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.
[Illustration: FIG. 33. Schematic illustration of distributions of
culture traits as indicative of their history. _A_, distribution
corresponding to one by accident, and suggesting that each occurrence is
independent of the others. _B_, distribution by contiguous occurrences,
strongly suggesting a single invention and subsequent diffusion. _C_,
distribution interpretable as due either to independent, parallel
origins; or to a single origin, diffusion over the whole area, and
subsequent loss of the trait in most parts, with survival only in
marginal tracts. The loss in the central area might be due to the growth
of a supplanting trait, whose later diffusion had not yet penetrated
to the farthest ends. _D_, distribution suggesting a single origin old
enough for its diffusion to have become extensive, but checked in certain
directions by adverse conditions in nature, communications, or cultural
preoccupation. The specific demonstration of such adverse factors would
substantiate the interpretation.]
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.
[Illustration: FIG. 34. Culture-areas of America. The numbers refer to
the names as listed on pp. 336, 338. (Modified from Wissler.)]
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.
[Illustration: FIG. 35. Diagram illustrating the occurrence of some
representative elements of culture in the various areas of America. In
general, assumed early elements are below, late ones above, _within
each column_; but for the figure as a whole, horizontal levels do not
indicate contemporaneity as they do in figure 36. Height of columns
is representative of quantity or elaboration of culture content,
which towers impressively in Middle America, to fall away towards the
peripheries. Hatching indicates elements that may once have existed in
areas but are now lacking; stippling, elements perhaps introduced from
Asia. Entries above the heavy line are local developments.]
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.
[Illustration: FIG. 36. Diagrammatic representation by Spinden of the
development of native American culture. Fewer elements of culture are
included than in figure 35, but these are definitely placed according to
their indicated sequence in time. While this diagram was prepared with
particular reference to Middle American civilization and therefore has
reference only to the culture areas cut by the line ABCD, and while it
carries the peopling of the continent a few thousand years back of the
time assumed in this book, it is in substantial agreement with the views
expressed in the present chapter.]
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]