Below we shall summarize the life habits of two ethnographically known
groups who lived near the Plains-Great Basin fringe. This is done in
an effort to present a brief outline of the type of life people in the
Morrison area could have lived. It is designed to serve as a guide
for interpretation of the archaeological remains, and should provide
insight into areas of social and religious action. The first group, the
Ute, are known to have lived for a time in the region; the second, the
Pawnee, were never in the area proper, but do represent the sort of
pottery-using, corn-growing Indians that had occupied it in the past.
This use of comparative ethnology and the reconstruction which follows
are in the nature of a theory, a theory of methodology. Too often,
as J. O. Brew (1946) has pointed out, archaeological fact gathering
has run riot ahead of the interpretation of these facts. Brew quoted
C. C. Kluckhohn in this respect: “In any case the alternative is not
between theory and no theory or a minimum of theory, but between
adequate and inadequate theories.... For I am afraid that many of
our anthropologists who are most distrustful of theory are like
Molière’s character who spoke prose without knowing it, for a complex
theoretical viewpoint is usually implicit in some of the most
apparently innocent statements of facts.” (Brew, 1946, p. 45; but for
full context see Kluckhohn 1939). We have striven, however, to remain
aware of the assumptions involved.