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.