultural abnormalities.—173. Environmental considerations.—174. Culture-areas.—175. Diagrammatic representation of accumulation and diffusion of culture traits.—176. Representation showing contemporaneity and narrative representation.—177. Racial origin of the American Indians.—178. The time of the peopling of America.—179. Linguistic diversification.—180. The primitive culture of the immigrants.—181. The route of entry into the western hemisphere.—182. The spread over two continents.—183. Emergence of middle American culture: maize.—184. Tobacco.—185. The sequence of social institutions.—186. Rise of political institutions: confederacy and empire.—187. Developments in weaving.—188. Progress in spinning: cotton.—189. Textile clothing.—190. Cults: shamanism.—191. Crisis rites and initiations.—192. Secret societies and masks.—193. Priesthood.—194. Temples and sacrifice.—195. Architecture, sculpture, towns.—196. Metallurgy.—197. Calendars and astronomy.—198. Writing.—199. The several provincial developments: Mexico.—200. The Andean area.—201. Colombia.—202. The Tropical Forest.—203. Patagonia.—204. North America: the Southwest.—205. The Southeast.—206. The Northern Woodland.—207. Plains area.—208. The Northwest Coast.—209. Northern marginal areas.—210. Later Asiatic Influences.
169. REVIEW OF THE METHOD OF CULTURE EXAMINATION
In a previous chapter (VII) it has been shown that culture cannot be adequately explained either by the innate peculiarities of racial stocks nor by the influences of geographic environment; that the factors to be primarily considered in the interpretation of civilization are cultural or social ones.
In a subsequent chapter (VIII) it was made clear that civilization is to a great extent the result of accretion. New elements are handed down in time or passed along in space by a process which psychologically is one of imitation and in its cultural manifestations is spoken of as tradition or diffusion. The chapters on the arch and the week, and the alphabet (X, XI) serve as exemplifications that the principle holds with equal validity in the domains of mechanical, institutional, and intellectual activity. It must be accepted therefore purely as the consequence of an objective or behavioristic examination of human civilization, that while the element of invention or creative progress remains unexplained, the factor of diffusion or imitation is the one that is operative in the majority of cultural events. As contrasted with it, instances of the principle of independent origin or parallel development prove to be decidedly rare, and tend to be illusory on searching analysis or to dissolve into only partial similarities.
In the analysis of the growth of religion in native California (Chapter XII), the attempt was made to apply an assumption derived from the diffusion principle—the assumption that normally the more widely spread element would be the more ancient—to the unraveling of the growth of a civilization which on account of its poverty has left no chronological records; in short, to reconstruct the tentative history of a field lacking ordinary historical data, by converting elements of space into elements of time.
It may now be worth while to apply this method on a larger scale and endeavor to outline the pre-Columbian history of the western hemisphere, which, with some brief and late exceptions in Mexico and Peru, is equally dateless. The cultural connections of native America with the Old World are generally conceded to have been slight: its civilization represents the most important one that in the main developed independently of the Eur-Asiatic nexus.
170. LIMITATIONS ON THE DIFFUSION PRINCIPLE
To essay, by the mere principle of converting spatial extent into temporal duration, an accomplishment of such magnitude and ultimately of such complexity as this, may seem simplistic; and it would be. The distribution principle may be the most useful of the weapons in the ethnologist’s armory. But it requires supplement and qualification.
First of all, it is obvious that spatial extension must not be measured mechanically. To work on the assumption that a custom or art practised over a million square miles was a third as old again as one practised over seven hundred and fifty thousand, would be too often contrary to the evidence of known history as well as the dictates of reason. Culture traits do die out, from inanition, from sterility of social soil, through supplanting by more vigorous descendants. Continuity is therefore not a necessary ingredient of geographical range. An ancient trait may have been displaced in all but a few remote peripheral tracts. The areas of these may aggregate but little. Yet the distances between them are likely to remain greater than the longest range of a later trait which has replaced the earlier one over most of its original territory.
Thus, alphabetic writing is more recent than the ideographic and rebus methods, but in the year 1500 A.D. was in use over a larger area in Europe, Africa, and Asia than the surviving Chinese and Mexican systems occupied. Yet these two outlying systems enclosed between them a larger tract than those over which the alphabets had diffused.
So, at the same period, was agriculture practised by peoples holding more area than was occupied by non-agricultural ones. But the former constituted two great and continuous groups, one in each hemisphere, to which the non-agricultural peoples in the north of Asia, the south of Africa, the remote continent of Australia, the north of North America, and the south of South America were obviously peripheral. Agriculture being of necessity later than the non-agricultural state, and there being thus no doubt that the marginal hunting peoples represent the remnant of a condition that was once world-wide, it appears that there must be a presumption of validity in favor of reckoning the extent of a scattered custom by its included rather than its actual area.
Of course, the situation is not always so simple. There may exist the possibility of two or more marginal areas sharing a trait as the result of parallelism. Half-hitch basketry coiling in Tasmania and at Cape Horn might logically be the last survival of a very ancient world-wide diffusion, or the product of two thoroughly independent inventions, or of parallel processes of degeneration in isolated and culturally unstimulated nooks. The last two interpretations in fact seem more conservative than the first. If half-hitch coiling were as antecedent in its nature to other coiling and to weaving as wild foods are to cultivated ones; or if the Old Stone Age remains showed it to have been actually so; or if it were practised by a considerable number of tribes in four or five rather large marginal areas instead of two quite narrow ones, diffusion, and the consequent antiquity of the trait, could be inferred with high probability. In short, the periphery argument must not be stretched too thin.
Obviously, too, comparables must be compared: coiling with twining, hand-weaving with loom-weaving; not, however, the very special variety of half-hitch coiling with the entire array of weaving techniques. Nor would it be fair to balance the whole group of true alphabets in the year 500 B.C. against the particular rebus system of Egyptian hieroglyphs from which they were possibly derived but which they had already much exceeded in their diffusion. Yet the distribution of all alphabets as against that of all ideographic and rebus systems would lead, at that date as two thousand years later, to the same interpretation that the facts of history actually give.
171. CULTURAL RANKING
Consideration must also be allowed, within certain limits, to cultural superiority and inferiority. This is a criterion that has been abused in the earlier anthropology, but it is usable with caution, especially where a measure of experience confirms the grading that seems rational. A machine process would normally be later than a manual one: cloth, for instance, subsequent to basketry. The antiquity of both these products happens to be so great that little or no direct historical evidence exists, and their perishability precludes much help from archæology. Yet there is this indirect evidence: there are peoples that make baskets only, others that make baskets and cloth, none that make cloth only. Cloth thus is something superadded, which, not coming into competition of utility with basketry, coexists with it.
Where two devices serve the same end and come into full contact, the issue is even simpler, because the better crowds out the worse. There is no record of any people, once able to produce metal axes or knives, reverting to or inventing stone ones. An adequate system of recording events has always maintained itself. Literacy may have become less frequent, now and then, under economic or military stress, and literature poorer, but no recording culture has ever gone back wholly to oral tradition. Specific systems of records have indeed died out—witness Egyptian and Cuneiform: but only because they were rendered useless by more efficient systems of pure phonetic writing. These, on the other hand, have never been known to yield to non-phonetic systems.
It is very different with culture phenomena whose ranking is based solely on the operation of our imaginations. In such cases judgment should if possible be wholly suspended until evidence is available. For fifty or sixty years it has seemed eminently plausible and natural, even inevitable to most people, that matrilinear institutions preceded patrilinear ones, because a man must know his mother, but in a condition of promiscuity would not know his father. Yet incontrovertible historical evidence of a change is conspicuously deficient, so that the belief in the antecedence of the matrilineate has remained founded solely in hypothesis. As has been indicated above (§ 110) and will be shown more in detail below (§ 185), the indirect evidence of distribution indicates rather that definitely matrilinear and patrilinear institutions have tended to be closely associated, and that among exogamous and totemic peoples the matrilineate has usually been the later phase.
In fact, one important stimulus to belief in matrilineal priority has been the awareness that the most advanced cultures of the recent period have inclined to count descent from the father. But it is obviously unfounded to deduce from this that ancient and primitive nations favored mother-reckoning. It would be equally logical—or illogical—to infer that what is had always been since institutions arose, as to argue that because a thing is now it must formerly not have been.
This points to a further limiting consideration: that it is dangerous to argue from a fraction of culture history to the whole. Particularly dangerous is it to infer from the last four centuries to all that went before. In the present era distant communications have become infinitely more numerous and rapid. Space has in one sense been almost abolished. Diffusions that now encircle the planet in a hundred years would in previous ages often have required a thousand to cross a continent by halting steps from people to people.
Similarly, the results of the diffusion principle may be vitiated by an arbitrary bounding of the spatial field of investigation. A review of African distributions by themselves, for instance, would lead to many misleading conclusions, because it is obvious that African culture has evolved not integrally but as a part of the larger complex Europe-Asia-Africa. What from the angle of Africa thus appears central, like iron, may really be peripheral; what appears marginal, like Islam, is often actually central. By comparison America is so discrete from the Old World, both geographically and historically, that an analogous attempt is far more justifiable. Yet even here, as will appear, some influences from the Old World have operated, whose a priori elimination would lead to false conclusions.
As regards what is high and low, whole cultures as well as culture elements must be considered. Between two civilizations, it is fair to assume that the more advanced will normally radiate, the retarded one absorb. It is known that the drift of diffusion was from western Asia to Greece in 800 B.C., from Greece to western Asia in 300 B.C. In the case of a still unexplained trait common to the two areas and limited to them, the presumption of origin would thus lie in one or the other tract according to whether its appearance fell in the period of Asiatic or Greek culture domination. So in America, loom weaving is shared by Mexicans and Pueblos. If nothing else were known of them except that the former but not the latter had passed from oral tradition to visible records, there would be justification for belief in the probability of importation of the loom from Mexico into the adjacent Southwest. Since this one item of Mexican superiority is reinforced by the facts that the Mexicans cultivated a dozen plants to the Pueblos’ three; that they were expert in several metallurgical processes and the Pueblos at best, and rarely, hammered native copper; that the Mexicans alone carried on elaborate astronomical observations, computed with large figures, and had established an intercommunal dominion, the probability of their priority in loom weaving becomes so strong as to serve as a fairly reliable working basis. Still, it is important to remember that in the absence of the direct testimony of history or archæology such a probability does not become a certainty. The Greeks were without writing, metal working, successful astronomy, or empire while these already flourished in Egypt and Asia and were later carried to Greece. Yet in this general period the Greeks developed metrical poetry and vowel signs for the alphabet.
Another limitation to the regularity of the diffusion process is to be found in the inability or unreadiness of undeveloped culture to accept specialized products of more advanced civilizations; and of any culture to accept traits incompatible with its existing customs, except on severe or long continued pressure. A backward tribe might adopt a simple iron-working technique quite avidly, yet find the manufacture of sewing machines beyond its endeavors and wants. Among a people owning little property and no money and therefore not in the habit of counting, and indifferent to their ages or the lapse of time as expressed in numbers of years and days, a calendar system like that of the Babylonians or Mayas would certainly not become established merely because of contact. They might adopt and make use of the knowledge that there are some twelve moons in the round of the seasons, and that the solstices furnish convenient starting points for the count within each year. But generations and centuries of gradual preparation through acceptance of such elementary fragments of the elaborate calendrical scheme would ordinarily precede their ability to take the latter over in completeness. So with a religion like Christianity or Buddhism carried by a lone missionary, or shipwrecked sailors, to a people as simple in their life as the Indians of California. The religion would be too abstract, too remote, too dependent on unintelligible preconceptions, to be embraced. A particular Christian or Buddhist trait, say a symbol like the swastika or cross, might conceivably be taken over and perpetuated as a decorative motive or as a magical charm. True, if the missionary came in the company of troops and settlers, and introduced cattle, regular meals, comfortable clothing, intertribal peace, new occupations and diversions, the old simple culture would often crumble rapidly, and the higher religion be adopted as part of the larger change, as indeed happened in California when the Franciscans entered it. But one would not argue from the convertibility of the Indians under such circumstances to their equal readiness to accept Buddhism from sporadic East Asiatic castaways.
172. CULTURAL ABNORMALITIES
Now and then a condition of cultural pathology must be discounted. About 1889 a messianic religious movement known as the Ghost-dance fired half the Indian tribes of the United States for a few years. In 1891 this had a wider diffusion than any ancient cult. It represented something struck from the contact of two culture systems: it was not of pure native evolution. A point had been reached where the old cultures felt themselves suffocated by the wave of Caucasian immigration and civilization. And in a last despairing delirium they flung forth the delusion of an impending cataclysm that would wipe out the white man with his labor, penalties, and restrictions, bring back the extinct buffalo, and restore the old untrammeled life. Such a cult could not of course have remained permanently active. If analogous excitements occurred in the prehistoric period, they died away without a trace and may therefore be disregarded in a view of long perspective. Or at most they served as ferments productive of other and more stable culture growths. Even if all knowledge of American religion were blotted out except its condition in 1891, the careful investigator would stand in no serious danger of inferring a high antiquity from the broad extent of the Ghost-dance cult, because of the conspicuous elements which it purloined from that very Christianity and Occidental civilization whose encroachments gave it birth.
173. ENVIRONMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS
Two other qualifications on the distribution method must be observed, although they are sufficiently obvious to carry no great danger of oversight. The first concerns gaps or bounds due to physical environment. Metallurgy will not be practised on an isolated coral island. Snowshoes cannot be expected in equatorial lowlands. The spread of the cultivation of a tropical plant like manioc is necessarily restricted no matter how great the antiquity of its use. Limitations of diffusion, or breaks in the continuity of distribution, thus do not count as negative evidence if climate or soil suffice to explain them. This is in accord with what has been previously formulated (§ 83) as to environment being a limiting condition rather than a cause of cultural phenomena.
Secondly, a marginal area need not be literally so. It may actually be nuclear. Thus in the Philippines, older elements of culture are best preserved in the interiors of the larger islands. The coasts show many more imported traits. Communication in the archipelago is by sea, internally as well as in foreign relations; resistance to travel, conquest, intercourse, or innovation is by land. The remote area as regards time may therefore be a mountain range fifty miles inland, while a coast a thousand miles away is near. So a rough hill tract in a level territory, a desert encircled by fertile lands, sometimes remain backward because they oppose the same obstacles to diffusion as great distances.
It is thus evident that valuable as the distribution principle is, perhaps most important of all non-excavating methods of prehistoric investigation, it can never be used mechanically. It must be applied with common sense, and with open-mindedness toward all other techniques of attack. With these provisos in mind, let us approach the problem of American culture.
174. CULTURE-AREAS
The native cultures of the New World are signalized by the two outstanding traits already alluded to. First, they have come to us virtually in momentary cross section, flat and without perspective. In general there are few historic data extant about them. Second, they represent the civilizations of by far the greatest geographical extent and highest attainment that have developed independently, in the main at least, of the great web of culture growths which appear to have had their principal origin in the regions not far from the eastern Mediterranean. They offer, accordingly, a separate problem, and one which, on account of the dearth of temporal data, has had to be approached through the medium of space. As soon, therefore, as knowledge of American cultures became orderly, its organization was inevitably effected in terms of geography. The result has been the recognition of a series of culture-areas or culture-centers, several of which have already been referred to (§ 150-152). These geographically defined types of culture are gradual and empirical findings. They are not the product of a scheme or imagination, nor the result of theory. They are not even the formulation of any one mind. They do represent a consensus of opinion as to the classification of a mass of facts, slowly arrived at, contributed to by many workers, probably accepted in exact identity by no two of them but in essential outlines by all; in short, a non-philosophical, inductive, mainly unimpeachable organization of phenomena analogous to the “natural” classification of animals and plants on which systematic biology rests.
These culture areas, centers, or types have been established with greater exactitude for North than for South America. The ten usually recognized (see Fig. 34) are:
1. Arctic or Eskimo: coastal
2. Northwest or North Pacific Coast: also a coastal strip
3. California or California-Great Basin
4. Plateau: the northern inter-mountain region
5. Mackenzie-Yukon: the northern interior forest and tundra tract
6. Plains: the level or rolling prairies of the interior
7. Northeast or Northern Woodland: forested
8. Southeast or Southern Woodland: also timbered
9. Southwest: the southern plateau, sub-arid
10. Mexico: from the tropic to Nicaragua.
The only serious divergence of opinion as to distinctness or approximate boundaries might arise in regard to numbers 4 and 5 of this list. The culture of the Mackenzie region is so deficient and colorless that some students have hesitated to set it up as a separate unit. The Plateau culture is also vague as to positive traits. A plausible argument could be advanced apportioning it between the adjacent Northwest, Plains, California, and Southwest cultures. In fact, usage has here been departed from in reckoning the Great Basin, that part of the plateau which is without ocean drainage, with California instead of the Plateau.
The Mexican area is less homogeneous than any of the preceding. At least three sub-centers must apparently be recognized within it: those of the Nahua or Aztec, Zapotec, and Maya. The Nahua were politically and economically dominant at the time of discovery, but the Maya center is likely to be the oldest. To it seems due most of the progress achieved in architecture, sculpture, calendry, and writing. The sources of knowledge in the Mexican area are historic and archæological rather than contemporaneously ethnological, and are available through the medium of Spanish writings. Also the phenomena are more diverse and intricate, as is only natural with higher cultures. The consequence is that they are scarcely as well ordered as those from north of Mexico and have not yet been brought into as close a comparable relation with the latter as these among themselves.
South American cultures seem to arrange themselves on fewer lines of cleavage than those of the northern continent. Only five areas are as yet distinctly recognizable. This paucity is perhaps due to a less intensive search for facts and less systematic attempt to classify them, so that future studies may increase the number of areas recognized. Yet a simplicity of plan of culture relationships is evident. The narrow strip between the Andes and the Pacific is a region of rather high culture throughout, the whole remainder of the continent one of much lower and comparatively uniform culture. The areas determined are:
11. Colombia or Chibcha: western Colombia with the nearer parts of Central America and northwestern Ecuador. This is in the main a timbered region.
12. Andean or Peruvian: from southern Ecuador to northern Chile and northwestern Argentina. This is distinctively an arid to sub-arid and unforested belt.
13. Patagonia: characteristically an open, semi-arid country.
14. Tropical Forest: the vast Orinoco, Amazon, and La Plata drainages, prevailingly lowland, humid, and containing the greatest forest in the world. Three sub-regions stand out with a certain ethnic differentiation, although the basis of their culture seems to be that of the woodland. They are: the savannahs of the Guiana region; the highlands of eastern Brazil; the Chaco, west of the middle La Plata system. All three of these are open areas or only part timbered.
15. Antillean: the West Indies, including probably the Venezuela coast. This culture was the earliest to perish in the New World. It received the first shock of Caucasian discovery and settlement, and its carriers had no hinterland to which to retreat. It is therefore imperfectly known. Its closest affiliations are with the preceding area. In fact, the Antillean may yet prove only a subdivision of the Tropical Forest culture. In the discussions that follow, it has been omitted, but can in the main be understood as included in what is said of the Tropical Forest area.
175. DIAGRAMMATIC REPRESENTATION OF ACCUMULATION AND DIFFUSION OF CULTURE TRAITS
The outstanding facts regarding these fourteen or fifteen culture-areas can be most vividly presented in a table allotting a column to each area. Roughly, at least, these columns can follow one another in geographical order. In each column, then, there might be entered all the culture traits found in its area. If one culture were twice as rich or complex as another, the double number of entries would pile up twice as high and impress the eye.
Actually, such a procedure is hardly practicable. The number of culture elements is too great. Often too there would be doubt whether a feature should be reckoned as one or several. Metal working comprises smelting, casting, forging, alloying, plating, soldering, and welding. These are distinct techniques. Yet they usually occur together or are all lacking. One tribe practises simple two-ply twining. Another adds three-strand, diagonal, and lattice twining and three-strand braiding, probably as developments of the original two-strand process. As between two adjacent or related basket-making peoples, this difference may be very significant; measured against cloth weaving, it is trivial.
Accordingly, in order to render the data more easily apperceived and conceptualized, only the more fundamental aspects of arts and institutions have been included in the diagram (Fig. 35), plus some that perhaps involve intrinsically less significant principles or faculties, but were of particular importance in the life of the peoples following them, such as the tipi or skin tent of the Plains tribes. This means that a necessarily subjective selection of traits has been made in the compilation of the table. But the reader who is not a specialist in the matter will generally be grateful for the elimination; and this elimination has at least been conducted without a conscious bias in any one direction. If anything, it would seem that the selective condensation has operated against the preëminence of the advanced areas. With every possible datum inserted, the peaks in the table would probably overshadow the valleys much more conspicuously.
Accepting the diagram, then, as affording an approximately truthful picture, it is obvious that much the greatest advancement took place in Middle America—the region from Mexico to Peru; and that on the whole the majority of culture traits found in any of the more backward areas are shared with this middle region. These are the traits below the heavy line that steps up and down across the diagram. A minority of traits—those above the heavy line—are local to the several areas. On the basic principle that a trait occurring over a continuous territory may be assumed to have originated but once and to have spread by diffusion, the bulk of the culture of most of the areas must have come into them from outside. On the principle that a people with many established arts is more likely to make a new invention than is a retarded people, the great majority of the diffused elements may therefore be attributed to a Middle American source. In this region, then, lay the focal point, the hive, of American civilization. From it, the tribes of the Lower Amazon and the upper Mississippi equally derived most of the limited culture which they possessed.
In South America, the diffusion proceeded broadside from the length of the Andes. In North America, it radiated fanwise from the south Mexican angle, the Southwest serving as the gateway or first relaying station that let through most but not all of what it received. One area alone, the Northwest Coast, was reached but imperfectly by Middle American influences, yet attained a tolerable development through its own creative force, supplemented in some measure by the drift into it of sporadic culture element migrants from Asia. Here only, then, there occurred a markedly independent growth of civilization, though definitely secondary to the great evolution of Middle America which in the main determined the culture of the twin continents.
176. REPRESENTATION SHOWING CONTEMPORANEITY AND NARRATIVE REPRESENTATION
So far as possible, the traits in each column of the diagram have been disposed in the order of their presumptive appearance in time. In the lowest level, for instance, have been set those elements that are likely to have been common to all the first immigrants into America. Local developments tending on the whole to be late, have been placed toward the heads of columns; and, roughly throughout, widely diffused and therefore apparently early elements are nearer the bottom. In general, accordingly, the sequence upward of traits indicates their approximate sequence in time. But this arrangement obviously holds chiefly for each column as a unit. As between the columns, it breaks down, since the top of each column would represent the same period, the moment of discovery, and these tops are not on a level.
The display of the same data in such a manner that vertical position would adequately represent proportional lapse of time as the horizontal placing suggests geographical contiguity, would necessitate another arrangement. In such a diagram the height of each column would be the same, but the richer cultures would have their constituent elements more closely crowded. That is, each new invention or institution or importation followed more rapidly on its predecessor than in the peripheral areas. For instance, while maize agriculture was spreading from Middle America to the Southwest and thence to the Northeast, the Middle Americans were adding varied agriculture and metallurgy, human sacrifice, and astronomy. The strata in the diagram would therefore generally not be level but would slope upward from their origin in the middle. This would be a more accurate schematic representation of what happened.
On the other hand, difficulties would arise in the graphic representation. The domestication of the llama, for instance, is confined to a single area, the Andean. Yet the domestication is rather ancient, as archæological discoveries prove; perhaps older than the spread of many culture elements from the Andes into the Tropical Forest, or from Mexico into the United States. The llama could therefore not be placed properly near the head of the column representing Andean culture, because the top of this column would signify recency. It would have to be inserted lower down, thus breaking the continuity of strata extending through several areas. Thus the diagram would quickly become so intricate as to lose its graphic value.
It would simplify the problem if the large mass of culture elements could be segregated into a small number of groups, each assignable to a stratum or period, much as the constituents of the religion and then of the whole culture of the California Indians were analyzed and then regrouped in the preceding chapter. Such a procedure, however, is much easier and more accurate for the subdivisions of one limited area than for an entire hemisphere, because the interrelations of the areas constituting this are naturally very complex and at many points imperfectly known. Such a schematic representation of the course of culture in the whole of the Americas on the basis of as many traits as are included in Figure 35, is therefore not attempted here. Instead, there is reproduced an analogous but simpler scheme (Fig. 36) recently published by an author whose primary concern is with Middle America, who has presented his story in the form of a treatment by larger periods, and in his diagram extends these to the remainder of the two continents. If his figure seems different from the preceding one, it should be remembered that the two approaches are not only from somewhat different angles but independent of each other, besides which it will be found that the divergence between the two illustrations (Figs. 35 and 36) is more apparent than intrinsic.
At best, however, all diagrams are not only schematic but static; and it may accordingly be worth while to try to narrate some of the principal events of the history of American civilization in order to bring out their continuity and relations as they appear in perspective. But the reader must remember that this is a reconstruction from indirect and often imperfect evidence, probably correct in the large and in many details, certain to be incorrect in some proportion of its findings, tentative throughout and subject to revision as the future brings fuller insight. It aims to give the truth as it can be pieced together: it is never a directly documented story like those familiar to us from orthodox “history.”
177. RACIAL ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS
The American race can hardly have come from anywhere else than Asia: it entered the New World perhaps ten thousand years ago. Its affiliations, as previously set forth (§ 23, 25) are generically Mongoloid. This statement does not mean that the American Indians are descended from the Chinese or Japanese, any more than the fact that these are denominated Mongolians implies belief in their descent from the particular modern people known as the Mongols. We call ourselves Caucasians without any intimation that our ancestors lived in the Caucasus mountains or that the present inhabitants of the Caucasus are a purer and more representative stock than we. So the Mongolians are that group of “yellow” peoples of eastern Asia of whom the Mongols form part; and the Mongoloids are the larger group that takes in Mongolians, East Indians, and Americans. From the original proto-Mongoloid stem, all three divisions and their subdivisions have sprung and differentiated. The American Indians have probably remained closer to it than the Chinese. It would be more correct to say that the Chinese have developed out of an ancient Indian-like stock, acquiring slant eyes rather late.
The proto-Mongoloid stem must be ten thousand years old. It is probably much older. In the Aurignacian period, the third from the last in the Old Stone Age, twenty-five thousand or so years ago, possibly longer, the two other great types of living men were already rather well characterized. The fossil Grimaldi race of this period shows pretty clear Negroid affinities; the contemporary Cro-Magnon race can probably be reckoned as proto-Caucasian. It is therefore probable, although as yet unproved by discoveries, that the proto-Mongoloids were also already in existence.
178. THE TIME OF THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA
About the end of the Palæolithic or beginning of the Neolithic some of these proto-Mongoloids drifted from Asia into North America. These were probably the real discoverers of the New World, which they found inhabited only by brutes. The time of their invasion can be but roughly fixed, yet within its limits it seems fairly reliable. Had the migration occurred much later, when the Neolithic was already well under way, the domesticated animals and plants of the Old World would have been introduced—cattle, pigs, sheep, wheat, barley, rice, millet, all of which the Americans lacked. The same holds for inventions like the wheel.
Analogous arguments weigh against a belief in a possible earlier peopling of America, say in the middle Palæolithic. In that event there ought to be cave or rock shelter or river terrace deposits corresponding to those of Europe in containing only implements of Palæolithic type. But none such have been found in America, or where alleged, their circumstances have remained matters of controversy.
Further, if Palæolithic man had inhabited the western hemisphere, it is likely that his fossil remains would have come to light. There has been much excavation, and numerous investigators are alive to the importance which evidence of this sort would bear. Yet to date not a single human fossil of positively Pleistocene age or type has been discovered. Numerous sensational finds have been announced. But in every case their geological matrix or stratum has been proved either recent or open to doubt. And not a single fragment of a skeleton of Neandertal type, or one equally different from modern man, is on record from America. Every once alleged Pleistocene skull or part appears to belong to some branch of the American Indian race as it exists to-day. It is therefore unlikely that man reached America before the last stage of the Palæolithic.
If the date of the entry is set at ten thousand years ago, the elapsed period accounts very well for the present diversification of the American race. There are broad and narrow headed tribes, tall and short ones, some with hooked noses, others with slightly wavy hair. But the fundamental type is everywhere the same. The differences seem just such as environment and mode of life, the accidents of descent from small groups, and perhaps a slight effect of selection, would be certain to accomplish in time. In general, the natives of America are remarkably homogeneous, considering the vast territory they occupy, its variations of temperature, humidity, altitude, and food supply, and the marked differences in the living customs of many tribes. The one group that at all stand apart are the Eskimo; and these are distinct in language and culture also. Moreover, they occupy the parts nearest to Asia, including both sides of Behring Strait. Thus they seem to represent a separate origin. But all the other groups from Alaska to Patagonia are so closely related somatically, that no comprehensive and generally accepted sub-classification of them has yet been possible. In fact, the American race seems almost too undifferentiated to require ten thousand years for its superficial diversifications; until it is remembered that human races left to themselves seem in most cases to alter rather slowly. Mixture is one of the greatest factors of racial change, and in the isolation of America this element was eliminated to a much larger extent than in most of the Old World.
179. LINGUISTIC DIVERSIFICATION
Language tells a similar story. The American Indian languages certainly appear to be diverse. It has been customary to reckon about a hundred and fifty distinct speech families in North and South America (§ 50). But many of these are imperfectly known; of late several Americanist philologists have been inclined to see definite resemblances between numerous tongues that are superficially different. Buried and disguised resemblances are being noted, which point to original unity. Thus the number of genetically distinct families or language stocks is shrinking. The number to be ultimately recognized bids fair to be small.
Old World conditions are at bottom more similar than at first glance seems. English and the modern Hindu languages, such as Bengali, although certainly related, are quite different from each other. The proof of their common Indo-European origin rests largely on the similarities between their ancestral forms, Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. These in turn are tied together more closely by the connecting evidence of other ancient languages, such as Greek and Latin. Take away these extinct tongues and the modern transitional ones, imagine English and Bengali to be the only representatives of Indo-European, and it is doubtful whether their common parentage could be wholly proved. The relationship would certainly not be readily recognizable; the most painstaking analysis would reveal so many words wholly peculiar to each language, and so many exceptions to every suggestion of regular sound equivalences, that conservative philologists would perhaps refuse to commit themselves on the problem of a single origin.
This imaginary situation parallels the actual one in American linguistics. Not a single ancient form of speech has been preserved. Many living ones are inadequately known. The fact that some enthusiast has compiled a grammar of Nahuatl or Quechua or Eskimo does not necessarily mean that he has dissected out its whole structure. A book devoted to a language may be as superficial as it looks learned. And the man who really knew Nahuatl has usually concerned himself very little with Quechua. So far as he might become acquainted with it, it would appear so different that the pressing of comparisons would seem sterile. Thus the great diversity of American languages came to be accepted not because any one believed it to have been really established, but because until recently no critical scholar considered himself able to establish serious connections. It has been a case of unproved rather than disproved unity of origin.
If the Indo-European languages were not our own but those of a strange race and therefore known to us much less intensively; if the history of their ancient forms were obliterated instead of preserved for us for over three thousand years; and if they were allowed a period of ten thousand years in which to have differentiated, philology would probably be assigning them to several distinct stocks. Multiply by three the amount of difference which Bengali shows from Sanskrit, and by six that of English from Anglo-Saxon, and a degree of divergence might be attained roughly comparable to that between Nahuatl and Quechua, or Maya and Iroquois. This is not an assertion that Nahuatl and Quechua are related. It is a claim that in the light of present knowledge they might have been one language ten thousand years ago. A single people with a single speech could well have given rise in so long a period as that—three hundred generations—to languages that now seem so different.
And at that, there is no reason for believing that all the American languages are necessarily derivable from a single mother tongue. There might have been half-a-dozen or a dozen idioms in use among as many populations which moved out of Asia into Alaska. For of course it is improbable that the migration was an isolated, unitary event. More likely it filled a period of some length, during which a succession of waves of population lapped from one continent into the other. Each of these waves, which only the perspective of ages has merged into the appearance of a single movement, may have brought its own speech, from which in time there branched out languages that ultimately became so differentiated as to appear now like distinct families. Not that it is known that this happened; but it seems inherently plausible that it might have happened, and there is no present evidence to the contrary.
In short, philology interposes no obstacle to the acceptance of the date which has been assumed as roughly defining the period of the peopling of America.
180. THE PRIMITIVE CULTURE OF THE IMMIGRANTS
As to the culture the immigrants brought with them, direct testimony being lacking, it is necessary to fall back on the working hypothesis that this culture was about the equivalent of the most backward American culture of to-day; or, better, of the common denominator of all American cultures, including the lowest. This procedure yields the group of elements entered in the bottommost layer of Figure 35. These elements were either brought along on the invasions or developed so soon afterwards as to become equally widely diffused. The harpoon, for instance, was used in Europe in the Magdalenian—at the close of the Palæolithic. For the bow and arrow, there is no proof in Europe until the opening of the Neolithic. The dog, the earliest animal attached to man, is known from the same period, whereas cattle, swine, and sheep were kept only at the height of the Neolithic (§ 67, 222). As the American Indians possess dogs, it is difficult to attribute the custom otherwise than to a heritage from the same culture stage in the Old World to which the harpoon and bow belong. This connection is made more certain by the fact that the Indian dog is most closely related not to the specifically American coyote but to the circumpolar wolf and perhaps the jackal, and diverged into much the same types of breeds as the Old World dog. There are American races of dogs—some of them ancient, as represented by skeletons from mounds, and mummies from Arizona and Peru—that are respectively droop eared, curly tailed, short legged, long furred, hairless, or undershot in the jaw, thus corresponding closely to the breeds evolved with similar traits in the eastern hemisphere, and virtually forcing the conclusion that the dog was brought into America by man and not domesticated from a wild species in this continent.
Such evidence as this it is that yields the period indicated—the closing stages of the Palæolithic or earliest Neolithic—as the time of man’s entry into America. The ten thousand years set as the lapse since this event are admittedly more arbitrary. No one pretends to date the remoter stages of European prehistory exactly. Relative durations are all that it is legitimate to pin much faith on. Dates are avowedly approximations. The estimate here chosen for the end of the Paleolithic is 8000 B.C.—ten thousand years ago. This round number, not taken too literally, has the virtue of concreteness and seems somewhere near the truth. It may yet prove to be a few thousand years short or over. But it does allow enough time, and no obtrusive excess of time, for the diversification of the Indians in race, speech, and culture; and this seeming accord of the assumption with the present facts may be taken as a rough corroboration.
The other culture elements assigned in Figure 35 to the first or immigrant stratum cannot be dated by any concrete remains, since some are institutions and others are arts whose materials are perishable—baskets and fire-drills, for instance. They are, however, found among all or most of the lower American tribes, and recur more or less widely in the eastern hemisphere.
The first settlers may accordingly be pictured as a people living off nature; hunting, fishing, gathering roots and fruits and seeds, digging or picking shellfish. Their best weapons were the bow and the harpoon with detachable head. The latter may already have been propelled by the atlatl or spear-thrower, an artificial extension of the arm. Simpler weapons were also used: clubs, stones, probably darts and spears, perhaps daggers of bone or stone. Flint was chipped and flaked, other stones were beginning to be ground or rubbed into form. Bone awls served for piercing; less certainly, eyed needles for sewing. Cordage of bast was twisted, and in all likelihood baskets, bins, weirs, traps were woven or twined, perhaps also nets made. Dogs were alternately played with and kicked about; they were half kept, half tolerated, probably eaten in time of need. There was no organization of society but on a basis of blood and contiguity. Related groups would act together until they fell apart. Labor was sex allotted; the men of each community possibly maintained a house or place of meeting at which they gathered in their leisure, perhaps nightly, and which women feared to enter. Beliefs in souls and spirits were already immemorially old. The people had risen to the point of being no longer passive toward the immaterial; the most intense-minded among them aspired to communication with the spirits; they demonstrated to their fellows their control and utilization of supernatural beings, and were what we call shamans. Custom in fact conceded the influence of the spiritual world on every human being, and felt it to be strongest at times of passage or crisis—birth, maturity, death. Puberty in particular seemed important, as portentous of the whole of adult life. The welfare of the individual and his proper relation to the community were therefore sought to be insured by spiritual safe-guarding. Girls were secluded, treated or doctored, trained; boys subjected to whipping or other ordeals of fortitude; the passing of such initiation admitted them to the men’s house.
181. THE ROUTE OF ENTRY INTO THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
With such background man entered America at Behring Strait. He may have navigated; more likely, or more often, he crossed on the ice. The water distance is only about sixty miles; the Diomede islands lie near the middle of the gap; and the ice may have extended across pretty continuously, ten thousand years nearer the peak of the last glaciation. Long before, there had been a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, by which horses, camels, cattle, elephants, deer and many other species extended their range from one continent to another. But this was in geological antiquity, man’s entry in geological recency—immediacy, rather; and the divided configuration of the continents was probably already established. Horses had become extinct in the New World when man arrived, the elephant tribe probably also. Llamas, pumas, jaguars took the place of Old World camels, lions, tigers. The fauna of the Americas, their vegetation, their climate, were nearly as they are to-day.
The Aleutian islands have also been suggested as a migration route. But their chain is long, the gap at the western end one of hundreds of miles of open water, scarcely negotiable except to rather expert navigators. Still weaker would be any supposition of arrival from Polynesia. Here the distances between the nearest islands and the mainland run to thousands of miles. Only well-equipped voyagers could survive, and there is nothing to prove positively that even late Palæolithic man had boats. Further, all the Polynesian evidence points to a late settling of the eastern islands of the Pacific; a few thousand years ago at most. Exclusion therefore indicates the Behring route as the only one to be seriously considered.
The migration was scarcely a sudden or single one. It went on for generations, perhaps for thousands of years in driblets. Two or three explorers would set across and return, to be followed by a few families. Others succeeded them. There would be no crowding, for a long time no resistance at the strait on the part of jealous established settlers. The open south, always milder, generally more fruitful the farther one went, lay ahead. It must long have drawn immigrants away from the strait faster than they crossed it. Some of the invading bands almost certainly differed from one another in customs, perhaps perceptibly in appearance, though of one general level of culture.
182. THE SPREAD OVER TWO CONTINENTS
Before them lay fifteen million miles of tundra, forest, plains, sea coast, desert, savannah, jungle, and plateaux, rich in this or that food, with no occupant to dispute possession or block travel but bear, wolf, puma, and jaguar—timid beasts compared with those of the Old World. So the immigrants pushed across the breadth of the continent and down its length, entered the tropics in Mexico, defiled through Panama—and a second continent stretched before them. How long it took the first wanderers to diffuse themselves from Alaska to the Strait of Magellan, it is impossible to say. Perhaps a couple of thousand years, perhaps only a few hundred. Curiosity, the desire to see, are strong in men if fear imposes no restraints.
Sooner or later, at any rate, they were living throughout both continents. The advance guard had long lost knowledge of the rear, if indeed the rear did not arrive until after the advance could progress no farther. When the Caucasian discovered America he might have commenced at Cape Horn, gone on to a people whose very existence was unknown to those at his starting point, and repeated the step a dozen times until his journey brought him to the Arctic. Before the rise of the empires of Mexico and Peru the number of links in the chain ignorant of each other would have been greater. The moving bands of the primitive first-comers no doubt lost touch with each other quickly in even shorter stretches. Thus diversities of speech, of mode of life, would become established. A family of brothers might become dominant in a band through the number of their descendants and so color the somatic type of the group, which in turn, favored by fortune and expanding, might lay the hereditary foundation for a sub-racial variety.
Movements of population continued to occur until the present. The maps of speech stocks previously presented (Figs. 14, 15) prove that distant migrations took place after great groups like Athabascan, Algonkin, Uto-Aztecan, Arawak, Tupi, had each lived in compact coherence long enough to establish a well defined language. But so far as these more recent migrations can be traced from speech, they no longer trended prevailingly from north to south and west to east as the first general diffusion must have moved, but shifted in the greatest variety of direction. They are a sort of boiling of the kettle, not a downhill flow. They relieved internal strains and vacillated back and forth with circumstances; they represented no drift like the first occupation. Much of their story may ultimately be worked out and provide a national history of pre-Columbian America. But the effect of these later pressures and expansions and wanderings on the culture development of the New World as a whole is likely to have been relatively slight.
183. EMERGENCE OF MIDDLE AMERICAN CULTURE: MAIZE
For perhaps five thousand years little of wide significance happened in America. There may have been progress, but it was slow, and in the long perspective of time its slender evidences are not yet determinable. One can affirm little of this early period except that differences in culture must have begun to develop in conformity with the localized opportunities of environment.
But by the end of the first half of the duration of American antiquity, let us guess somewhere about 3000 B.C., a perceptible differentiation appears to have taken place between the culture of the Middle American[24] highland and the remainder of the Americas. The highland had forged ahead. Especially, perhaps, was this true of the region of southern Mexico and Guatemala. Why it was here that civilization first gathered a notable momentum, it is difficult to say; we are dealing with obscure beginnings at a remote period. An unusual concentration of population is likely to have been an important factor. This in turn may have rested on the ease of existence in a sub-tropical area. Advanced civilizations in general find their greatest opportunities in fairly temperate environment; incipient ones in semi-tropical climates or unforested regions in the tropics. At least there are the parallels of Egypt, Babylonia, India. Possibly the environmental feature of greatest value to cultural progress in Middle America was its diversity. Mountain and coast, temperate highland and hot lowland, humid and arid tracts, tropical jungle and open country, were only a few hours apart. In each locality the population worked out its necessary adaptations, and yet it was near enough others of a different adaptation for them to trade, to depend on one another, to learn. Custom therefore came in contact with custom, invention with invention. The discrepancies, the very competitions, would lead to reconciliations, readaptations, new combinations. Cultural movement and stimulus would normally be greater than in a culturally uniform area.
Be that as it may, Middle America took the lead. It is in the region of southern Mexico that a wild maize grows—teocentli, “divine maize,”[25] the Aztecs called it. From this, in a remote archaic period, the cultivated plant was derived. At least, such seems to be the probability in a somewhat tangled mass of botanical evidence. Here then the dominant plant of American agriculture was evolved: with it, very likely, the cultivated beans and squashes that are generally associated in native farming even in parts remote from Mexico.
Pottery has so nearly the same distribution as maize agriculture, as to suggest a substantially contemporaneous origin, probably at the same center. This is the more likely because the art is of chief value to a sessile people, and farming operates more strongly than any other mode of life to bring about a sedentary condition.
Agriculture almost certainly increased the population. The food supply was greater and more regular; people got used to living near each other where before they had unconsciously drifted apart through distrust; and the proximity in turn, as well as the new stability, would lessen many of the local famines, hostilities, and other hardships to which the smaller and less settled communities had been exposed. As the death rate went down and numbers mounted, specialization of labor would be first made possible, and then almost forced. A self-contained community of a hundred cannot permit much specialization of accomplishment and none of occupation. Every man must be first of all an immediate food getter. On the other hand a community of a million inevitably segregates somewhat into classes, trades, guilds, or castes. The individual with decided tastes and gifts in a particular direction finds his products in enough demand to devote himself largely or wholly to their manufacture. The very size of the community as it were forces him to specialization, and thus diversity, with its train of effects leading to further stimulation, is attained independently of environment.
184. TOBACCO
For some culture elements, the evidence of early origin in Middle America is less direct. The use of tobacco, for instance, is as widely spread as agriculture, but is not necessarily as ancient. Its diffusion in the eastern hemisphere has been so rapid (§ 98) as to make necessary the admission that it might have spread rapidly in the New World also—faster, at any rate, than maize. Moreover, a distinction must be made between the smoking or chewing or snuffing of tobacco and its cultivation. There are some modern tribes—mostly near the margins of the tobacco area—that gather the plant as it grows wild. It is extremely probable that wild tobacco was used for some time before cultivation was attempted. Nevertheless tobacco growing, whenever it may have originated, evidently had its beginning in the northern part of Middle America, either in Mexico or the adjacent Antillean province. It is here that _Nicotiana tabacum_ was raised. The tribes to the north contented themselves with allied species, mostly so inferior from the consumer’s point of view that they have not been taken up by western civilization. These varieties look like peripheral substitutes for the central and original _Nicotiana tabacum_.
The Colombian and Andean culture-areas used little or no tobacco, but chewed the stimulating coca leaf. This is a case of one of two competing culture traits preventing or perhaps superseding the other, not of tobacco never having reached the Andes. Most of the remainder of South America used tobacco.
185. THE SEQUENCE OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
The most peripheral and backward peoples of both North and South America even to-day remain without clans, moieties, hereditary totems, or exogamic groupings (§ 110). Some of these, like the Eskimo and Fuegians, live at the extreme ends of the continents, under conditions of hardships which might be imagined to have directed all their energies toward the material sides of life and thus left over little interest for the development of institutions. But this argument will not apply to the many clanless tribes of the California, Plains, and Tropical Forest areas. It must accordingly be concluded that those American nations that show no formal organization of society on a hereditary basis—or at least the more primitive ones who possess no equivalent or substitute—do without this organization because they never acquired it. This negative condition may then be inferred as the original one of the whole American race.
Somewhat more advanced culturally, on the whole, and less definitely marginal, at any rate in North America, are several series of tribes that do possess exogamic groups—either sibs or moieties—in which descent goes in the male line and is generally associated with totemic beliefs or practices. These comprise the tribes of one segment of the Northwest Coast area; those of one end of the Southwest with some extension into California; and those of most of the Northern Woodland, with some extension into the Plains.
Another series of tribes live under the same sort of organization but with descent reckoned in the female instead of the male line. These comprise the peoples of one end of the Northwest Coast; those of one portion of the Southwest; and those of the Southeast, with some extensions into the Northeast and Plains.
These exogamic-totemic series of tribes average higher in their general culture than the clanless and totemless ones. On the whole, too, they are situated nearer the focus of civilization in Middle America. As between the two exogamic-totemic series the matrilinear tribes must be accredited with a more complex and better organized culture than the patrilinear ones. The finest carving in North America, for instance, is that of the Northwest—totem poles, masks, and the like. Within the Northwest, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—matrilinear tribes—excel in the quality of this work. They far surpass the patrilinear Kwakiutl and Salish. So in the Southwest: the matrilinear Pueblos build stone towns, obey a priestly hierarchy, and possess an elaborate series of cult societies. The patrilinear Pimas and southern Californians live in villages of brush or earth-covered houses, are priestless, and know at most a single religious society. Again, the matrilineal Southern Woodlanders had made some approach to a system of town life and political institutions, the patrilineal Northern Woodlanders did without any serious institutions in these directions. The one Northeastern group that established a successful political organization, the Iroquois with their League of the Five Nations, were matrilinear among patrilinear neighbors and possessed positive affiliations with the Southeast.
It would be extravagant to maintain that throughout the North American continent every matrilineal tribe was culturally more advanced than every patrilineal one. But it is clear that within each area or type of culture the matrilineal tribes manifest superiority over the patrilineal tribes in a preponderance of cultural aspects. The matrilineal clan organization thus represents a higher and presumably later stage in North America than patrilineal clan organization, as this in turn ranks and temporally follows the clanless condition.
With one exception, the distribution of the same tribes with reference to the South Mexican center agrees with their advancement. The Northeast is distinctly peripheral, the Southeast a half-way tract connected with Mexico by way both of the Southwest and the Antilles. The matrilineal Pueblo portion of the Southwest occupies part of the plateau backbone near the southern end of which the Mexican culture developed. It was along this backbone that civilization flowed up through northern Mexico. The coasts lagged behind. They were marginal in Mexico, more marginal still in the Southwest, where the patrilineal tribes lived on or near the Pacific.
The one exception is in the Northwest Coast, where the more remote northerly tribes are matrilinear, the nearer southerly ones patrilinear. This reversed distribution raises the suspicion that the Northwestern social organization may have had nothing to do with Mexico, but may be a purely local product. This suspicion is hardened by the fact that the Northwest shows a number of other culture traits—some peculiar to itself, others recurring in well separated areas—which it seems impossible to connect with Mexico. Several of these traits will be discussed farther on. For the present it is enough to note their existence as an indication favorable to the interpretation of the Northwest social organization as unrelated to Mexico. Thus the abnormal matrilineal-patrilineal distribution in the Northwest is no bar to the generic finding for North America that clanless, patrilinear, and matrilinear organizations of society rank in this order both as regards developmental sequence and distance from Middle America.
For South America the data are too scattering to discuss profitably without rather detailed consideration.
The distributional facts outside Middle America thus point to this reconstruction of events. The original Americans were non-exogamous, non-totemic, without sibs or unilateral reckoning of descent. The first institution of exogamic groups was on the basis of descent in the male line, occurred in or near Middle America, and flowed outwards, though not to the very peripheries and remotest tracts of the continents. Somewhat later, perhaps also in Middle America, possibly at the same center, the institution was altered: descent became matrilinear. This new type of organization diffused, but in its briefer history traveled less far and remained confined to the tribes that were in most active cultural connection with Middle America.
Now, however, a seeming difficulty arises. Middle America, which appears to have evolved patrilinear and then matrilinear clans, was itself clanless at the time of European discovery.[26] The solution is that Middle America indeed evolved these institutions and then went a step beyond by abandoning or transforming them. Obviously this explanation will be validated in the degree that it can be shown that probable causes or products of the transformation existed.
186. RISE OF POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS: CONFEDERACY AND EMPIRE
In general, the transformation would seem to have been along the line of a substitution of political for social organization. Struggling villages confederated, with a fixed meeting place and established council; the authority of elected or hereditary chiefs grew, until these gave the larger part of their time to communal affairs; towns consolidated. Public works could thus be undertaken. Not only irrigating ditches and defenses, but pyramid temples were constructed. In Middle America this condition must have been attained several thousand years ago. The Mayas had passed beyond it early in the Christian era. They were then ruled by a governing class and priesthood, and were erecting dated monuments that testify to a settled existence of the more successful of their communities.
In the area of the United States, which may be reckoned as perhaps two thousand years more belated than southern Mexico, political organization was still in the incipient stage at the time of discovery. The Pueblos of the Southwest had achieved town life and considerable priestly control. They had not taken the further step of welding groups of towns into larger coherent units. In the Southeast, however, while the towns were less compact physically, and probably less populous, political integration on a democratic basis had made some headway. The institution evolved was essentially a confederacy of the members of a language group, with civil and military chiefs, council houses, and representation by “tribes” or towns and clans. From the Southeast the idea of the confederacy was carried into the Northeast by the Iroquois, whose famous league, founded perhaps before Columbus reached America, attained its culmination after the French and English settlement and the introduction of firearms. The Iroquois league was an astounding accomplishment for a culturally backward people. Its success was due to the high degree of political integration achieved. Yet it did not destroy the older clan system, in fact made skilful use of it for its own purposes of political, almost imperialistic, organization.[27]
Some stage of this sort the Mexican peoples may have passed through. The Maya form of political organization was evidently similar to that of the Pueblos, the Aztec development more like that of the Muskogeans and Iroquois. A thousand years before Columbus the Maya cities were contending for hegemony like the Greek city-states a millenium earlier. Then the Nahua peoples forged to the front; and about two centuries before the invasion of Cortez, Tenochtitlan, to-day the city of Mexico, began a series of conquests that ended in some sort of empire. It was a straggling domain of subjected and reconquered towns and tribes, interspersed with others that maintained their independence, extending from middle Mexico to Central America, containing probably several million inhabitants paying regular tribute, held together by well-directed military force, and governed by a hereditary line of half-elected or confirmed rulers of great state and considerable power. The exogamic clan organization as such had disappeared. Groups called calpulli were important in Aztec society, but they were local, or based on true kinship, and non-totemic. They may have been the made-over survivals of clans; they were not clans like those of the Southwest, Southeast, or Northwest.
Five successive stages, then, were probably gone through in the evolution of south Mexican society. First there was the pre-clan condition, without notable organization either social or political; next, a patrilinear clan system; third, a matrilinear clan system, with more important functions attaching to the clans, especially on the side of ceremonial; fourth, the beginnings of the state, as embodied in the confederacy, the clans continuing but being made use of chiefly as instruments of political machinery; fifth, the empire, loose and simple indeed, judged by Old World standards, but nevertheless an organized political achievement, in which the clans had disappeared or had been transformed into units of a different nature.
187. DEVELOPMENTS IN WEAVING
In the textile arts, since the successive stages rank one another rather obviously, and the distributions coincide well with them, the course of development is indicated plainly.
The first phase was that of hand-woven basketry, which has already been accredited to the period of immigration, and is beyond doubt ancient. All Americans made baskets at one time or another. The few tribes that were not making them at the time of discovery had evidently shelved the art because their environment provided them with birch bark, or their food habits with buffalo rawhide, with exceptional ease, and because their wants of receptacles and cooking utensils were of the simplest. That basket making goes back to a rudimentary as well as early stage of civilization is further suggested by the fact that perhaps the finest ware is made in the distinctly backward areas, such as the Plateau and California.
A second and a third phase, which are sometimes difficult to distinguish, are those of loose suspended warps and of a simple frame or incomplete loom. Pliable cords of some sort, or coarse bast threads, are employed. The objects manufactured are chiefly wallets or bags, blankets of strips of fur or feathers, hammocks, and the like. These two processes are widely spread, but not quite as far as basketry; the northern and southern extremes of the double continent do not know them. Occasionally, very fine work is done by one or the other of these two methods. The most striking example is the so-called Chilkat blanket of the Northwest Coast, a cloth-like cape, woven, without a complete loom, of mountain goat wool on cedar bark warps to a complicated pattern—a high development of a low type process.
The fourth stage is that of the true or complete loom. In America the loom is intimately associated with the cultivation of cotton. The two have the same distribution, except for some use of the plant for the twining of hammocks on a half-loom in portions of the Tropical Forest area. Disregarding this case as a probable part adaptation of a higher culture trait to a lower culture, we may define the distribution of both loom and cotton as restricted to the Middle American areas, the adjacent Southwest, and perhaps the adjacent Antilles. This is certainly central.
The fifth stage is the loom with a handle or mechanical shedding device, obviating tedious hand picking of the weft in and out of the warps. The heddle is proved only for Peru. It was probably used in Mexico. It may therefore be tentatively assumed to have been known also in the intervening Chibcha area. It is used to-day in the Southwest, but may have been introduced there by the Spaniards. This stage accordingly is limited even more strictly to the vicinity of Middle America.
The sixth stage, that of the loom whose heddles are operated by treadles, and what may be considered a seventh, the use of multiple heddles to work patterns mechanically, were never attained by any American people.
The best and finest fabrics were made in Peru, in part probably as consequence of the addition of wool to the previous repertory of cotton. This addition in turn probably followed the domestication of the llama by the Peruvians. The Mexicans had no corresponding animal to tame, and their textiles lagged behind in quality.
188. PROGRESS IN SPINNING: COTTON
Spinning and weaving are interdependent. Baskets are made of woody rods, cane splints, root fibers, or straws, all untwisted, but it is probable that the ability to twist cordage is about equally old as basketry. At any rate there is no American people ignorant of cord making. The materials are occasionally sinews, more frequently bast—that is, bark fibers. These are rolled together, almost invariably two at a time, between the palm and the naked thigh. Cordage is used for the second and third stages of weaving. The cotton employed in loom weaving does not spin well by this rolling method. It was therefore spun by being twisted between the fingers, the completed thread being wound on a spindle. This spindle served primarily as a spool or bobbin. In the Old World the distaff has been used for thousands of years. This is a spindle with a whorl or flywheel. It is dropped with a twirl, giving both twist and tension to the loose roving of linen or wool and thus converting it into yarn by a mechanical means. The New World never fully utilized this device. The Southwest to-day uses the wheeled spindle, but evidently as the result of European introduction. Old Mexican pictures and modern Maya photographs show the spindle stood in a bowl, not dropped. The whorl which it possessed was therefore little more than a button to keep the thread from slipping off the slender spindle. For Peru this is established. Thousands of spindles have been found there, normally with whorls too small and light to serve as an effective flywheel. It may then be concluded that all American spinning was essentially by hand; which is in accord with the absence from all America of any form of the wheel. The Indian spinning methods were only two: thigh rolling for bast, finger twisting for cotton.
The origin of the higher forms of spinning and weaving in Middle America is confirmed by the tropical origin of cotton, on which these developments depend. The cotton of the Southwest, for instance, was introduced from Mexico as a cultivated plant. It is derived by some botanists from a Guatemalan wild species. This may well have been the first variety to be cultivated in the hemisphere.
189. TEXTILE CLOTHING
Clothing in general is too much an adaptation to climate to render satisfactory its consideration wholly by the method here followed. But clothing of textiles shows a distribution that is culturally significant. The distribution is that of loom-woven cotton; the salient characteristic is rectangular shape: the blanket shawl, the poncho, the square shirt and skirt. In the Northwest Coast region hand and half-loom woven capes and skirts of bast were worn more or less. But these were flaring—trapezoidal, not rectangular—and thus evidently represent a separate development.
In all the cloth weaving areas, and in them only, sandals were worn. The spatial correlation is so close that there must be a connection. It may be suggested that the sandal originated, or at least owed its spread, to textile progress. Again the Northwest Coast corroborates by being unique; it is essentially a barefoot area.
To summarize. The original textile arts of the race were probably first advanced to the stages intermediate between basket and cloth making in Middle America. Thence they spread north and south, but not quite to the limits of the hemisphere, being retained in special usage chiefly in the Northwest. With the cultivation of cotton in Middle America, spinning and the loom came into use, and were ultimately carried to the Southwest, but not beyond. Cloth garments and sandals promptly followed. The heddle was evidently devised last, and did not diffuse beyond Middle America.
190. CULTS: SHAMANISM
In the matter of religious cults, seven entries have been included in Figure 35: (1h) shamanism, and (1i) crisis ceremonies, especially for girls at puberty and the whipping of adolescent boys, two more or less synchronous traits; (6a) initiating societies, and (6b) masks—also about contemporaneous; (16) priesthood; and (22) human sacrifice and (23) temples.
The shaman is an individual without official authority but often of great personal influence. His supposed power comes to him directly from the spirits as a gift or grant. He himself, as a personality, has been able to enter into a special relationship, denied to normal persons, with the supernatural world or some member thereof. The community recognizes his power after it is his: the community does not elect him to his special position, nor accept him in it by inheritance. His communion with spirits enables the shaman to foretell the future, change the weather, blast the crops or multiply game, avert catastrophes or precipitate them on foes; above all, to inflict and cure disease. He is therefore the medicine-man; a word which in American ethnology is synonymous with shaman. The terms doctor, wizard, juggler, which have established themselves in usage in certain regions, are also more or less appropriate: they all denote shamans. When he wishes to kill his private or public enemy, the shaman by his preternatural faculties injects some foreign object or destructive substance into his victim, or abstracts his soul. To cure his friends or clients, he extracts the disease object, sometimes by singing, dancing, blowing, stroking, or kneading, most often by sucking; or he finds, recaptures, and restores the soul. Of the two concepts, that of the concrete disease object is more widely spread; that of the soul theft is apparently characteristic of the more advanced tribes; but the exact distribution remains to be worked out.
The territorial extent of shamanistic ideas and practices is from the Arctic to Cape Horn. The method of acquiring power from spirits, the nature of the disease object and its process of extraction, the conviction that sickness must be caused by malevolent shamanistic power, there being no such thing as natural death; these and other specific features of the institution are sometimes surprisingly similar in North and South America. In fact, they recur in peripheral parts of the eastern hemisphere—Siberia, Australia, Africa—with such close resemblance as strongly to suggest their being the remnants of a once world-wide rudimentary form of religion or religious magic.
191. CRISIS RITES AND INITIATIONS
Crisis rites are of equally broad diffusion and apparent antiquity. They concern the critical points of human life: birth, death, sometimes marriage and childbirth; but most frequently, or at least most sacredly, they are wont to concern themselves with maturity. They are thus often puberty ceremonials, made for the welfare both of the individual and of the community, and fitting him or her for reproductive functions as well as for a career as a useful and successful community member. The girls’ adolescence rites have been described (§ 154) in some detail for California. With but minor variations, the account there given applies to the customs of many American and in fact Old World peoples. The boys’ rites come at the corresponding period of life, but their reference to sex and marriage is generally less definite. Fortitude, manliness, understanding are the qualities they are chiefly intended to test and fix. Privations like fasting, ordeals of pain, admonitions by the elders, are therefore characteristic elements of these rites. It is thus not as surprising as it might seem at first acquaintance that identical practices, such as having the boys stung by vicious ants, are occasionally found in regions as remote as California and Brazil: even the particular method may be a local survival of a wide ancient diffusion. Perhaps most common of all specific ingredients of the rite in America is a whipping of the boys. Possibly this commended itself as combining a test of fortitude and an emotional memento of the counsel imparted. At any rate it evidently became an established part of the puberty rites thousands of years ago, and thus acquired the added social momentum of an immemorial custom in many parts of both North and South America.
192. SECRET SOCIETIES AND MASKS
Out of the puberty crisis rite for boys there grew gradually a society of initiates who recruited their ranks by new initiations. As emphasis shifted from the individual to the community as represented by those already initiated, the ceremony came to be performed less for the benefit of the individual than for the maintenance of the group, the society as such, with its rites, secrets, and privileges. Very often, no one was excluded but immature boys and females; yet, if the act of admittance was to have any psychic significance, the exclusion of these elements of the community had to be made much of. Thus secrecy toward women and children was emphasized, although often the secrets simmered down largely to the fact that there were secrets.
The girls’ adolescence ceremony does not seem to have taken this course of growth, because of its more personal and bodily character, puberty in women being so much more definite a physiological event. There are women’s societies among some American tribes. But they seem to be generally a weaker imitation of the men’s societies after these were fully developed, not a direct outgrowth of the original girls’ rite.
Shamanism entered as another strain into the formation of the secret society. Medicine-men often would come to act for the public good, the occasion would be repeated regularly, and a communal ceremony with an esoteric nucleus resulted. Also, the shamans at times helped the novice shamans train and consolidate their spiritual powers. The extension of this habit perhaps sometimes led, or contributed, to the establishment of a secret society (§ 158).
Masks are closely associated with secret societies. They disguise the members to the women and boys, who are told, and often believe, that the masked personages are not human beings at all. Of course this adds to the mystery and impressiveness of the initiations, especially when the masks are fantastic or terrifying. Masks and societies thus are two related aspects of one thing. But they are by no means inseparable. There are tribes, like some of the Eskimo, who use masks but can scarcely be said to possess societies, while in the Plains and elsewhere there are definite societies that initiate without masks. Physical and economic conditions in the Arctic operating against large-scale community life or social elaboration, the masks of the Eskimo may represent merely that part of a mask-society “complex” which these people could conveniently take over when the complex reached them.
In the Southwest, among the Pueblos, there are two types of societies. There is a communal society, embracing all adult males, who are initiated at puberty by whipping and who later wear masks to impersonate spirits and dance thus for the public good. There are several smaller societies, also with secret rites, which cure sickness, recruit their membership from the cured, and use masks little or not at all. It is clear here how the two component strains, namely crisis rites and shamanistic practices, have flowed into the common mold of the society idea and become patterned by it without quite amalgamating.
193. PRIESTHOOD
This, then, was the second general stage of American religion. The third is marked by the development of the priesthood. The priest is an official recognized by the community. He has duties and powers. He may inherit, be elected, or succeed by virtue of lineage subject to confirmation. But he steps into a specific office which existed before him and continues after his death. His power is the result of his induction into the office and the knowledge and authority that go with it. He thus contrasts sharply with the shaman—logically at least. The shaman makes his position. Any person possessed of the necessary mediumistic faculty, or able to convince a part of the community of his ability to operate supernaturally, is thereby a shaman. His influence is essentially personal. In actuality, the demarcation cannot always be made so sharply. There are peoples whose religious leaders are borderline shaman-priests. Yet there are other tribes that align clearly. The Eskimo have pure shamans and nothing like priests. The Pueblos have true priests but no real shamans. Even the heads of their curing societies, the men who do the doctoring for the community, are officials, and do not go into trances or converse with spirits.
Obviously a priesthood is possible only in a well constructed society. Specialization of function is presupposed. People so unorganized as to remain in a pre-clan condition could hardly be expected to have developed permanent officials for religion. As a matter of fact they have not. There are not even clear instances of a full fledged priesthood among patrilinear sib tribes. The first indubitable priests are found among the matrilinear Southwesterners and a few of their neighbors. Thence they extend throughout the region of more or less accomplished political development in Middle America. Beyond that, they disappear.
Here once more, then, we encounter a trait substantially confined to the area of intensive culture and evidently superimposed upon the preceding stages. This makes it likely that the second stage, that of societies and masks, originated in the same center, but so long ago as to have been mostly obliterated by later developments, while continuing to flourish half way to the peripheries.
Even the priesthood is old in Middle America. This seems reasonably demonstrable. We do not know its actual beginnings there. But its surviving conditions at the edge of its area of occurrence may be taken as roughly indicative of its origin. Among the Pueblos, each priest, with his assistants, is the curator of a sacred object or fetish, carefully bundled and preserved. The fetish serves the public good, but he is its keeper. In fact he might well be said to be priest in virtue of his custodianship thereof. Associated is the concept of an altar, a painting which he makes of colored earth or meal. In the Plains area, some tribes may be somewhat hesitatingly described as having a priest or group of old men as priests. Wherever such is the case, these half-priests are the keepers of fetish-bundles; usually they make something like an altar of a space of painted earth. Areas as advanced as the Northwest Coast, where distinctive priests are wanting, lack also the bundles and altars. It looks, therefore, as if the American priesthood had originated in association with these two ceremonial traits of the fetish bundle and painted altar—both of which are conspicuously unknown in the eastern hemisphere.
194. TEMPLES AND SACRIFICE
In Middle America the fetish bundle and picture altar do not appear, apparently through supersedence by elements characteristic of the next or fourth cult stage, characterized by the temple and the stone altar used in sacrifice. Temples, however, were already in luxuriant bloom among the Maya in their Great Period of 400 to 600 A. D. The beginnings of their remarkable architecture and sculpture must of course lie much farther back; certainly toward the opening of the Christian era, very likely earlier. Before this came the presumptive initial stage of priesthood, with bundles and altar paintings or some local equivalent. If a thousand years be allowed for this phase, the commencement of the priesthood would fall in southern Mexico or Guatemala at least three thousand years ago; possibly much longer. Peru, perhaps, did not lag far behind.
Temples mark the last phase of native American religion, but the most purely religious characteristic of the period, independent of mechanical or æsthetic developments, is human sacrifice. This had long been practised by the Mayas and in Peru, but reached its culmination in the New World and probably on the planet, at least as regards frequency and routine-like character, among the Aztecs. These were a late people, by their own traditions, to rise to culture and power, attaining to little consequence before the fourteenth century. It looks therefore as if human sacrifice had been a comparatively recent practice, perhaps only one or two thousand years old when America was discovered, and still moving toward its peak.
Outside Middle America, human sacrifice was virtually nonexistent. There was considerable cannibalism in the Tropical Forest and Antilles, but no taking of life as a purely ceremonial act. For the Pueblos of the Southwest, there are some slight and doubtful suggestions, but it appears that such deaths as were inflicted were rather punishments than offerings. The one North American people admittedly sacrificing human life were the Pawnee, a Plains tribe, who once a year shot to death a girl captive amid a ritual reminiscent of that of Mexico. This has always been interpreted as suggestive of a historical connection with Mexico. In fact, the Pawnee appear to have moved northward rather recently, and most of their Caddoan relatives had remained not far from the Gulf of Mexico when discovered.
The precise origin of sacrifice is obscure, although it is significant that it was restricted to the area of concentrated population and towns. In Mexico at least there were no domesticated mammals available. The ultimate foundation of human sacrifice is no doubt the widespread and very ancient custom of offerings. It is, however, a long leap from the offering of a pinch of tobacco, a strew of meal, an arrowpoint or some feathers, or even a few bits of turquoise, to the deliberate taking of a life. Possibly the idea of self-inflicted torture served as a connection. The Plains tribes sometimes hacked off finger joints as offerings, and in their Sun Dance tore skewers out of their skins. In the northern part of the Tropical Forest knotted cords were drawn through the nose and out of the mouth—a sufficiently painful process—in magico-religious preparation. In Mexico it was common for worshipers to pierce their own ears or tongues, the idea of a blood offering combining with that of penance and mortification.
It may seem strange that so shocking a custom as human sacrifice represented the climax of American religious development. Yet in a few thousand years more of undisturbed growth, it would probably have been superseded. This is precisely what happened in the Old World, which may be reckoned as about four to five thousand years ahead of the New. In the Old World also the really lowly and backward peoples did not sacrifice men. The practice is a symptom of incipient civilization.
195. ARCHITECTURE, SCULPTURE, TOWNS
To construct stone-walled buildings seems a simple accomplishment, especially in an environment of stratified rocks that break into natural slabs. Such flat pieces pile up into a stable wall of room height without mortar, and a few log beams suffice to support a roof. Yet the greater area of the two continents seems never to have had such structures. Stone buildings are confined to Middle America and the Southwest. Outside these regions only the wholly timberless divisions of the Eskimo make huts of stone, and for their winter dwellings they are limited to choice of this material or blocks of snow. The Eskimo hut is tiny, not more than eight or ten feet across, and the weather is kept out not by any skill in masonry or plastering, but by the rude device of stuffing all crevices with sod. The Eskimo style of “building” in stone would be inapplicable in a structure of pretension. Made larger, the edifice would collapse.
The art of masonry, like agriculture, pottery, and loom weaving, may therefore be set down as having had its origin in Mexico or Peru, or possibly in both. It shows, however, this peculiarity of distribution: at both ends of the area, among the Pueblos of the Southwest in North America and among the Calchaqui of northwest Argentina in South America, living houses were stone-walled. In the intervening regions, most dwellings were of thatch or mud, public buildings of stone. The Aztec, Maya, and Inca areas have therefore left stone temples, pyramids, palaces, forts, and the like, but few towns; the Pueblo and Calchaqui, only towns.[28] How the Middle Americans were first brought to use stone is not known; but a temple built as such being a more specialized, decorative, organized edifice than a dwelling, as well as involving some degree of communal coöperation, it can safely be regarded as a later type than private dwellings. The occurrence of the stone living houses at the peripheries confirms their priority. Evidently masonry was first employed in Middle America for simple public structures: chiefs’ tombs, water works, platforms for worship. In its diffusion the art reached peoples like the Pueblos, who lived in small communities, interred their leaders without great rites, and offered no sacrifices in sight of multitudes. These marginal nations therefore took over the new accomplishment but applied it only to their homes. Meanwhile, however, the central “inventors” of masonry had grown more ambitious and were rearing ever finer and larger structures, until the superb architecture of the Mayas and the consummate stone fitting of the Incas reached their climax.
Stone sculpture grew as an accompaniment. It remained rude in Peru, and chiefly limited to idols, in keeping with the simple, massive style of architecture. But the Mayas covered their structurally bolder and more diversified religious buildings with sculpture in relief and frescoed stucco, and between them set up great carvings of animal and mythical divinities, as well as luxuriantly inscribed obelisks. Their sculpture is æsthetically the finest in America and compares in quality with that of Egypt, India, and China.
Recent excavations in the Southwest have revealed a succession of stages as regards buildings. The first houses in this region may have been thatched or earth-roofed. The earliest in which stone was used were small, dug out a few feet, the sides of the excavation lined with, upright rock slabs, and a superstructure of poles or mud-filled wattling added. Then followed a period of detached one-room houses, with rectangular walls of masonry; and finally the stage of drawing these together in clusters and raising them in terraced stories. This whole development can be traced within the area. Yet it by no means follows that it originated wholly within the area. The knowledge of laying stone in courses, the impulse or habit of doing so, might, theoretically, just as well have come from without; and evidently did actually come into the Southwest from Mexico.
This is a type of situation frequently encountered in culture history problems. A group of data seem to point to a spontaneous origin on the spot so long as they are viewed only locally, whereas a broader perspective at once reveals them as merely part of a development whose ultimate source usually lies far away. For instance, the backward Igorot tribes of the interior Philippines rear imposing terraces for their rice plots; their more advanced coastal neighbors do not. It has therefore been debated whether the Igorot invented this large-scaled terracing or learned it from the Chinese. Yet the terracing is only an incident to rice culture, which is widespread in the Orient, ancient, and evidently of mainland origin. The knowledge of terracing was therefore no doubt long ago imported into the Philippines along with rice cultivation, and the Igorot only added the special local development of carrying the terraces to a more impressive height. There is no question that the increase and better concatenation of knowledge is gradually leading to more and more certain instances of wide diffusions and fewer and fewer cases of independent origin.
Town life possesses a material aspect—that of the type and arrangement of dwellings—as well as the social and political aspects already touched on. The largest towns in America were those of Mexico and Peru, whose capitals may have attained populations of fifty to a hundred thousand. The Maya towns were smaller, in keeping with the Maya failure to develop an empire. The largest towns of the Chibcha of Colombia may have held ten or twenty thousand souls. The most flourishing pueblos of the Southwest seem never to have exceeded three thousand inhabitants. The Calchaqui towns in Andean Argentina were no larger, probably smaller. Southeastern and Northwest Coast towns ran to hundreds instead of thousands of population. These figures tell the usual story of thinning away from center to peripheries.
But local differences were sometimes significant. The Southeastern town, except for its court and rude public buildings, was straggling and semi-rural compared with the compact, storied, and alleyed Southwestern pueblo; often it was less populous. Yet its political and military development was more advanced, at any rate as a unit in the larger group of the confederacy.
196. METALLURGY
The use of metals in America falls into three stages. The peripheral and backward areas, such as Patagonia and California, and those parts of the Tropical Forest in which nature had denied a supply and remoteness had shut off trade, did wholly without metals.
In the areas of medium advancement, like the Northwest, Southwest, and the ancient Mound Builder region of the Ohio Valley, native copper was beaten out into sheets, trimmed, bent, gouged, and engraved. It was not smelted from ore nor cast. Its treatment was thus essentially by stone age processes. Gold, silver, and other metals were not used; iron only sporadically when it could be obtained in the native metallic state from a fallen meteorite. The supply even of copper was rarely large. It flowed in trade, much like precious stones among ourselves, to the wealthier groups of nations able to part with their own products in exchange for this substance prized by them for jewelry and insignia but rarely made into tools.
The third stage is that of true metallurgical processes, and is confined to the three Middle American areas. Here, copper, gold, silver, and so far as they were available tin and platinum, were sought after and worked. Copper at any rate was extracted from its ores by smelting; all the known metals were fused and cast, both in permanent molds and by the method of melting wax out of a single-time mold. Wire was beaten or drawn out; gold leaf and acid plating practised; and welding, hardening by hammering, and self-soldering were known. Alloys were made: copper-tin bronze in Bolivia and the south Peruvian highland, whence its use later spread north, perhaps being carried as far as Mexico (§ 108); copper-arsenic bronze and copper-silver alloy on the Peruvian coast; copper-gold in Colombia and Mexico; copper-lead bronze in Mexico.
Nowhere, however, was metal the standard material for tools, which continued to be mostly of stone or wood. Metallic tools and utensils, especially knives and axes, were not altogether rare in the bronze region of South America. The superior hardness of bronze as compared with copper no doubt proved a stimulus in this direction. But Maya temple-cities were built with stone tools, and the Aztecs cut and fought with obsidian. In general, metal remained treasure or ornament. There were not even the beginnings of an iron culture anywhere in the hemisphere.
In the larger outlines, the history of American metallurgy is thus simple enough, as something developed late and never diffused beyond the central region of intensive culture. As to the sequence of use of the several metals and processes, on the other hand, rather little has been ascertained. It seems that in these matters South America might have been somewhat in advance of Mexico, both in time and in degree of attainments. The age of the metallurgical arts in Middle America must not be underestimated. In spite of their relative recency, they can hardly have been less than several thousand years old.
197. CALENDARS AND ASTRONOMY
The earliest stage of anything like time reckoning in America was what might be called the descriptive moon series. The return of the seasons marked the year. Within the year, rude track was kept of the passage of time by following a series of “natural” months or lunations named after events, such as “heavy cold,” “flying geese,” “deer rutting,” or “falling leaves.” No one cared and perhaps no one knew how many days there were in a moon, let alone in a year. No one knew his age, nor, as a rule, how many years ago any event had taken place. It is a mark of pretty high civilization when people know how old they are.
From the point of view of accuracy, the moon series calendar left much to be desired, since there are something over twelve and considerably under thirteen visible lunations in a solar or seasonal year. Some tribes allowed twelve moons, others thirteen, in some different individuals disagreed. Whenever the geese actually flew, debates were settled: it was flying geese month, and every one went on with the series from there. If he had happened to get a moon ahead or behind, he accepted the event as a correction.
The moon series calendar was used by the majority of tribes in the United States and Canada.
Somewhat more advanced is the solstitial moon series. This takes one of the solstices, usually the one just before our Christmas, as the fixed beginning and end of the year. The days are noticeably shortest then. Some tribes went farther and employed landmarks to observe the place on the horizon of the sun’s rising. Until the solstice this place shifts daily southward, after it northward. Also, the noonday shadows fall longest at the winter solstice. Here then was a point in the year which was always the same, whereas the geese might fly or the leaves fall early one year and late the next. The definiteness thus obtained was followed up by numbering the moons instead of describing them, or by recognizing both solstices as a frame within which there fell two parallel groups of six moons, or of five moons and a slightly longer solstitial period.
This method also did not solve the really difficult problem of making twelve lunations and an irregular fraction fit automatically and permanently into the solar year; and provision for counting days and years was still wholly lacking. Yet the first beginnings of exact astronomical observations had been made and were utilized to give the year and its subdivisions a certain fixity.
The occurrence of the simple solstitial calendar in North America is significant. It occurs in the Southwest and Northwest: that is, in the area most directly influenced by the higher Mexican center, and the area which made most progress independently of Mexico.[29]
These two stages of the descriptive and the solstitial moon series were long ago passed through in southern Mexico and a need felt for a more precise time reckoning. No calendar can either serve accuracy or cover long periods which fails to concern itself with the exact arithmetical relation of its smaller units to its larger ones: the number of days in the month and year, for instance. This concern, would not be difficult if the relations were simple; but nature has put something over 29½ days into a lunation, something under 365¼ days and a little over 12⅓ lunations into the year. The first step ahead was undoubtedly a day count, as previously the numbering of the moons had marked an advance over their descriptive naming. The day count must have revealed the discrepancy between the actual numbers and those assumed for the larger units, such as 30 and 360. A great advance was therefore made when the natural lunation was wholly abandoned and artificial units substituted. The Mayas, or possibly some previous and forgotten people, invented a “month” of twenty days, probably because they counted by twenties instead of tens. Eighteen of these months, with five added leap days, made a 365-day year. Thirteen 20-day months made another and wholly arbitrary period of 260 days, which the Aztecs, who borrowed the system, called tonalamatl.[30] The tonalamatl had no basis in nature or astronomy and was a pure invention: a reckoning device. It ran its course concurrently with the year as two wheels of 260 and 365 cogs might engage. The same cogs would meet again at the end of 73 and 52 revolutions respectively, that is, 365 and 260 divided by 5, their highest common factor. At the end of each 52 years, therefore, the beginning of the year and of the tonalamatl again coincided, giving a “calendar round” of that duration. This 52-year period is the one by which the Aztecs dated.
The Mayas, however, did not content themselves with the 52-year period, but reckoned time by katuns of 20 and cycles of 400 years.[31] The dates on Maya inscriptions are mostly from their ninth cycle, with some from the end of the eighth and beginning of the tenth. This period corresponds approximately to the first six centuries of the Christian era. The beginning of the first cycle would fall more than 3,000 years before Christ. There is no reason to believe that this time reckoning began then. It is more likely that a little before the time of Christ the Mayas perfected this system of chronology and gave it dignity by imagining some seven or eight cycles to have passed between the beginning of the world, or some other mythological event, and the actual commencement of their record. From the close of their eighth cycle, however, the dates are apparently contemporary with the events to which they refer.
This system is so elaborate that it could scarcely have been devised and adopted all at once. There must have been a time lasting some centuries, perhaps over a thousand years, previous to the Christian era, during which the first day count was being elaborated and perfected into the classical calendar of the early post-Christian Maya monuments.
This calendar did not exhaust the astronomical and mathematical accomplishments of the Mayas. They ascertained that eight solar years correspond almost exactly with five “years” or apparent revolutions (584 days) of the planet Venus, and that 65 Venus years of a total of 37,960 days coincide with two calendar rounds of 52 solar years. They knew that their 365-day year was a fraction of a day short of the true year, determined the error rather exactly, and, while they did not interpolate any leap days, they computed the necessary correction at 25 days in 104 years or two calendar rounds. This is greater accuracy than has been attained by any calendar other than our modern Gregorian one. As regards the moon, they brought its revolutions into accord with their day count with an error of only one day in 300 years. These are high attainments, and for a people without astronomical instruments involved accurate and protracted observations as well as calculatory ability.
Much less is known of South American calendars; but, like the dwindling away from Maya to Aztec to Pueblo and finally to the rudiments of the descriptive moon series of the backward tribes in the northern continent, so there is discernible a retardation of progress as the Maya focus is left behind toward the south. The most developed calendar in South America was that of the Chibchan peoples of Colombia. Beyond them, the Inca, in their greater empire, got along with a system intermediate in its degree of development between the Aztec and the Pueblo ones. In the Tropical Forest and Patagonian areas there do not seem to have been more than moon name series comparable to those of peripheral North America.
198. WRITING
Related to calendar and mathematics in its origin was writing, which passed out of the stage of pictographs and simple ideograms only in the Mexican area. The Aztecs used the rebus method (§ 130), but chiefly for proper names, as in tribute lists and the like. The Mayas had gone farther. Their glyphs are highly worn down or conventionalized pictures, true symbols; often indeed combinations of symbols. They mostly remain illegible to us, and while they appear to contain phonetic elements, these do not seem to be the dominant constituents. The Maya writing thus also did not go beyond the mixed or transitional stage. The Chibcha may have had a less advanced system of similar type, though the fact that no remains of it have survived argues against its having been of any considerable development. The Peruvians did not write at all. They scarcely even used simple pictography. Their records were wholly oral, fortified by mnemonic devices known as quipus, series of knotted strings. These were useful in keeping account of numbers, but could of course not be read by any one but the knotter of the strings: a given knot might stand equally for ten llamas, ten men, ten war clubs, or ten jars of maize. The remainder of South America used no quipus, and while occasional pictographs have been found on rocks, they seem to have been less developed, as something customary, than among the North American tribes. All such primitive carvings or paintings were rather expressions of emotion over some event, concrete or spiritual, intelligible to the maker of the carving and perhaps to his friends, than records intended to be understood by strangers or future generations.
Connected with the fact that the highest development of American writing took place in southern Mexico, is another: it was only there that books were produced. These were mostly ritualistic or astrological, and were painted on long folded strips of maguey fiber paper or deerskin. They were probably never numerous, and intelligible chiefly to certain priests or officials.
199. THE SEVERAL PROVINCIAL DEVELOPMENTS: MEXICO
Since the calendrical and graphic achievements enumerated, together with temple sculpture, lie in the fields of science, knowledge, and art, and since they show a definite localization in southern Mexico, in fact point to an origin in the Maya area, they almost compel the recognition of this culture center as having constituted the peak of civilization in the New World.
This localization establishes at least some presumption that it was there rather than in South America that the beginnings of cultural progress, the emergence out of primitive uniformity, occurred. To be sure, it is conceivable that agriculture and other inventions grew up in Andean South America, were transported to Mexico, for some reason gained a more rapid development there, until, under the stimulus of this forward movement, further discoveries were made which the more steadily and slowly progressing Peruvian motherland of culture failed to equal. Conjectures of this sort cannot yet be confirmed or disproved. Civilization was sufficiently advanced in both Mexico and Peru to render it certain that these first beginnings now referred to, lay some thousands of years back. In the main, Mexican and Peruvian cultures were nearly on an equality, and in their fundamentals they were sufficiently alike, and sufficiently different from all Old World cultures, to necessitate the belief that they are, broadly, a common product.
Still, the superiority of the Mexicans in the sciences and arts carries a certain weight. If to this superiority are added the indications that maize and cotton were first cultivated in the south Mexican area, in other words, that the fundamentals of American agriculture and loom-weaving seem more likely to have been developed there than elsewhere; and if further the close association of pottery with agriculture throughout the western hemisphere is borne in mind, it seems likely that the seat of the first forward impetus out of the wholly primitive status of American culture is to be sought in the vicinity of southern Mexico.
200. THE ANDEAN AREA
The triumphs of Mexican civilization were in the spiritual or intellectual field; those of Peru lay rather in practical and material matters. The empire of the Incas was larger and much more rigorously organized and controlled, their roads longer and more ambitious as engineering undertakings, their masonry more massive; their mining operations and metal working more extensive. The domestication of the llama and the cultivation of certain food plants such as the potato gave their culture an added stability on the economic side.
The extent of the Inca empire, and of the smaller states that no doubt preceded it, was of influence in shaping Andean culture. Organized and directed efforts of large numbers of men were made available to a greater degree than ever before in the New World. The empire also operated in the direction of more steady industry, but its close organization and routine probably helped dwarf the higher flights of the mind. In the quality of their fabrics, jewelry, stone fitting, and road building, as well as in exactness of governmental administration, the Peruvians excelled. It is remarkable how little, with all their progress in these directions, they seem to have felt the need of advance in knowledge or art for its own sake. They thought with their hands rather than their heads. They practised skill and inhibited imagination.
The Incas, like the Aztecs in Mexico, represent merely the controlling nation during the last stage of development. Their specific culture was the local one of the highlands about Cuzco. Prehistoric remains from the coast both north and south, and in the Andean highland southward of Cuzco in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca and the adjacent parts of Bolivia, demonstrate that this Inca or Cuzco culture was only the latest of several forms of Andean culture. At the time of Inca dominion, the great temple of Tiahuanaco near Lake Titicaca was already a ruin. Pottery of a type characteristic of the Tiahuanaco district, and similar in style to its stone carvings, has been found in remote parts of the Andean area, thus indicating the district as an early center of diffusion. Other centers, more or less contemporaneous, some of them perhaps still earlier, can be distinguished along the coast. In short, the inner history of the Andean region is by no means summed up in that picture of it which the Inca domination at the time of discovery presented. New scientifically conducted excavations throughout the area will no doubt unravel further the succession of local cultural developments.
201. COLOMBIA
The Chibchas of Colombia, the intermediate member of the three-linked Middle American chain, fell somewhat, but not very far, below the Mexicans and Peruvians in their cultural accomplishments. Their deficiency lay in their lack of specific developments. They do not show a single cultural element of importance peculiar to themselves. They chewed coca, slept in hammocks, sat on low chairs or stools; but these are traits common to a large part of South America. Consequently the absence or weak development of these traits in Mexico is no indication of any superiority of the Chibchas as such. The great bulk of Colombian culture was a substratum which underlay the higher local developments of Mexico and Peru; and this substratum—varied agriculture, temples, priesthood, political organization—the Chibchas possessed without notable gaps. Whatever elements flowed from Mexico to Peru or from Peru to Mexico at either an early or a late period, therefore probably passed through them. In isolated matters they may have added their contribution. On the whole, though, their rôle must have been that of sharers, recipients, and transmitters in the general Middle American civilization.
202. THE TROPICAL FOREST
The line of demarcation between the narrow Pacific slope of South America and the broad Atlantic drainage is sharp, especially in the region of Peru. The Cordilleran stretch is arid along the coast, sub-arid in the mountains, unforested in all its most characteristic portions. East of the crest of the Andes, on the other hand, the rainfall is heavy, often excessive, the jungle thick, communication difficult and largely dependent on the waterways. Even the Caucasian has made but the slightest impression on the virgin Amazonian forest at its densest. The Inca stretched his empire a thousand miles north and a thousand to the south with comparative ease, establishing uniformity and maintaining order. He did not penetrate the Tropical Forest a hundred miles. At his borders, where the forest began, lived tribes as wild and shy as any on earth. The Andean civilization would have had to be profoundly modified to flourish in the jungle, and the jungle had too little that was attractive to incite to the endeavor. Some thousands of years more, perhaps, might have witnessed an attempt to open up the forest and make it accessible. Yet when one recalls how little has been done in this direction by Caucasian civilization in four centuries, and how superficial its exploitation for rubber and like products has been, it is clear that such a task would have been accomplished by the Peruvians only with the utmost slowness.
Yet various culture elements filtered over the Andes into the hidden lowlands. The Pan’s pipe, for instance, an element common to the Andes and the Forest, is likely to have originated in the higher center. Elements like the blowgun, the hammock, the chair or stool, are typical of the northern Forest and Antilles, and may have infiltrated these areas from Colombia or even been locally developed. The same is true of the cultivation of the cassava or manioc plant, from which we draw our tapioca. This, the great staple of the Forest region, is better adapted to its humid climate than is maize, which flourishes best in a sub-arid environment. Cassava may therefore be looked upon as perhaps a local substitute for maize, evolved as a domesticated plant under the stimulus of an already established maize agriculture. Its cultivation has evidently spread through the Forest region from a single source, since the specialized processes of preparing it for food—the untreated root is poisonous—are relatively uniform wherever it is grown. Maize is not unknown in the area, but less used than cassava wherever the forest is dense.
A characteristic quality of those Forest culture-traits which are not common ancient American inheritance, is that, whether of Middle American or local origin, they are detached fragments, particular devices having little or no relation to one another, like the hammock and the blowgun, or cassava and the Pan’s pipe. Original fundamental processes, higher accomplishments necessitating order or organization of effort, are lacking. This is precisely the condition which might be anticipated when a culture too low to take over a higher one in its entirety had borrowed from it here and there, as the Forest peoples undoubtedly have borrowed from Middle America.
Three districts within the Forest area have previously been mentioned (§ 174) as regions in which the forest becomes open or disappears, and whose type of culture is locally modified: Guiana, eastern Brazil, and the Chaco. Of these the Brazilian highlands constitute an area of unusually deficient culture. In parts of them agriculture and pottery seem to be lacking. These highlands are perhaps to be construed as an interior marginal region representing an isolation within the greater Forest area. Had these highlands been in juxtaposition to the Andean area, or even situated near it, they would presumably have been able to take over Andean culture elements more successfully than the low-lying Forest, and would then have stood out from this through superiorities instead of absences. Their remoteness, however, enabled the intervening Forest region to shut them off from Andean influences of consequence, while giving to them only part of its own low cultural content.
The peculiarities of the Chaco are due to the opposite reason. The Chaco is a partly open country at the southerly extremity of the Forest. It lies close to the foot of the Andes where these broaden out into the southern Bolivian plateau. It also shades off into the treeless Patagonian region. It is thus open to influences from three sides, and its culture appears to represent a mixture of the three adjacent ones. The basis would seem to be the culture of the Tropical Forest, but definite Patagonian as well as Andean elements are traceable.
203. PATAGONIA
Patagonia is par excellence the peripheral region of South America, culturally as well as geographically. As regards civilization, this is true in the highest degree at the extreme tip of the continent about Tierra del Fuego. Many of the most widely spread South American culture traits being lacking here, there is a curious resemblance to the northerly tribes of North America.
Yet even this culturally disinherited area is not without a few local developments of relatively high order. The most striking is the plank-built canoe of the south Chilean archipelago. The skill to carpenter such boats was exercised in only one other region in the hemisphere; the Santa Barbara Islands of California. Curiously enough the latter is also a district of comparatively backward culture. In any event this built-up canoe of the rude people of the extreme south contrasts strikingly with the lack of any real boats among the advanced nations in the Andean area. The moral would seem to be that it is speculative to base much theory or explanation on any single culture trait.
Of other elements specific to the Patagonian region, there might be mentioned coiled basketry (§ 104) and the bolas. This is a hunting weapon of three stones attached to ropes swung so as to wind around the neck or legs of game. Except at the extreme south, Patagonian culture was profoundly modified by the introduction of the horse, which soon after the arrival of the Spaniards multiplied on the open plains. The horse enlarged the ability of the Patagonian tribes to take game, especially in the Pampas in the north, increased their wealth, and strengthened their warlike interests. The same change occurred in the Chaco.
204. NORTH AMERICA: THE SOUTHWEST
In North America the Southwest area lies at the point where the continent spreads out fanwise. It is therefore the gate or transforming station through which Mexican influences flowed on their way to the various areas beyond. Whatever of Mexican culture the Pueblos received and accepted, they worked over before they passed it on. This reconstitution gave the culture a new color. Nearly every one on first coming in contact with Southwestern culture has been struck with its distinctive cast. Analysis, however, shows few intrinsic elements peculiar to it. The novelty as compared with Mexico lies in a different emphasis or a new arrangement of the elements. Masonry, for instance, is used for dwellings instead of temples. Town life is well developed, but the political organization which accompanies it in Mexico is much weaker in the Southwest.
205. THE SOUTHEAST
Superficially, Southeastern culture appears different from Southwestern. Much of the seeming difference is due to the wooded and rather humid environment; another portion is accounted for by the failure of the Southeastern tribes to build in stone. But there are differences that go deeper, such as the poverty of Southeastern ritual and the comparative strength of political organization. The religious dwarfing may be attributed to greater distance from Mexico.
The precise routes of diffusion into the Southeast are not wholly clear. The culture center of the area lay on or near the lower Mississippi—sufficiently close to the Southwest. Yet the district which is now Texas intervened, and this was one of distinctly lower culture, largely occupied by tribes with Plains affiliation. Theoretically it would have been possible for cultural elements to travel from Mexico along the Texas coast to the Southeast. Yet what little is known about the tribes of this coast indicates that they were backward. A third possibility for the transmission of culture was from the Antilles, especially by the short voyage from Cuba or the Bahamas to the point of Florida. Some connections by this route almost certainly took place. But they seem to have affected chiefly the peninsula of Florida, and to have brought less into the Southeast as a whole than reached it overland.
206. THE NORTHERN WOODLAND
The Northeast was historically dependent on the Southeast as this was on the Southwest and the Southwest on Mexico. It was thus the third stage removed from the origins in Middle America. It was inferior to the Southeast in several points. Pottery was cruder, clans mostly patrilinear instead of matrilinear, town and tribal life less organized. Some exceptions within the Northeast can be traced to direct influences or migrations from the Southeast. The matrilinear and confederated Iroquoian tribes of the Northeast, for instance, were linguistic relatives of the Cherokee in the Southeast.
A similar movement of culture or peoples, or both, occurred at an earlier time and has left as its remains the mounds of the Ohio valley—local equivalents of the Mexican temple pyramid. Some of these are of surprising bulk, and others have the form of animals. Associated with them are earthwork fortifications which indicate coherent populational groups of some size. The industries of the Mound Builders were also on a somewhat higher level, especially as regards artistic quality, than those of the historic tribes of the region. In detail the Mound Builder culture represents many interesting points that remain to be cleared up. In the large, however, it was a temporary local extension of the Southeastern culture, from which flowed its occasional resemblances to Middle America.
207. PLAINS AREA
The Plains area is adjacent to the Southwest, but a review of its culture elements shows that a surprisingly small fragment of Southwestern civilization penetrated it. The most advanced Plains tribes seem rather to have been in dependence on the Southeast. This is probably to be explained as the result of a flow of culture up the more immediate Mississippi valley. The western Plains, close to the Rocky mountains, were sparsely populated in aboriginal times, and life there must have been both unsettled and narrow in its scope. Contacts between these western Plains and the Southwest no doubt existed, but presumably the Plains tribes were too backward, and too engrossed in their own special adaptation to their environment, to profit much by what they might have borrowed from the Pueblos.
Certain specific culture traits were developed on the Plains. The nearly exclusive dependence on buffalo stunted the culture in some directions, but led to the originating of other features. Thus the Plains tribes came to live in tipis—tents made of the skin of the buffalo—pitched these in regular order in the camp circle, and traveled with the bundled tents lashed to a “travois” frame dragged by dogs. While they never accomplished anything notable in the way of confederating themselves into larger stable groups, nor even in effective warfare, they did develop a system of “coup counting” or military honors which loomed large in their life.
During the seventeenth century the horse was introduced or became abundant on the Plains. It reached the Indians from Spanish sources, as is shown by their adopting modifications of Spanish riding gear and methods of mounting. The horse gave them an extension of range and a greater sureness of food supply; more leisure also resulted. The consequence was a general upward swing of the culture, which put it, as regards outward appearances, on a par with the cultures of other areas that in purely aboriginal times had outranked the Plains. This development due to the horse is in many ways comparable to that which occurred in the Patagonian area, but with one difference. The Patagonians possessed a meager culture. The introduction of the horse resulted in their hybridizing two elements so dissimilar as their own low civilization and the Caucasian one. The Plains culture had a somewhat fuller content. The Plains tribes were also protected from intimate Caucasian contacts for nearly two centuries, during which they were able to use the new and valuable acquisition of the horse to enrich and deepen their culture without essentially remodeling it. Horse transport was substituted for dog transport, tipis became more commodious and comfortable, the camp circle spread out larger, more property could be accumulated. Warfare continued to be carried on as a species of game with military honors as prizes, but now provided the added incentive of substantial booty of herds easily driven off.
208. THE NORTHWEST COAST
The North Pacific coast is the most anomalous of the North American areas, and its history is in many ways unique. It is nearer in miles to the Southwest and Mexico than is the Northeast, yet agriculture and pottery never reached it. At the same time the Northwest culture is obviously more than a marginal one. People with so elaborate a social organization as these Coast tribes, and with so outstanding an art, were certainly not peripheral dependents. The explanation is that much of the development of culture in the Middle American region never became established in the Northwest, but that this area manifested a vitality and initiative of its own which led to the independent development of a number of important culture constituents. The art is in the main of such local origin, since it does not affiliate closely with the art of other areas. Very important too was the stress increasingly laid on wealth in the Northwest. Society was stratified in terms of it. The potlatch, a combination of feast, religious ceremony, and distribution of property, is another peculiar outcome of the same tendency. The use of dentalium shells as a sort of standard currency is a further manifestation. The working of wood was carried farther than anywhere else. Several traits, such as the solstitial calendar and matrilinear clans, which the Northwest Coast shares with other areas, have already been cited as probable instances of independent evolution on the spot.
All in all, then, it is necessary to look upon the Northwest Coast culture as one that fell far short of the high civilizations of Middle America, in fact barely equaled that of the Southwest, yet as the only one in the New World that grew to any notability with but slight dependence on Middle America. It is an isolated secondary peak standing aloof from the greater one that culminated in Mexico and Peru and to which all the remainder of the hemisphere was subordinate. Figure 35 visualizes this historic relation.
209. NORTHERN MARGINAL AREAS
The Arctic, Mackenzie, Plateau, and California areas were also but little influenced by Middle American civilization. In fact, most of the elements which they share with it may be considered direct survivals of the general proto-American culture out of which the early Middle American civilization emerged. Yet why these areas on the Pacific side of North America should have profited so much less by the diffusion of Mexican advancement than the areas on the Atlantic, is not clear. In the mostly frozen Arctic and Mackenzie tracts, the hostile environment may have forbidden. But this explanation certainly does not apply to the California area which lies at the very doors of the Southwest and yet refrained from taking over such fundamentals as agriculture and pottery. Sparseness of population cannot be invoked as a cause, since at least along the coast the density of population was greater than in almost all the eastern half of the continent.
Of the people of these four areas, the Eskimo are the only ones that evinced notable originality. It is easy to attribute this quality of theirs to the stern rigor of environment. In fact, it has been customary to appeal to the Eskimo as an example of the popular maxim that necessity is the mother of invention. Yet it is clear that no great weight can be attached to this simple philosophy. It is true that without his delicately adjusted harpoon, his skin boat, his snow hut, his dog sled, and his seal oil lamp, the Eskimo could not have maintained an existence on the terrifically inhospitable shores of the Arctic. But there is nothing to show that he was forced to live in this environment. Stretches of mountains, desert, and tundra in other parts of the world were often left uninhabited by uncivilized peoples. Why did not the Eskimo abandon his Arctic shore or refuse to settle it in the first place, crowding his way instead into some more favorable habitat? His was a sturdy stock that should have had at least an equal chance in a competition with other peoples.
Furthermore it is evident that rigorous environment does not always force development or special cultural adaptations. The tribes of the Mackenzie-Yukon and the most northerly part of the Northeast area lived under a climate about as harsh as that of the Eskimo. In fact they were immediate neighbors; yet their culture is definitely more meager. A series of the most skilled devices of the Eskimo were wanting among them. If necessity were truly as productive a cause of cultural progress as is commonly thought, these Athabascan and Algonkin Indians should have been stimulated into a mechanical ingenuity comparable to that of the Eskimo, instead of continuing to rank below them.
These considerations compel the conclusion that the Eskimo did not develop the achievements of his culture because he lived in his difficult environment, but that he lived in the environment because he possessed a culture capable of coping with it. This does not mean that he had his culture worked out to the last detail before he settled on the American shores of the Arctic ocean. It does mean that he possessed the fundamentals of the culture, and the habits of ingenuity, the mechanical and practical turn of mind, which enabled him to carry it farther and meet new requirements as they came up. Where and how he acquired the fundamentals is obscure. It is well to remember in this connection that the physical type of the Eskimo is the most distinctive in the New World, and that his speech has as yet shown no inclination to connect with any other American language. It is conceivable that the origin of the Eskimo is to be set at a time later than that of the American race and somewhere in Asia. The fact that at present there are Eskimo villages on the Siberian side of Behring Strait is too recent and local a phenomenon to afford strong confirmation of such a view, but certainly does not operate against it. Somewhere in the Siberian region, then, within occasional reach of influences emanating from higher centers of civilization in Asia or Europe, the Eskimo may have laid the foundations of their culture, specialized it further as they encountered new conditions in new Asiatic habitats, and evolved only the finishing touches of their remarkable adaptation after they spread along the northernmost shores of America. Some of the Old World culture influences which had reached them before they entered America may go back to the Magdalenian culture of the Palæolithic. There are at any rate certain resemblances between Magdalenian and Eskimo cultures that have repeatedly impressed observers: the harpoon, spear thrower, lamp, carving, and graphic art (§ 67).
210. LATER ASIATIC INFLUENCES
One set of influences the Eskimo, and to a lesser degree the peoples of adjacent areas, were unquestionably subject to and profited by: sporadic culture radiations of fairly late date from Asia. Such influences were probably not specially important, but they are discernible. They came probably as disjected bits independent of one another. There may have been as many that reached America and failed of acceptance as were actually taken up. In another connection (§ 92) it has been pointed out how the tale known as the “Magic Flight” has spread from its Old World center of origin well into northwestern America. A similar case has been made out for a material element: the sinew-backed or composite bow (§ 101), first found some three to four thousand years ago in western Asia. This is constructed, in Asia, of a layer each of wood, sinew, and horn; in its simpler American form, which barely extends as far south as the Mexican frontier, of either wood or horn reinforced with sinew. Body armor of slats, sewn or wound into a garment, seems to have spread from Asia to the Northwest Coast. The skin boat, represented in its most perfect type by the Eskimo kayak; the tipi or conical tent of skins; birchbark vessels; sleds or toboggans with dog traction; bark canoes with underhung ends; and garments of skin tailored—cut and sewn—to follow the contours of the body, may all prove to represent culture importations from Asia. At any rate they are all restricted in America to the part north and west of a line connecting the St. Lawrence and Colorado rivers, the part of the continent that is nearest to Asia. South and east of this line, apparently, Middle American influences were strong enough to provide the local groups with an adequate culture of American source; and, the Asiatic influences being feeble on account of remoteness, Asiatic culture traits failed of acceptance. It is also noteworthy that all of the traits last mentioned are absent on the Northwest Coast, in spite of its proximity to Asia. The presumable reason is that the Northwest Coast, having worked out a relatively advanced and satisfactory culture adaptation of its own, had nothing to gain by taking over these elementary devices; whereas to the culturally poorer peoples of the Arctic, Mackenzie, Plateau, and in part of the California, Plains, and Northeastern areas, they proved a valuable acquisition.
A careful analysis of Eskimo culture in comparison with north and east Asiatic culture may reveal further instances of elements that have spread from one hemisphere to the other. Yet the sum total of such relatively late contributions from the civilization of the Old World to that of the New, during the last one or two or three or four thousand years, is not likely to aggregate any great bulk. Since the early culture importation of the period of the settlement of America eight or ten thousand years ago, the influences of the Old World have always been slight as compared with the independent developments within the New World. Even within the northwestern segment of North America, the bulk of culture would seem to have been evolved on the spot. But mingled with this local growth, more or less modifying it in the nearer regions, and reaching its greatest strength among the Eskimo, has been a trickling series of later Asiatic influences which it would be mistaken wholly to overlook.