Indians of North America

ISBN: 0-226-16467-5 (paperbound)

ISBN 978-0-226-22130-4 (ebook)

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 79-76207

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1961, 1969 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1969

Printed in the United States of America

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Indians of North America

Second Edition, Revised

Harold E. Driver

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

To Wilhelmine

Contents

Preface

1: ORIGIN AND PREHISTORY

The First Farmers

Civilization

2: CULTURE AREAS

3: LANGUAGE

Phonology

Grammar

Language and Culture

Classification

Language Areas and Culture Areas

Writing

4: SUBSISTENCE PATTERNS

Areal Survey

Natural Vegetation Areas

Domesticated Animals

Population

5: HORTICULTURE

Maize

Other Plants

Tools and Techniques of Farming

Conclusions

6: OTHER ASPECTS OF SUBSISTENCE

Hunting

Fishing

Wild Plant Foods

Food Preparation and Preservation

Nutrition

Social and Religious Aspects

Conclusions

7: NARCOTICS AND STIMULANTS

Tobacco

Alcoholic Beverages

Major Narcotics

Minor Narcotics

8: HOUSING AND ARCHITECTURE

Dominant House Types

Comparative Analysis

Sweathouses

Architecture

9: CLOTHING

Major Styles

Geographical Distributions

Division of Labor

10: CRAFTS

Weaving

Pottery

Skin Dressing

Metallurgy

Division of Labor

11: ART

Areal Survey

General Remarks on Visual Art

12: MUSIC AND DANCE

By Wilhelmine Driver

13: EXCHANGE AND TRADE

Gift and Ceremonial Exchange

Trade

Conclusions

14: MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY

Infant or Child Betrothal

Premarital Mating

Ways of Acquiring a Spouse

Incest Taboos and Exogamy

Cousin Marriage

Affinal Marriage

Polygamy

Postnuptial Residence

The Family

15: LARGER KIN GROUPS AND KINSHIP TERMINOLOGY

Lineages, Sibs, Moieties, Phratries

Clans and Demes

Kinship Terminology

The Origin of Unilateral Descent

16: PROPERTY AND INHERITANCE

Land Tenure

Ownership and Inheritance of Dwellings

Ownership and Inheritance of Chattels

Incorporeal Property

17: GOVERNMENT AND SOCIAL CONTROLS

Areas without True Political Organization

Areas with Borderline and Mixed Systems

Areas with Tribal Organization in the Historic Period

The State

Summary and Conclusions

18: VIOLENCE, FEUDS, RAIDS, AND WAR

Absence of True Warfare

Weak or Mixed Patterns of Warfare

Well-Developed Warfare

Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism

Economic Conquest and Human Sacrifice

Conclusions

19: RANK AND SOCIAL CLASSES

Minimal Development of Status and Rank

Northwest Coast System

Systems Adjacent to Northwest Coast

Complex Systems of Meso-America

Systems Derived in Part from Meso-America

Conclusions

20: SODALITIES AND THEIR CEREMONIES

Inconsequential Sodality Organization

Relatively Important Sodalities

Greatest Elaboration of Sodalities

Summary and Conclusions

21: LIFE CYCLE

Birth and Infancy

Puberty

Death

Summary and Conclusions

22: EDUCATION

Discipline

Praise and Ridicule

Free Imitation and Directed Learning

The Markers of Maturity

Personal Names

Vision Quest and Spirit Helper

Education among the Aztecs

23: RELIGION, MAGIC, AND MEDICINE

The Gods and Priests of the Aztecs

The Magic and Medicine Men of the Navaho

The Forgiving Creeks

The Vision Quest of the Sanpoil

The Possessional Shamanism of the Eskimo

Conclusions

24: PERSONALITY AND CULTURE

The Controversial Pueblos

The Egocentric Northwest Coast Men

The Manly-Hearted Plains People

The Pseudo-Apollonians of the Sub-Arctic

The Aggressive but Insecure Iroquoians

The Ambivalent Eskimo

The Negative Meso-American Commoners

Conclusions

25: HISTORY AND CULTURE CHANGE IN MEXICO

26: INDIAN-WHITE RELATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

27: INDIAN CULTURE CHANGE IN THE UNITED STATES

28: HISTORY AND CULTURE CHANGE IN CANADA, ALASKA, AND GREENLAND

Canada

Alaska

Greenland

29: ACHIEVEMENTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS

PLATES

MAPS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

INDEX

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Diffusion of Maize

2. Domed Snow House

3. Domoid Stone-Earth-Whalebone House

4. Rectangloid Earth-Covered Alaskan House

5. Rectangular Plank House

6. Crude Conical Tipi

7. Double Lean-to

8. Semisubterranean Plateau House

9. Plains Tipi

10. Prairie-Southeast Earth Lodge

11. Gothic Dome Thatched House

12. Domed Bark, Mat, Thatch, or Hide House

13. Rectangular Barrel-Roofed House

14. Rectangular Gabled House, Thatched

15. Rectangular Flat-Roofed House

16. Mohave Type Four-Pitch Roof House

17. Rectangular Domed-Roof House

18. Pyramidal or Hip-Roof Rectangloid House

19. Sculpture, Ground Plan, and Elevation at Copán, Honduras.

20. Arctic Clothing

21. Northwest Coast Clothing

22. Northern Plains Clothing

23. Southeastern Clothing

24. Pueblo Clothing

25. Meso-American Clothing

26. Basketry Weaves

27. The True Loom

28. Northwest Coast House Front

29. Pueblo Basket Designs

30. Pueblo Rain Bird

31. Nuclear Family

32. Polygamous Families

33. Extended Families

34. Lineages

35. Patrilineage

36. Minimal Patrisib

37. Matricentered Lineage and Extended Family

38. Lineages and Extended Families

39. Minimal Patrician

40. Basic English Kinship Terminology

41. English Abbreviations of Anthropological Terminology

42. Mother-Aunt Classifications

43. Sister-Cousin Classifications

PLATES

I. Eskimo Pipe Stem

II. Eskimo Ivory Seal

III. Northwest Coast Chest

IV. Northwest Coast Dance Costume

V. Northwest Coast Mask

VI. Plains Man’s Buffalo Robe Painting

VII. Plains Woman’s Buffalo Robe Painting

VIII. Plains Quillwork

IX. Pueblo Pottery Vessels

X. Eastern Stone Pipe

XI. Eastern Stone Pipe

XII. Eastern Fluorspar Figurine

XIII. Eastern Stone Face

XIV. Eastern Shell Gorget

XV. Meso-American Weaving Designs

XVI. Meso-American Sculptured Pottery Jar

XVII. Meso-American Pottery Head

XVIII. Meso-American Pottery Head

XIX. Meso-American Seated Clay Figure

XX. Meso-American Clay Figure

XXI. Meso-American Group of Dancing Women

XXII. Meso-American Sculpture in Stone

XXIII. Meso-American Metal Work

XXIV. Meso-American Manuscripts

XXV. Meso-American Painting

MAPS

1. Some Archeological Cultures and Sites

2. Culture Areas

3. Dominant Types of Subsistence

4. Subsistence Areas

5. Natural Vegetation Areas

6. Native Population Density

7. Maize and Cotton

8. Horticultural Sexual Division of Labor

9. Salt

10. Dominant Species of Tobacco

11. Probable Aboriginal Sources of Tobacco

12. Alcoholic Beverages

13. Peyote

14. Other Narcotics

15. Dominant House Types

16. Conical and Subconical Houses

17. Semisubterranean Houses, Tunnel Entrances, and Hammocks

18. Multifamily Houses

19. Dominant House-Building Division of Labor

20. Sweating

21. Dominant Clothing Materials

22. Moccasins

23. Dominant Noncooking Containers

24. Twining or Coiling of Baskets, Bags, or Mats

25. Plaiting of Baskets, Bags, or Mats

26. Weaving Devices

27. Pottery Vessels

28. Craft Specialization

29. Land Tenure

30. Ownership and Inheritance of Dwellings

31. Postnuptial Residence

32. Descent

33. Number of Multiple Sibs

34. Moieties

35. Mother-Aunt Terms of Reference

36. Sexual Dominance in Subsistence Pursuits

37. Language Families

38-44. Principal Indian Tribes of North America:

38. Northwest North America

39. North Central North America

40. Eastern North America

41. Western United States

42. Central United States

43. Eastern United States

44. Mexico and Western Caribbean

Preface to the Second Edition

SINCE the first edition was published in 1961 there has been an increased interest on the part of students, laymen, and anthropologists alike in what the Indians of the twentieth century have been doing, especially in the recent years of the 1960’s. To meet this demand, the author has deleted the last chapter of the first edition and substituted for it five new chapters on ethnohistory and culture change after A.D. 1492. These terminal chapters divide the continent along national lines, with separate chapters or sections for Mexico, the United States, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Because most readers of this book are likely to be residents of the United States and are most concerned with the Indians in this nation, two of these chapters are devoted to the United States.

The five terminal chapters are more concerned with the facts of ethnohistory than with the broad trends or processes of acculturation theory. The author was more impressed with the wide variation in the responses of Indians to Whites than with the overall uniformities which could be pigeonholed under a double handful of theoretical concepts. At the same time, contrasts have been made between the Spanish and the English treatment of Indians in the colonial period, and between the policies and programs of the new governments—Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Denmark—in the later period. The twentieth century is given more space than any other, perhaps as much as the other four historic centuries combined.

The first chapter, on archeology, has been rewritten entirely to include the many discoveries since 1961 and to emphasize the growth of the civilizations in Meso-America. Dancing has been added to the chapter on music by Wilhelmine Driver, and the music of Meso-America has been given fuller treatment.

The order of two chapters has been changed. The chapter on language, originally 25, has been moved forward to become 3. This has been done to familiarize the reader near the beginning with the terms for language families and subfamilies, which are used throughout the book to localize information of all kinds. The genetic language classification of Voegelin and Voegelin (1966) replaces the older scheme of the first edition. The original Chapter 14, Property and Inheritance, has now become 16 so that it will follow the two chapters on kinship instead of preceding them. Property was owned and inherited by kinship groups, and their structures must be known in order to understand the discussion about property.

The Circum-Caribbean area has been dropped from the text, although it is left on the maps. It is included in the Handbook of South American Indians, edited by Julian H. Steward, in Native Peoples of South America, by Steward and Louis Faron, and in other general works on South America. Its geographical and historical affiliations are with South America rather than with North America.

The chapter on horticulture has been drastically revised in light of new research by archeologists and botanists. Intentional diffusion by man of domesticated plants across the Pacific before A.D. 1492 has been abandoned as an explanation in favor of independent domestication in the two hemispheres for all genera and species except the sweet potato, which seems to have been first domesticated in the New World and subsequently diffused to Polynesia within the time span A.D. 1-1492. The list of Meso-American domesticated plants has been expanded, but the new entries are of minor importance in the native culture.

About 150 new references have been cited and added to the terminal bibliography, most of them with dates in the 1960’s. The illustrations remain the same except for the deletion of one line drawing; Maps 1, 2, 6, 31, and 37 have been revised. The index retains most of the original entries, to which several hundred new ones have been added.

The criticism made by some reviewers that the first edition of this book lacked functionally integrated descriptions of the cultures of single tribes has not been acted upon because four other books with a wealth of such descriptions have appeared since: The Americas on the Eve of Discovery, edited by Harold E. Driver, 1964; The Native Americans, by Robert F. Spencer, Jesse D. Jennings, et al., 1965; This Land Was Theirs, by Wendell H. Oswalt, 1966; The North American Indians, edited by Roger C. Owen, James J. F. Deetz, and Anthony D. Fisher, 1967. These books supplement each other as well as this book.

I wish to thank the reviewers and teachers of courses on Indians for their suggestions for improving the book, especially David Barreis, David Damas, William N. Fenton, Nelson H. H. Graburn, June Helm, Melville Jacobs, Volney Jones and Evon Vogt. My wife Wilhelmine and I are especially grateful to George Herzog for his meticulous and helpful criticism of the revised version of the chapter on music and dance, as well as for suggestions for the language chapter. I wish also to acknowledge the help of Nancy O. Lurie of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Joseph Jorgensen of the University of Michigan, who read the first draft of the terminal chapters on the areas north of Mexico and made valuable marginal notes, most of which were incorporated in the final draft. I am also grateful to Frank Essene of the University of Kentucky for verbal comments on both the old and the new material which improved its quality, and to Daniel Crowley of the University of California, Davis, for giving the typing of the first draft of the terminal chapters priority over his own work. I wish, further, to thank Patricia Rademaker of Davis, California, and Peggy Wagner and Janice Perry of Bloomington, Indiana, for a careful typing job. My greatest debt, however, is to my wife Wilhelmine, who criticized and edited every word of the manuscript from the first to the final draft, read and summarized a number of Spanish sources, and contributed enormously to the thought of the book as well as to the mechanics of the writing.

Indians of North America

1

Origin and Prehistory

RECENT discoveries by Louis S. B. Leakey and others in east Africa have pushed back the first appearance of fossil men (hominids) in the Old World to about two and a half million years ago (Patterson and Howells, 1967). Still older fossils, intermediate between apes and men, demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that man evolved from fossil monkey and ape ancestry in the Old World. In the New World, in contrast, all fossil human bones so far discovered have been classed as Homo sapiens sapiens (doubly wise man), the subspecies to which all living forms of man belong. It is obvious that until man had evolved into a full-fledged human being with the ability to make fire, fur clothing, and semisubterranean houses, and to capture arctic game, he could not have lived in the arctic climate of Siberia in the Pleistocene and eventually worked his way east over a land bridge into Alaska and the New World. Although in the preceding Tertiary epoch there were warmer periods, which made it possible for monkeys to get to South America, this was before any form of man existed, and the records show that these monkeys did not serve as the springboard for evolution upward to man in the New World.

There is abundant evidence of the presence of man in the New World as early as about 10,000 B.C., and no trained anthropologist doubts these facts. A growing number, however, believe that the earliest entry of man into the New World from Siberia took place as early as about 40,000 B.C. The evidence consists of large quantities of crude chipped stone implements found mostly on the surface in both North and South America and not yet dated accurately. None of these implements can pass as a spear point or arrowhead; so this early horizon has been labeled pre-projectile-point (Krieger, 1964). Such tools were probably used in the butchering and skinning of game killed with spears or clubs of wood, which is rarely preserved in the soil more than a few years. At a later date, perhaps between 25,000 and 10,000 B.C., hunters from Siberia may have come over a land bridge bringing both unifacial and bifacial chipped stone spear points of a widespread Eurasian Levallois-Mousterian tradition. Although these tools appeared earlier in Europe and western Asia (50,000 to 150,000 B.C.), they survived in the marginal area of Siberia until the period 25,000 to 10,000 B.C. and may have given rise to the later lanceolate and fluted stone blade forms of America.

Although the Eskimos have regularly and frequently negotiated Bering Strait in hide boats filled with trade goods in historic times, and archeological evidence suggests that they and their ancestors have paddled their way back and forth across this strait for several millenia (Giddings, 1960: 128, 133), the earliest immigrants to the New World were not Eskimos and more likely walked across on a land bridge as much as 1,000 miles wide at its maximum. There is overwhelming zoological and geological evidence of land bridges from Siberia to Alaska at several times during the Pleistocene. The native animals in northern Asia and North America are so much alike that zoologists have combined the two areas into a single major life zone. Geologists estimate that during the maximum periods of the major glaciations the ice cap was a mile high over vast areas of land and as much as 9,000 feet high in some localities. The enormous amount of water contained in these ice caps came ultimately from the oceans in the form of fog and clouds and later fell in the form of snow, which still later became compressed into solid ice. The result was a lowering of the ocean level by as much as several hundred feet. Because the ocean bottom at Bering Strait today is only about 120 feet deep, it is clear that a modest lowering of ocean depths could produce a land bridge there.

Recently assembled evidence indicates that there were two land bridges in the late Pleistocene between Siberia and Alaska which might have been used by early immigrants to the New World (Müller-Beck, 1966: 1203–4). The first existed between about 50,000 and 40,000 B.C., and the second between about 26,000 and 8000 B.C. The second was wider than the first and reached its maximum width of 1,000 miles at about 18,000 B.C. However, the climate during the time of the earlier land bridge was a little milder and more favorable to man than it is today, and it was at this time that the woolly mammoth, caribou, and other species later hunted by early man first migrated from Asia to North America. At the time of both of these land bridges the climate was so cold that a people not equipped with tailored fur clothing and pit houses could not have survived in what is now the Bering Sea area. The landscape of the land bridge was arctic tundra, without trees, and temperatures were about as cold as those of the tundra today. Evidence of pit houses and fur clothing has been found in Mongolia near Lake Baikal at sites dated between 13,000 and 8000 B.C., and may well have been continuously distributed across the land bridge into Alaska. An impediment to migration into North America over this second bridge was an ice barrier just south of Alaska between about 21,000 and 11,000 B.C. That this ice barrier was broken by ice-free corridors, and that human groups were traversing it at this time, is suggested by the apparently sudden appearance of Paleoindians at many localities in the Americas around 10,000 B.C. or soon after. The evidence of early man in Tierra del Fuego by about 8000 B.C. suggests that his ancestors had passed through this so-called ice barrier thousands of years earlier.

Spruce pollen recently collected by Colinvaux (1967) on the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea proves that spruce forests extended farther to the west in Alaska at about 8000 B.C. than they do at present. This, in turn, shows that the climate at the land bridge was a little milder for a short period at this time than it is today, although it was never mild enough in the late Pleistocene for the forests of Siberia and Alaska to join one another on the land bridge.

Physically, Indians resemble Asians more closely than they do any other major physical type in the Old World; but resemblance is closer to the marginal Mongoloids of Indonesia, west central Asia, and Tibet than to the central ones of Mongolia, China, or Japan. The marginal Mongoloids represent an earlier and less specialized racial type than do the central Mongoloids. The American Indians sprang from the ancestors of this marginal Mongoloid population, which at one time covered most of Asia north and east of India. These marginal Mongoloids share more physical characteristics with Europeans than do the central Mongoloids; this fact is explained by the hypothesis that the separation of Europeans and Mongoloids had not progressed very far when the latter in northeast Asia began to migrate into Alaska via the land bridge across Bering Strait.

The physical anthropologist Imbelloni (1958) has classified the Indians of both continents into 11 subvarieties; Georg Neumann (1952) has divided the Indians of North America north of Mexico into 8 subvarieties. Neumann postulated that all but one of his sub-varieties represented a separate migration of a physical subtype already differentiated from the others when it entered the New World. At the opposite pole is the theory of Marshall Newman (1962), who postulates that most of the physical variations among subvarieties of American Indians are to be explained by adaptations of a single ancestral type to the various environments of the New World. The truth of the matter probably lies somewhere between these extreme views.

A recent quantitative test by Long (1966) of the reality of Georg Neumann’s subvarieties in the eastern United States found strong supporting evidence for some, no evidence at all for others, and postulated a new Iroquoian group not distinguished by Neumann. Although no published criticism of Marshall Newman’s environmental explanation has been as explicit, it seems likely that the populations in California, the Southwest, the Southeast, and central Mexico were not as stable and free of migration as he believes. Language classification alone suggests many migrations into these areas during the past 5,000 years and probably earlier (Map 37; Voegelin and Voegelin, 1966). Whole languages do not spread by relay diffusion, but require the migration of considerable numbers of speakers or of a powerful political and military elite, such as that of the Romans in their colonies. The plethora of unrelated language families and phyla found in the areas that Marshall Newman considered the most stable calls for more migration than his theory can tolerate. If we allow for the immigration of several distinct subtypes into the New World and also permit a moderate amount of adaptation to environment, we arrive at a more plausible explanation of the physical subvarieties of the American Indians. It has been a complicated development which cannot be explained by any single overriding process, as Newman and Neumann have agreed in more recent writings.

Until recently linguists have been unable to relate any of the languages and language groups of the Americas with those of Asia. Swadesh (1962) has finally assembled considerable evidence to indicate that the Eskimo-Aleutian languages of the North American Arctic are historically related to the Kamchadal-Chukchi-Koryak group in Siberia. The former group is called Eskaleutian, and the latter Chukotian. These two language families diverged from a common ancestral language about 2500 B.C., as estimated from glottochronology. This is the strongest case of its kind so far. Earlier attempts by Shafer (1952) and Swadesh (1952) to relate Athapaskan to the Sino-Tibetan phylum were less conclusive. As more and more comparative linguistic knowledge accumulates, we may anticipate more evidence on the historical relationship of other language groups in Asia and the Americas, but the time depths are likely to be great.

The earliest major culture type to emerge unchallenged in the archeological record is the Big-Game Hunting tradition. It flourished in the grasslands which covered not only the area now known as the Great Plains but also parts of the Southwest and the Eastern Woodland. It is characterized by lanceolate projectile points retouched on both sides. These fall into several major types: the fluted Clovis, Folsom, and related forms; the single-shouldered Sandia; and the groups called Plano. Although none of these so far discovered can be dated with certainty earlier than 10,000 B.C., they may be several millenia older in light of their possible derivation from older Old World forms and the excellent workmanship that suggests the need of an apprentice period of development. The demise of this Big-Game tradition began as early as 8000–7000 B.C. in some localities, but it survived in the Plains area to as late as 4000 B.C. Because the weapon points were much larger and heavier than the arrowheads of historic hunting peoples, it is universally assumed that they were attached to the ends of spears which could either have been thrust and retained in the hands or hurled like a javelin. Some might have been thrown with the spear-thrower, although there is no direct evidence of this implement in this early period.

From 10,000 to 8000 B.C. the principal animals hunted were the mammoth and mastodon, huge animals larger than any modern elephant. As these animals became scarcer, an extinct bison larger than any form alive today was the most important animal; this species gave way later to the smaller bison hunted by historic Plains Indians. Although these Big-Game Hunters certainly killed and ate smaller game too and even ate a little vegetable food from time to time, their principal occupation and diet centered in the big game. They have left no evidence of houses or of food storage pits, suggesting that they were constantly on the move. They must have had a close-knit social organization with a maximum of teamwork within their hunting parties in order to kill such large animals as the mammoth. The Big-Game Hunting culture gave rise to the Archaic traditions of the Plains and Eastern Woodlands.

From about 9000 to 5000 B.C. a cultural tradition called Old Cordilleran flourished in the northwestern part of North America from the Rocky Mountain divide to the Pacific Ocean and from Alaska south to Oregon. This is distinct from the Big-Game Hunting tradition, and, although the two overlap in time, they occupied mutually exclusive areas. The most diagnostic single trait of the Old Cordilleran Culture is a willow-leaf-shaped stone point chipped on both sides and retouched on all edges. These points are thought to have been used as points on spears or darts and possibly also as knives in a wooden or horn handle. They are associated with other chipped stone tools presumably used for chopping, cutting, scraping, and perforating—all suggesting a predominantly hunting subsistence. No seed-grinding stones occur in this tradition. The Old Cordilleran tradition was the forerunner of the later cultures that appeared in the Arctic, Northwest Coast, Plateau, and parts of California.

A third major early culture is called the Desert tradition, which was found in the Great Basin, the Southwest, and Northeast Mexico. The two most diagnostic traits are baskets and milling stones to grind wild seeds. The baskets were used to collect the seeds, to carry them home, to store them, and to boil them by means of hot stones placed in water in the basket. Projectile points were broader and shorter and generally smaller than those of the Big-Game Hunters or the Old Cordillerans. They were mounted on darts or spears hurled with the aid of the spear-thrower. Animals of various sizes were hunted, but the larger ones were most often wild sheep, antelope, and deer, although some bison bones have also been found in Desert sites. Beginning about 8500 B.C., this Desert tradition persisted with little change in the Great Basin area of Nevada, Utah, eastern Oregon, and southern Idaho until the middle of the nineteenth century. The Paiute and Shoshoni Indians are the descendants of the Desert people. Because there were never any desert areas in Alaska and Canada, the Desert tradition must have arisen after the early Indians had reached the desert area well within the boundaries of what is now the United States. The ancestors of the earliest Desert people were probably the Old Cordillerans.

THE FIRST FARMERS

The earliest archeological sites in the highlands of central and southern Mexico reveal a hunting culture generically akin to those of the Big-Game Hunters and Old Cordillerans. By about 7000 B.C. the peoples of these areas were subsisting principally on wild plants, and the first evidence of farming also appears at this time. Caves in the mountains of southern Tamaulipas have yielded evidence for the domestication of the bottle gourd (Lagenaria), the chili pepper (Capsicum annum or frutescens), and the summer squash or pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo) during the Infiernillo phase, from 7000 to 5000 B.C. In the same horizon the remains of a number of wild plants, such as maguey (Agave), the cactus pear (Opuntia), and the runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus), have been found at camp sites in these caves. All of these plants were eaten except the gourd, which was used as a container. These people made twilled and checkered mats, rod-foundation baskets, and net bags. The latter two were used to collect and store the plant products. They also made chipped stone projectile points, scrapers, and choppers used in hunting, butchering, and dressing hides, but remains of plants far outnumber those of animals, suggesting that these people possessed a Desert culture.

In Tamaulipas, stone mortars and manos, used for grinding plant seeds, first appear between 5000 and 3000 B.C. It is estimated that at this time wild plants provided about 80 per cent of the diet, domesticated plants about 7 per cent, and wild animals about 13 per cent. Maize (corn) (Zea mays) did not appear in this area until 2500 B.C., and squash (Cucurbita moschata) not until 2000 B.C., when domesticated plants furnished about 20 per cent of the diet. The house remains in the open sites of this period suggest a more sedentary way of life. Permanent farming villages with pottery were achieved in the next millenium, 2000–1000 B.C.

Four hundred miles to the south, in what is now the Mexican state of Puebla, a partly independent but parallel development of farming cultures was going on at the same time. Cave sites in the Tehuacán Valley at about 6,000 feet altitude have yielded the first evidence of farming in the El Riego period, 7000 to 5000 B.C. One plant—squash (probably Cucurbita moschata or mixta)—may have been domesticated. Remains of wild plants, such as grasses, maguey, and cactus pear, were found in abundance, but animal bones were rare, suggesting that subsistence was heavily biased toward plants. Man-made objects found in the caves include bell-shaped pestles and mortars, crude milling stones and manos, string nets, coiled baskets, and twined blankets of plant fibers.

In the next later horizon in Puebla, 5000 to 3400 B.C., more plants appear. The most significant one is corn, which dates from about 5000 B.C.; at that time it was a tiny primitive form with a pod around each kernel. Although no cobs or grains of corn have yet been recovered from any earlier archeological sites, pollen analysis of much earlier soils reveals that wild corn existed as early as 80,000 B.C. This completely demolishes speculation that corn may have originated in the Old World. Other plants were avocados, chili peppers, gourds, amaranth, tepary beans, zapotes, and squash (C. moschata). The last-named was a domesticate, as the others may have been at this date and are definitely known to have been in later periods. The fact that plants harvested in both fall and spring seasons were found side by side in the same time levels suggest occupation of the same cave all or most of the year.

The earliest cotton (Gossypium) appeared about 5800 B.C. in sites occupied by human beings, but it was probably wild. It became increasingly more common, and by the Abejas phase, 3400–2300 B.C., was widely used and probably domesticated. The pumpkin (C. pepo) first appears in Puebla at about 3000 B.C.

Recent excavations in Oaxaca by Flannery et al. (1967) yielded evidence of a third center of early domestication. Small black beans (Phaseolus sp.) and squash seeds (Cucurbita sp.) first appear at about 7000 B.C., and these were soon followed by other species of plants. By 1500 B.C., permanent villages, relying principally on farming with irrigation from shallow wells in the corn fields, were established.

This evidence suggests that agriculture may have had multiple origins in Mexico, because most of the earliest domesticated plants in the three areas were of different species. Once plants were domesticated, however, they were relayed from one area to another by intervening peoples, thus establishing diffusion as an important contributor to culture growth. Much of the growth of farming in Mexico took place during a hot and dry period called the Altithermal, which extended from about 5000 to 2500 B.C. It is possible that the failure of wild plant crops to thrive in this adverse climatic phase encouraged the Indians to plant, cultivate, and eventually irrigate the wild species that needed such care. Then, when the climate became moister and cooler, around 2000 B.C., agriculture experienced a leap forward and soon became the dominant means of subsistence.

In the Southwest, which includes Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua, and parts of Utah, Colorado, and Texas, the earliest evidence of farming is the corn or maize from Bat Cave, New Mexico, dated between 3500 and 2500 B.C. It was a small pod-popcorn, similar to that from Tamaulipas dated at 2500 B.C. It was most likely the result of relay diffusion from Mexico, probably up the Sierra Madre Occidental to the Mogollon Mountains of southern New Mexico and Arizona. Although the evidence for squashes or pumpkins and the gourd is more shaky, it is probable that these domesticates diffused along with maize. The red kidney bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) arrived in the same area by 1000 B.C. along with improved maize varieties. These domesticated plants would not have been accepted by the earlier Southwesterners, who were principally hunters; but the later Desert peoples of this area had been subsisting mostly on wild plants for thousands of years before knowledge of domesticated plants reached them from Mexico, and were sufficiently plant-conscious to learn from the outside how to cultivate the new species. By about the beginning of the Christian era the cultivation of these plants had spread more widely and had laid the groundwork for the emergence of three separate traditions: the Mogollon, the Anasazi, and the Hohokam. The Mogollon survived in northern Mexico until about A.D. 1700; the Anasazis became the historic Pueblos, and the Hohokam probably the historic Pimans. About A.D. 700 the Patayan culture began to farm on the Colorado River, and has survived in the historic period as the River Yumans.

In the Eastern Woodlands, farming was first introduced about 1000 B.C., either from the Southwest or from Tamaulipas, Mexico. It became associated with burial mounds and pottery, which had made their first appearances about 1500 B.C. and 2500 B.C. respectively (Jennings, 1968: 185). The first plants to be cultivated were squashes, pumpkins, and gourds, introduced from the south or west, along with a number of endemic species, including the sunflower, pigweed, marsh elder, and goosefoot. Maize came along a few centuries later, apparently from the Southwest. As early as 500 B.C., at least squash had been relayed as far north as the Saginaw Valley in Michigan.

Perhaps the most famous and widespread tradition of this period in what is now the eastern half of the United States was that of the Hopewell people, who flourished from 200 B.C. to A.D. 400. Although they cultivated maize and probably other plants, they subsisted principally on game and wild plants. Their mounds and village sites extend from Kansas to Ohio and from Wisconsin and Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico. The culmination of prehistoric Indian cultures in this area is that of the Mississippian peoples, A.D. 700–1500, who, by A.D. 700–900, were raising much larger quantities of maize, beans, squashes, pumpkins, sunflowers, and gourds. The climactic period for the Mississippians was from A.D. 1200 to 1500. De Soto came upon them in his famous explorations, 1539 to 1542, and found huge fields of maize and other plants, large mounds on which temples and palaces were erected, and witnessed the arrival of male and female chiefs on litters carried on the shoulders of commoners.

CIVILIZATIONS

It was noted above that the peoples of southern Mexico stepped up their farming activities at about 2000 B.C. and became more sedentary. The first great civilization to emerge in this area was that of the Olmecs in southern Veracruz and Tabasco from 1500 B.C. to perhaps A.D. 300. They built the first religious centers with man-made mounds of earth, on which temples of perishable materials were probably erected, and carved a number of stone monuments, the most impressive being huge stone heads up to eight feet high and weighing as much as thirty tons. At the other extreme, they made hollow, baby-faced pottery figurines, some of which were small enough to be concealed in one hand. Olmec sculpture was both in the round and in relief. It portrayed human beings and mythical half-animal and half-human gods, of which the anthropomorphized jaguar was the most recurrent. The characteristic mouth has full lips and turned-down corners. At La Venta, the largest Olmec ceremonial center, 800 to 400 B.C., the complex of mounds and monuments extended for two kilometers; the largest structure was a rectangular earth mound seventy by 120 meters at the base and thirty-two meters high at one end. The population that built such a religious and political center must have numbered thousands. They lived principally on cultivated plants, and were led by a chief or overlord with the power to compel them to work at least part time on these large public works. At Tres Zapotes, the latest Olmec center, a stela carved with a bar-and-dot numerical date, equivalent to our 31 B.C., is the oldest archeological evidence so far of writing and the Long Count calendar in the New World. These apparently were Olmec contributions to Meso-American culture, although these accomplishments reached their greatest development in the hands of the Mayas.

During the middle pre-classic period, 1000 to 300 B.C., Olmec civilization spread west and south into what are now the Mexican states of Puebla, Morelos, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, and even into Guatemala. It served as a base for the greater civilizations of the lowland Maya, those in the Mexican highlands at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, and at Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico, and many other smaller and lesser-known nations.

The first settlers in the Maya lowlands arrived after 1000 B.C. and, by about the time of Christ, had constructed a number of religious centers comparable to the somewhat earlier ones of the Olmecs. During their classic period, A.D. 300 to 900, the Mayas surpassed all other American civilizations. This was followed by an invasion of Toltecs from central Mexico, a subsequent decline, and a sort of leveling off of achievement by the time the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century.

The material achievements of the Mayas include a stone architecture, using both the post-and-beam principle and the corbeled arch, and the construction of pyramids up to seventy meters in height in the ceremonial centers of their towns. On top of the high pyramids were temples, while lower earthworks were crowned with lower and longer buildings thought to have housed royalty and nobility. All pyramids and buildings were at least faced with solid stone, on which elaborate art was carved. As many as twenty such ceremonial centers were occupied and fully in operation at the same time in the classic period.

The Maya were the most intellectually advanced of all Indian peoples. Their knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, and the resulting calendar exceeded that of the Greeks and Romans. But their writing never advanced beyond the ideographic glyph stage, and has never been completely deciphered and translated. Mayan art is generally ranked first among pre-Columbian art styles, but it is so different from Old World forms of artistic expression that comparison is difficult.

A second great civilization to develop from the Olmec base was that of the Zapotecs at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, 600 B.C. to A.D. 900. In the earliest phase, about 500 B.C., the Zapotecs produced large, flat-topped mounds, carved stone monuments, hieroglyphs, numerals, and a calendar. In phase III, A.D. 600 to 900, Monte Albán was one of the largest religious and political centers in all of Meso-America. It was built on a hilltop which had been leveled, creating a plaza in the center, surrounded on four sides by platforms, pyramids, temples, palaces, and a ball court. There were many tombs of royalty and nobility, one of which produced the finest and most valuable collection of gold, silver, and copper jewelry so far discovered at any single archeological site in the New World. Some of the tombs are painted with interior frescoes of men, gods, and hieroglyphs. A distinctive feature of the site is the large number of burial urns on which the figure of a seated god has been modeled in clay. The site was abandoned after A.D. 900 except as a burial place for Zapotecan and later Mixtecan royalty and nobility.

A third great culture to stem from the Olmec base is that at Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico northeast of Mexico City, 200 B.C. to A.D. 600. The first phase, 200 B.C. to A.D. 1, produced platform ceremonial mounds and closely packed residential structures covering three square miles. This civilization reached its climax in the second and third phases, A.D. 1 to 600, when seven square miles were occupied by two large pyramids, several temples and palaces, thousands of wall-to-wall rooms that apparently housed families, and a long concourse connecting the two pyramids and the principal temple, that of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god. The largest pyramid, called (later by the Aztecs) the Pyramid of the Sun, is 210 meters square at the base with a flat top sixty-four meters above the surrounding plain. The best examples of stone carving are the heads of the feathered serpent god on the temple dedicated to him. The city of Teotihuacán certainly dominated the Valley of Mexico and may have been the capital of a kingdom of wider extent. Its population is estimated at from 10,000 to 100,000 persons. There is a little evidence of hieroglyphic writing and a calendar, both of central Mexican types differing from those of the Maya. The power of this great city ended suddenly about A.D. 600, when it was sacked and burned by an enemy army.

After the fall of Teotihuacán, central Mexico was dominated by the Toltecs at their capital city at Tula in Hidalgo from about A.D. 950 to 1160. The Aztecs first appeared on the scene about the time that Tula was destroyed (A.D. 1160), and may even have had a hand in its destruction. Like the Toltecs before them, they moved in from the north and only gradually became acculturated to the way of life of the more civilized peoples already in the Valley of Mexico. It was not until A.D. 1428 that the Aztecs gained the ascendancy in the Valley of Mexico, but by A.D. 1502 they were operating an economic and military empire that stretched from coast to coast and extended southeast all the way to Guatemala. They, in turn, were defeated by the Spanish in 1521.

The majority of American scholars view the great Indian civilizations as largely historically independent of those in the Old World, although some contacts across the Pacific are not denied. Willey (1966: 19–24) assembles a representative sample of the arguments that have been offered for trans-Pacific diffusion. Wauchope (1962) debunks a large number of untenable speculations about the origin of the Indians and their cultures. The view of this volume is that we must give almost all the credit to the Indians, even though we concede a few diffusions from the Old World.

A comparison of rates of cultural evolution in the New World with those in the Old World shows that American Indian cultures developed faster from their first appearance until about 7000 B.C. The Levallois-Mousterian base in Siberia, from which the Indian traditions stemmed, was 10,000 to 20,000 years behind the demise of this base in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. By the time the Indians began to farm, about 7000 B.C., they were only about two thousand years behind the earliest farming in the Old World, about 9000 B.C. (Wright, 1968). From this time on, however, the Indians fell behind, and remained in a stage of incipient agriculture for about five thousand years. It was not until after 2000 B.C. that their farming provided more food than did their hunting and gathering. In the Old World, in contrast, permanent villages and towns with wall-to-wall adobe brick rooms were achieved by 6000 B.C., suggesting that farming was already the dominant means of subsistence. Cities with populations in the tens of thousands do not appear in the New World until about the beginning of the Christian era, while in the Old World there were a number of such cities by 3000 B.C.

In the field of technology, bronze was known by 3500 B.C. and iron by 1500 B.C. in the Old World, while the Indians did not invent bronze until A.D. 1150 (in Peru) and knew nothing of iron until Europeans introduced it. Similarly, hieroglyphic writing was established by 3000 B.C. and the alphabet by 1000 B.C. in the Old World, while the Indians were not using hieroglyphs until almost at the beginning of the Christian era and never did invent an alphabet.

On the other hand, the mathematics, astronomy, and calendar of the Mayas were more advanced than those of the Greeks, Romans, or any other Old World civilization earlier than, or contemporary with, that of the Mayas. Whatever evaluation one makes of the largely independent growths of civilization in the two hemispheres, the conquest of the Indians by Europeans throttled any further independent development on the part of the Indians and robbed the world of the further original achievements they surely would have contributed if they had not been subjugated.

REFERENCES

COLINVAUX, 1967; FLANNERY et al., 1967; GIDDINGS, 1960; GRIFFIN, 1967; IMBELLONI, 1958; JENNINGS, 1968; JENNINGS AND NORBECK, 1964; KRIEGER, 1964; MÜLLER-BECK, 1966; NEUMANN, 1952; NEWMAN, 1962; PATTERSON AND HOWELLS, 1967; SWADESH, 1962; VOEGELIN AND VOEGELIN, 1966; WAUCHOPE, 1962, 1966; WILLEY, 1966; WRIGHT, 1968.

2

Culture Areas

THE word culture, as used by anthropologists and other social scientists, refers to the entire way of life of a people, not just the visual arts, music, dancing, drama, and literature. The chapter headings in this volume, with the partial exception of that on the origin of the Indians, all refer to culture, each to a different aspect of it. A culture area is a geographical area occupied by a number of peoples whose cultures show a significant degree of similarity with each other and at the same time a significant degree of dissimilarity with the cultures of the peoples of other such areas. In theory the delimitation of culture areas must be based on a representative sample of all aspects of the cultures of all the peoples being thus classified. The determination of significant degrees of similarity and dissimilarity is ultimately a statistical problem, but working approximations may be arrived at by other means, partly intuitive, by scholars familiar with a region.

The culture area, in its current stage of development, is a convenient way of describing the ways of life of hundreds of peoples covering a whole continent or a larger part of the earth’s surface. Few readers are familiar with even a hundred names of Indian tribes, and the many names on Maps 38–44 at the end of this volume are much too numerous to be repeatedly mentioned in a book of this kind. Therefore the entire North American continent, from the Arctic to Panama, has been divided into seventeen culture areas, which are relatively easy to remember (Map 2). With this simple scheme it is possible to give the approximate geographical distribution of some detail of Indian life, such as the custom of scalping, in a few words. As is evident from the many maps to follow, most details of culture do not fit the areas exactly. Nevertheless, the areas provide a convenient framework for introducing some degree of order in the plethora of detail available about North American Indians.

In some respects the culture areas of the anthropologist are like the geographical regions of the geographer, and the dominance of geographical terms in the culture area labels is designed to help the reader remember where the areas are located. The boundaries of such areas on maps unavoidably give a false impression by overemphasizing the sharpness of the break. Most boundaries are actually the approximate lines where the two neighboring types of phenomena are present in equal amounts. In one direction the first features become progressively more dominant, while in the opposite direction the second features become more and more noticeable.

For example, if you drive from New York to San Francisco you encounter a number of geographical zones. You start on a coastal plain, originally covered with broad-leaved trees, and as you proceed west you gain in altitude until you have reached the modest ranges of the Appalachians in Pennsylvania. Here trees of the pine family appear along with the broadleaves. After leaving the mountains around Pittsburgh, you travel through the slightly rolling Ohio country which gradually becomes flatter and flatter in Indiana and Illinois. If the natural vegetation had been undisturbed by the White man, you would notice at about the Indiana-Illinois line a balance between equal amounts of the forest, through which you have traveled so far, and a treeless prairie. As you proceed west in Illinois the forest cover gradually gives way to the tall grass of the prairie which dominates the landscape until you arrive in Nebraska. There at about the 100th meridian the grass becomes shorter and the trees still fewer. The first really abrupt change comes when you strike the magnificent peaks of the Rockies, which rise 9,000 feet above the mile-high plains at Denver. You suddenly find yourself in a wonderland of snow-capped peaks, coniferous trees, and cascading mountain streams. But before you are out of Colorado, the land becomes drier and sagebrush makes its appearance, anticipating the deserts of the Great Basin. The Great Basin is so labeled because the streams there do not reach the ocean but flow inward to lakes, such as Great Salt Lake, or lose themselves in desert sands. After about a day’s drive on the desert, you suddenly reach the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada which rise abruptly from the desert floor. Again you see the snow-capped peaks and coniferous forest which give way in California to valley grasslands and low coastal mountains.

If you could have traveled the same route in 1600, before Indian cultures had been disturbed by the Whites, you would have noticed similar changes in their way of life. You might travel for hundreds of miles with no appreciable change in Indian housing, clothing, and customs, and then suddenly you would notice abrupt changes within a few miles. In most cases, however, the change would be gradual. The permanent houses of the eastern United States would become salted with portable tipis in the prairie area before they were abandoned entirely in favor of the tipi out on the open plains. Nevertheless, it is convenient to draw a boundary at the line where the frequency of portable tipis matches that of stationary houses. The boundaries of culture areas, therefore, are generally the lines at which the two ways of life are in balance and only occasionally represent an abrupt change. A brief description of the culture areas follows.

Arctic.—The home of the Eskimo in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, this area is divided into a western portion, which includes the Aleut on the Aleutian Islands as well as the Eskimo of Alaska, and a combination central and eastern division, which embraces all the Eskimo from the Mackenzie River delta east to Greenland. The Alaskan Eskimo and Aleuts have been much influenced by both the cultures of Siberia on the west and of the Northwest Coast on the southeast. The Central and Eastern Eskimo retain more of the early and distinctive features of their way of life because they lived in greater isolation, with less contact with Indians to the south. The Eskimo in every locality but one or two had access to the sea and lived most of the year on the shoreline where they could obtain sea mammals.

Sub-Arctic.—This area lies directly south of the Arctic, as the name implies, in a belt of coniferous forest broken here and there by treeless tundra. It includes interior Alaska and most of interior Canada and was the home of the snowshoe and toboggan Indians who spoke languages of the Athapaskan and Algonquian families. For convenience this huge area has been split into three subdivisions: the Yukon Sub-Arctic in Alaska and Yukon Territory, Canada, drained by the Yukon River system; the Mackenzie Sub-Arctic in Northwest Territories and the northern parts of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, drained by the Mackenzie River; and the Eastern Sub-Arctic in Ontario, Quebec, and adjacent parts of Manitoba, and coast of Labrador. Indians speaking languages of the Athapaskan family occupied the Yukon and Mackenzie regions, while people speaking Algonquian languages lived in the eastern part. The caribou and the moose were the principal sources of food over most of the Sub-Arctic, and the many streams, lakes, and swamps made travel in the birch bark canoe almost universal.

Northwest Coast.—This area includes the coastline from the panhandle in southeastern Alaska through British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, to the northwestern corner of California. These Indians subsisted principally on fish, lived in plank houses, and enjoyed a considerable surplus of the necessities of life. Those in Alaska and British Columbia are famous for their totem poles, which may be seen in many large museums. The culture of this area competes with that of the Arctic as the most distinctive or the most foreign of aboriginal North America. This is due partly to the geographical environment but also to its history, which shows much evidence of contact with Asia. The great emphasis on the acquisition of material goods, their display on public occasions, and the emergence of social classes and hereditary slavery set it off sharply from other nonfarming culture areas of the continent.

Plateau.—This region is named after the Columbian plateaus drained by the Columbia River system. It includes parts of British Columbia. It is a difficult area to characterize because its culture exhibits influences from both the Northwest Coast and the Plains, and the semidesert environment of the southern portion gives it something in common with the Great Basin as well. In the central part of the Plateau we find democratic peoples entirely free of the emphasis on rank of the Northwest Coast; they are also peaceful peoples largely lacking the war drive of the Plains Indians. Fish was the staple food over most of this region as one might suspect from the large numbers of salmon taken in its streams in modern times.

Plains.—This area stretches from central Alberta all the way south to the Mexican border. It is bounded on the west by the Rocky Mountains and on the east by the Missouri River. It includes parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The Plains Indians are the ones best known to most people in the United States today. They ate the meat of the buffalo, rode horses after A.D. 1600, lived in conical tipis, and did not farm. After acquiring the horse, they became the most nomadic of all Indians and fought the White man bravely to defend their lands until as late as the 1870’s. This was the home of the Blackfoot, Crow, Sioux (Dakota), Cheyenne, and Comanche Indians, among others.

Prairies.—This region matches pretty closely our modern Middle West. It includes all of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, and parts of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana. These Indians were much like those of the Plains except that they farmed and lived in permanent villages near their farms part of the year. Most of them also hunted the buffalo as well as other animals. Such familiar peoples as the Pawnee, Omaha, Iowa, Osage, and Illinois lived in this area.

East.—This area extends from a little beyond the St. Lawrence River in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and from the eastern boundary of the Prairies area to the Atlantic. It includes all of New York and the Middle Atlantic states, southern New England, and most of the Southern states as far west as Louisiana. The Iroquois of New York state belong in this region, as do the Five Civilized Tribes of the South. These peoples were more sedentary than those of the Prairies, subsisted to a greater extent on farm crops, and were organized into the largest political units north of Mexico. The European colonists settling in the United States contacted these Indians and learned from them to raise corn, beans, and pumpkins, as well as tobacco.

California.—This culture area includes about two-thirds of the modern state of that name. Although the area is small, it is famous for its great diversity of physical type, speech, and culture. In spite of the absence of farming, population was fairly dense but the political unit, called the tribelet, numbered only a few hundred. These Indians suffered a decline after the Spanish arrived in 1770, and the Gold Rush of 1849 put an end to their independence. The names of these peoples, such as Maidu, Miwok, Pomo, and Yokuts, are not generally familiar today.

Great Basin.—This area includes all of Nevada and Utah and parts of California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado. It is one of the driest regions in the United States and was inhabited by Shoshonis, Paiutes, and Utes. These peoples obtained a meager living from wild species of plants and animals available in their deserts and mountains. They lived in small family groups or bands until they got horses from the Spanish or from other Indians. Along with the horses came other influences from the Plains area, and those living east of Great Salt Lake adopted the buffalo-hide tipis, Plains dress, and Plains customs after that time.

Baja California.—This small area is left separate because it does not fit very well with any of the neighboring areas. Most of it is desert, but in the south rainfall is heavier. From the number of village names left by the Spanish Padres, population appears to have been greater in the more favorable southern environment. Although none of these Indians farmed, their diet was superior to that of the Great Basin peoples because of sea foods. Few localities are more than fifty miles from the sea, and settlements were more numerous on the shore than inland. They were missionized by the Spanish before the California Indians and died of malnutrition and European diseases in such numbers that few survive today. Little is known about them.

Southwest.—This area includes most of Arizona, New Mexico, all of the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa, and the western parts of Chihuahua and Durango. Because much of the land is desert, settlements tended to be in oasis-like spots near streams. All of these Indians farmed, although some much more than others. Many of them lived in villages or towns, hence the name Pueblo for the village dwellers of northern New Mexico and Arizona, such as Hopi and Zuñi. The Navaho and Apache also belong in this area, as do such lesser-known tribes as the Mohave and Yuma. Of the Mexican tribes, the Yaqui are known to many people in the United States today, and the Tarahumara may be familiar to those who have toured Mexico. On the whole the Indians in New Mexico and Arizona have been less disturbed by our own westward expansion than those in any other part of the United States, and they still retain many of their Indian attitudes and customs which make them interesting to tourists. The Navaho are now the largest tribe in the United States, with a population of about 100,000 in 1969.

Northeast Mexico.—This desert region was formerly inhabited by the wild Chichimecs, who harassed the Spanish during the entire colonial period. They lived exclusively on wild plants and animals and were experts with the bow and arrow. They were extremely warlike and cost the Spanish many times as much in blood, sweat, tears, and money as did the successful campaign of Cortés against Montezuma and the Aztecs. On many occasions the Chichimecs fought to the last man to defend themselves against the Spaniards and, when captured, often escaped or committed suicide rather than acquiesce in a life of farming and peace. Today the few survivors of the Chichimecs live on little farms of their own or work as laborers on the farms and ranches of the Mexicans, but the oldest ones, who still speak no Spanish, remember the wild tales