Dictionary of Daily Life of Indians of the Americas

INTRODUCTION

MEN FROM ASIA may have first penetrated North America between forty thousand and twenty thousand years ago, crossing the land bridge exposed by the lowered sea levels of the last glaciation. These first Americans began a tradition of independent biological and cultural evolution, the New World cultures, which along with those of the Old World have become the basis for the study of mankind.

The evolution of the New World cultures would end in 1492 with surety, with the intrusion of a cannon’s blast upon the stillness of an October morning. But perhaps end is too strong a word: the cultural and physical evolution of 10 million or more American Indians continues today, now as an integral, rather than separate component in total human evolution.

American Indian cultures have been most seriously studied by the social science discipline, anthropology. Archaeologists, anthropologists who study past cultures, have provided literally tens of thousands of reports which form the basis for reconstructing cultures from the earliest times to the present. Ethnographers and culture historians are anthropologists who study living peoples working with written records, memories of times past, and, extensively, with ongoing cultural groups. Their research has also produced tens of thousands of reports on cultures from the Arctic to the tip of South America. Anthropological linguists, specializing in the structure and history of unwritten languages, have contributed analyses and classificatory data for representatives of all major New World language groups. This kind of data is another important source for inferences on temporal and spatial relationships.

Social science nowhere possesses as large a body of descriptive and analytical information on a world area of equivalent geographic size. On the one hand, anthropological research has provided an embarrassment of riches data on the growth, development, and present condition of American Indian populations are so vast as to deny to any one person more than a fragmentary knowledge of the total. On the other hand, sadly, these vast data were collected at a time when anthropology, as a developing science, was in the descriptive-natural science phase of its growth as most would agree it still is. Consequently, when the oft-studied Indians, meeting torment and destruction stemming from the kinds of culture contact situations they faced, sought assistance from their constant observers, few anthropologists had much to offer. Lacking general theories which permit decision-making on a scientific basis, most anthropologists responded as individuals and citizens. Consequently, only rarely in Latin America (as at Vicos, Peru, and occasionally in Brazil), and rarely in the United States, have anthropologists been in policy-making positions with respect to governmental actions taken toward the indigenous populations. For this reason, and not for lack of compassion nor for concern, most anthropologists have been ineffective in leading the search for a satisfactory life style for the contemporary descendants of America’s earliest inhabitants.

AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE

General Observations

Culture is the cumulative product of human adaptation. Seen from this perspective, two significant facts, as pointed out by Betty Meggers, serve to introduce American Indian culture:—(1) cultural developments in similar habitats, whether in North or South America, show strong similarities, and (2) cultural development was far more rapid in some environments in North, Central, or South America than in others. The ultimate common origin for all populations, i.e. Asia, and the relative isolation of the Americas, are other considerations affecting the form of American Indian culture.

Meggers proposes six occupiable habitats in the Americas-forests, deserts, plains, the Pacific Coast, marginal zones, and the Arctic. With the exception of the Arctic, strikingly similar cultural groups developed in both North and South America where habitats were similar. For example, in forests, such as the tropical rain forest of the Amazon Basin or the Eastern Woodlands of North America, cultures tended first to develop a maximal efficiency in the use of wild resources, then, later, to adopt cultigens (cultivated plants whose wild ancestors are unknown) as a supplement. Population density in forests remains relatively low, and regular shifting of settlements is characteristic. Environmental limitations in forest areas, given the level of technology available, deterred the development of anything more than simple village-tribal organization.

Culture developed most rapidly in two regions of the central zone of the hemisphere where the environment was composed of two or more complementary habitats-desert and forest, coast and mountains, rivers and plains. The northern center in the Central Mexican highlands of Mesoamerica, and the southern center in the Central Andean and coastal region of South America are collectively called Nuclear America. It was here that the cultivation of plants first occurred and where further supportive agricultural technology, such as irrigation, seed selection, and mass labor, contributed to the growth firstly of towns and cities, and later of states and empires. This nuclear center of the hemisphere began its rise to eminent position in the roster of world civilizations more than ten thousand years ago. Whether man in the New World learned to grow plants because of the simple co-existence in time and space of potential cultigens and suitable growing conditions, or because expanding populations required additional foods, horticulture, by about 2000 B.C., had become the most important basis of subsistence for residents of the growing villages and ceremonial centers.

More than fifty different plants were cultivated, most important of which were maize (or American corn), varieties of beans, squash, potatoes, manioc, sweet potatoes, gourds, tobacco, cottons, amaranths, and others. Native Americans had domesticated all the cultigens known to have been available to them (except the North American grape). The same is true of animals—dogs, turkeys, guinea pigs, llamas, and possibly parrots were domesticated; no other New World animals have been successfully domesticated since.

Cultural energy constantly pulsed from Nuclear America, penetrating, even if in a weakened form, all suitable habitats. Those lacking horticulture in A.D. 1500 were the inhabitants of the colder forests and woodlands (including most of what is now Canada); the grassy plains (including the pampas of South America and the high plains east of the Rocky Mountains); and portions of the Pacific coast. Accompanying the diffusion of horticulture were various artifacts, such as types of pottery manufacture and styles, (although the making of pottery itself probably predates horticulture). Technology including simple metallurgy was also diffused, as also was architecture, which included temple mounds and other large ceremonial structures. Social ideas, which were associated with complex theologies, were also spread. Many of these cultural features can be found as far apart as northeastern Argentina, the Caribbean Islands, and, in what is now the United States, in Ohio, New York, and Wisconsin.

Thus, over a vast area of the hemisphere, the advanced level of complexity achieved in Nuclear America influenced the spread and development in subsistence base, technology, and associated social and religious aspects of culture. In a manner strikingly similar to the growth of civilization in the Near East and in Southeast Asia, the Western Hemisphere was well within the upper ranks of civilization developed on this planet five hundred years ago.

In marginal areas, where such influences were hardly felt, cultural forms in both North and South America followed a pattern thousands of years old, a form of adaptation fitting difficult environments and utilizing limited technology. Small social groups foraged the land of southern South America, northern Canada, the Arctic, the east Brazil Highlands, and most of western North America. The marginal pattern of life was a simple yearly recapitulation of varyingly successful harvesting and processing of wild plants and animals. Some marginals possessed pottery, others traded for or even cultivated a few agricultural products, and some increased their exploitative techniques with the development of efficient tool kits.

The success of the Inuit (Eskimo), for example, in the least hospitable habitat on earth, the Arctic, is a result of the development of social and cultural elements specifically adaptive to the subsistence in their icy habitat. An examination of Inuit housing, clothing, means of land and water transportation, and complex weaponry reveals details that are nothing short of ingenious devices adaptive to what is otherwise an unoccupiable zone.

The success of the Indians of the Northwest coast of North America is, in contrast, a result of the enriched faunal assemblage on both land and in the sea. The anadromous salmon (i.e. salmon ascending rivers from the sea at certain seasons in order to spawn), supplemented by schools of fish, shellfish, and sea and land mammals, were harvested by the Indians of this area. This bountiful subsistence base provided a life chance unequalled in the world for societies lacking domestic plants or animals, and some social and artistic forms developed analogous to those of complex horticultural societies.

The independence of the development of New World cultures is supported by considerable biological and archaeological data. The physical similarity—for example blood types, hair, and body build—of Amerinds to each other does not suggest recent immigration from any other quarter, excepting certain complexities in North West Canada. The archaeological record in the main reflects isolation, with few exceptions. The remarkable similarity in pottery styles in both the islands of Japan and along the coast of Ecuador approximately five thousand years ago, has led many experts to conclude that TransPacific voyages took place. Others have seen later oceanic trips from Southeast Asia to Central America, Phoenician contact with Brazil, African contact with Central America and the Antilles, and Vikings and Irish monks sailing across the North Atlantic in bullboats (shallow-draft boats made of bull skins).

The essential question is, how important an impact did these voyagers have? The domestication of plants and the beginning of village life had taken place before the earliest oceanic contacts have been postulated. Pottery may or may not have been present at the time in South America. And thus, the question remains open.

The preponderance of professional opinion, based on the evidence gathered by the mid-1970s, is that New World cultural development is due to parallel evolution, perhaps stimulated to some small degree by trans-oceanic contacts prior to Columbus.

THE TRADITIONAL CULTURE OF THE NEW WORLD INHABITANTS

Languages

All American Indian cultures possess fully developed, complex languages belonging to several major unrelated language stocks. There is not, nor was there ever, a single American Indian language. Rumors or reports of Indian groups that communicated by grunts or only hand signals are nonsense. Nor does there appear to exist any correlation between cultural complexity and the complexity of language structure. One would expect the dialect of Quechua spoken by the ruling class of Inca in Cuzco to possess a larger range of lexical (vocabulary) units than that of the culturally simpler Chiricahua Apaches but, given the necessity, Chiricahua nonetheless should prove adequate to express any thought, including those originating with culturally more complex people.

The number of languages in the New World depends upon the recognition of what constitutes separate languages. In many New World regions, contiguous social groups spoke totally unrelated languages or progressively divergent dialects of closely related languages. Thus, two hundred languages have been claimed for aboriginal California alone. Generally, however, anthropologists allow about two hundred languages in all of North America; approximately three hundred fifty in Central America; and nearly fifteen hundred in South America. These numbers underscore the degree of diversity characteristic of languages spoken by New World natives.

In terms of sound, Indian languages are not exceptional. Most of the consonant phonemes (basic units of speech in a given language) that are relied upon occur in Indo-European and other stocks as well. Grammatically, many Indian languages diverge sharply from common Indo-European patterns, but are well within world-wide language forms. In short, American Indian languages are diverse and complex and, if they contain few unique features, it will take hundreds of years to come to know their structure fully.

Research on American Indian language also stimulated a hypothesis regarding a possible relationship between language and culture. Language provides a frame through which to view reality and, because languages provide so many different kinds of frames, many different realities should be perceived by speakers of different languages. Thus cultures should co-vary with language as they adapt to differing perceptions of reality. This hypothesis has never been rejected, but research results to date have provided little substantial evidence to the point.

Genetic classification of languages is well developed and has proven a useful historical tool in the New World. The first systematizers of languages for North and South America proposed fifty and sixty stocks respectively. The numbers in each of these regions have been progressively reduced to seven and eight stocks in successive studies. Combined, these two classificatory schemes propose twelve stocks for the hemisphere as a whole, although many linguists believe these taxonomic reductions (i.e. reductions in the classificatory system) are based on inadequate data. Notwithstanding this criticism, Morris Swadesh suggested that all aboriginal New World languages could be included in six families, each representative of a separate wave of newcomers. Furthermore Swadesh, as well as some other linguists, has proposed tentative genetic relationships between some New World languages and such Old World stocks as Sino-Tibetan, Finno-Ugric, Malayo-Polynesian, and even Indo-Eruopean.

Linguistic research has led to the development of a tool for measuring the time since the separation of genetically related languages, based on the premise that the rate of lexical change occurs at regular and therefore measurable rates in related languages. Called glottochronology, this technique permits inferences on the lengths of time separating the diverging members of single language stocks. Despite the flaws in the technique, the dates estimated often correspond with those derived by archaeological means.

Social Organization and Social Institutions

The study of the social organization and social institutions of American Indians is a study of the interplay between ancient American general characteristics, regional variations brought about by varying habitats, history, accident, or other causes, and the influence of diffused items and complexes such as those from Nuclear America.

Some social-cultural characteristics of the most ancient Americans can be proposed on the basis of theoretical considerations, the known history of culture, as well as the nearly universal distribution of such traits among widely dispersed Marginal people at the time of European contact, or first study. Whether we speak of the Ona or Yahgan of southern South America, or the Pai Pai or Cree of North America, most or all of these ancient characteristics-characteristics first carried across Beringia (the land bridge between Asia and America which formerly crossed what is now the Bering Sea) thousands of years ago may still be found.

The first migrants coming to the New World would have been in the form of small social groups numbering anywhere between twenty-five and two hundred persons. Their adaptation to a subsistence on wild plants and game is the economic context for their non-sedentary way of life and political independence. Such groups as these have come to be called bands, and were internally organized around statuses determined largely by age, sex, and kinship factors. The family, nuclear or extended, was most likely the only formal kinship unit in bands: if extended, most commonly the form would have been patrilaterally (i.e. on the father’s side). Leadership was probably vested in the most trusted individual, often an elder male. One of his main functions would be to serve as mediator between feuding members of his band or between his and neighboring bands. Socially, anthropologists would expect them to have practiced some form of familial exogamy (marriage outside the group), probably to have been polygynous (practiced forms of marriage in which a man had two or more wives at the same time), and perhaps to have preferred patri-local residence (centered around the residence of the husband’s family). A low population density is estimated. Corporate descent groups, mans’ societies, and other social complexities often associated with more recent Indians were probably not developed.

Bands continued to be found throughout the New World in the marginal zones and were scattered as enclaves among cultivators in the desert and forest regions. With the notable exception of the Inuit, they were possessors of simple technology, usually ancient in origin. In South America, some bands possessed loom weaving, pottery, rudiments of clothing, and other cultural items probably borrowed from their more complex neighbors. Nadene speakers (constituting a major language grouping, including Athapascan, Haida, and Tlingit) in North America, both Northern and Southern, possessed many characteristics borrowed from the Inuit on the one hand, and the Pueblo on the other. Thus, band people in contact with more complex cultures gradually acquired, environment permitting, more efficient subsistence means and became more tribe-like. This was one impact of the pervasive influences emanating from Nuclear America, and, later, must also have been a universal result of European penetration into the marginal areas of the New World.

Where collected food was exceptionally abundant, or where horticulture was practiced, social groups became larger, sedentism increased, and political alliances between societies became possible. Although statuses also derived largely from age, sex, and kinship factors, some positions, such as chief, sachem, or ritual leader came to be determined by society-wide approval. Such groups as these are given the formal designation as tribes, and may cover wide areas and number thousands of members in dozens of residential locations.

Tribes occurred in zones contiguous to or in contact with Nuclear America, principally the forests and deserts, and in favored areas in the plains of North America, particularly in the well-watered valleys of the western tributaries of the Mississippi River.

Tribes often possessed unilineal corporate groups, most commonly patrilineal but also matrilineal, and many also practiced unilocal post-marital residence. Because of the increased population size, authoritarian leadership sometimes developed in New World tribes but, more often, tribes had leaders who functioned only in specific contexts, such as raiding or war, religious occasions, or as mediators. Occasionally, tribes possessed decision-making councils composed of respected individuals, most often male. Many tribes developed non-kinship sodalities, such as men’s drinking societies, war clubs, shamans’ organizations, ceremonial cults, and others. Standard tribal relations with other groups were ones characterized by trade and inter-marriage, but also suspicion and feud. Many tribes considered themselves at war with all with whom they did not have a formal peace. Because many tribes consisted of but one or two cooperating villages among dozens or hundreds of linguistically similar settlement groups, conflict and war on a small scale was a standard characteristic.

Unusual tribal forms developed in North America among Northwest Coast collectors, possibly around the Great Lakes where wild rice provided substantial storable food, and in portions of California, where the acorn served a similar purpose.

When groups of tribes amalgamate under central leadership, and adhere to one or more distributive residential centers with a large number of sociocentric statuses available either through achievement or ascription, tribes have formed into chiefdoms which, upon further development of governmental forms and expansion of boundaries, may become states, of which one type is the empire.

Chiefdoms tended to develop in habitats where a combination of natural resources and food production provided a large and dependable economic subsistence for good-sized populations. The only portion of North America north of Mexico to witness such developments were portions of the lower Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast to the east of the delta. Here developed absolutist leadership, social classes if not castes, temple and burial mounds, extensive development of sumptuary goods (such as food, clothing, and furniture) and privileges, and multi-village political units. Other areas where similar cultures developed include many of the Caribbean Islands, Mesoamerica, and some northern and western coastal and highland regions of South America.

States developed only in Nuclear America, but here reached high levels of political, social and economic development. The ultimate development in the Andes was the empire. The factors leading to statehood are obscured by the passage of time, and there are no historic examples of the process to use as analogies. The archaeological evidence relating to the development of the state focuses on the material remains, such as monumental public architecture, or remains of highly developed trading systems. This and other kinds of evidence have led most authorities to infer that the roots of state development were set some three thousand years ago by the Olmec in Mesoamerica and the Chavín in the Andean Highlands. Their religious and artistic motifs spread widely, each ultimately coming to have influence upon the general area of the other.

In the early fifteenth century, the Inca, the Maya, and the Aztec were the ultimate holders of Nuclear America’s flowering. Thousands of years of growth of skill and knowledge had produced social organization, technology, science, and ideology rarely bested to that time anywhere on earth.

Cultural Characteristics

Two broad generalizations can be made about the material, technological, and many other aspects of traditional American Indian culture. First, a survey covering the thousands of miles between the tip of South America and the frozen landscape of North America and comparing the characteristics of marginal peoples with those of Nuclear America reveal a very broad range of diversity across many levels of complexity. Secondly, although some features are basically similar to those found universally, the American Indian culture often contains categories and elements that give Amerind culture a distinctive and recognizable flavor.

1. Habitations and Construction

Habitations ranged from the brush, bark, and dirt, lean-tos and wigwams of many band peoples, through tents and tipis, semi-subterranean pit houses, multiple family structures of wood or stone, huge stone or adobe apartment houses, and ultimately the massive mortared stone or cut stone structures of walled cities and ceremonial centers of Nuclear America. This area and nearby areas saw the emergence of city planning, vast irrigation projects, the building of bridges, and the establishment of guard and watch posts along paved highways hundreds of miles long. Europeans first seeing the centers of these developments believed New World cities to be superior to any of the Old World.

2. Technology

The earliest examples of woven basketry are found in the New World. Woven baskets appear nearly everywhere in the hemisphere, but especially fine examples are typical of western North America, both in the desert and in coastal regions. Both ceramics and woven textiles were widely distributed among all but people living in the marginal cultures; the creation and execution of unique forms and artistic motifs reached peaks of development in the Andes rarely matched elsewhere in the world. In Nuclear America, work in the softer metals, particularly gold, was remarkably skilled: silver, copper, platinum, and bronze were cast, soldered, hammered, and otherwise manipulated.

3. Weapons

Despite its relatively late appearance in the Americas, nearly all of the New World natives knew of and used the bow and arrow. (The inhabitants of many Caribbean Islands were an exception.) Bows ranged in type from the simple self-bow, the only type found in South America, to the complex, recurved, sinew-backed bow of northern North America. The shape and size of bows and arrows varied greatly, and some groups produced a dozen or more types of arrow, depending upon their intended use. Spears and throwing sticks were widely distributed, as was the use of clubs of varying shapes. The bola (two or more stone balls attached to the ends of a cord and used for throwing at an animal to entangle it) was distributed from the Inuit to southern South America, although most groups between these points lacked it at the time the Europeans came. The blowgun was found in and around Nuclear America especially in the Amazon Basin, but also in southeastern North America. Other armaments of lesser importance were the poisoned darts and lances, slings, spear-throwers, javelins, harpoons, pellet-bows, and bronze and copper axes. Shields were widespread in use, and forms of armor were known to a few.

4. Clothing

Doubtless, the members of the majority of Amerind cultures went nude or nearly nude most of the time. When clothing was used, most commonly it took the form of genital coverings and some form of foot gear. Hides and skins, as well as woven fabrics, including the magnificent feathered cloths of Nuclear America, were made into draped tunics and capes rather than fitted garments. The most developed clothing were produced by the Inuit, closely followed by some contiguous Indian groups with their finely tailored hides and furs, waterproof seams and welts. Inuit goods are still imitated by those who must move through Arctic winters.

5. Narcotics and Stimulants

Tobacco, both wild and cultivated, was the most widespread stimulant, being either smoked, chewed with lime, snuffed into the nose, eaten, drunk, or licked wherever it was available. Corn beer and fruit wines were made by many cultivators, and were especially important in Nuclear America. Beers or wines were also made from the fruit of the mesquite tree, and from manioc, persimmons, plantains and bananas, honey, palm fruit and juice, sweet potatoes, algaroba, pineapples, and probably several dozen more vegetable sources. The juice of the agave and dasylirion (yucca) plants were made into pulque in northern Nuclear America. Because it is impossible for these beverages to reach high alcoholic potency, real drunkenness may have been rare. In America north of Mexico, the only potent halucinogenic used was datura (jimson weed), and possibly the fruit of Sophora secundiflora, commonly called the mescal bean, although it is unrelated to the agave. Further to the south, however, peyote (Lophophora williamsii) was commonly used for religious purposes, as were various mushrooms.

In South America, mate (Ilex paraguayensis), with caffeine as the active agent, was a common drink, as was guarana, made from the vine Paullinia. Erythroxylon coca was commonly chewed in the Andes and in Central America. Plants of the genus Banisteriopsis, and datura were used in the Upper Amazon and Pacific Coast respectively, and perhaps a dozen or more hallucinogenic plants were less widely used. Use of hallucinogenics, especially in South America, was more common with horticulturalists than with people of the marginal cultures.

6. Myths and Legends

The ideological fabric of American Indian culture is, as are other cultures, made up of myths and legends, some being recognized as true. while others are considered clearly fictional or supernatural. Universal themes in which the sun, moon, and stars combine with animals in creation myths, or legends having to do with ancestral people, are cast with American characters. Raven, coyote, spider, sloth, snake, jaguar, vulture, tapir, and other locally significant forms played trickster roles. Many legends, such as those of the Bungling Host, the Eye Juggler, the Flood, occur over wide areas. Certain themes, among which are those of cannibal monsters, forest demons, four brothers, twins, incest, salt, endo-cannibalism (cannibalism of members of one’s own family or tribe), and transition from the mythical to real time, are common to both continents. Indian myths and legends usually cast people in inferior or weaker roles than those of the animals or supernaturals. Man as a privileged guest or as an equal in nature, rather than as a host or dominator, tended to encourage respect and awe toward natural phenomena.

The Past POST-COLUMBIAN TRENDS

The most immediate result of European contact throughout the hemisphere, wherever it occurred, was a decline in numbers of the native population. American Indians had little or no resistance to many of urban Europe’s epidemic diseases-measles, mumps, cholera, plague, small pox, and others. Whole populations were destroyed by rapidly-spreading diseases, while the original carriers scarcely contemplated this Act of God. Secondary causes of population decline were: war, both between Europeans and Indians and among Indians alone; cultural disintegration and consequent malnutrition and starvation; spreading venereal diseases and resultant sterility; and alcohol-related violence and ill health. Paradoxically, Indians who submitted and were reduced to living either in missions or on settlements became even more vulnerable to most of these causes of mortality.

Indians located along coasts and navigable waterways or near resources desired by the Europeans bore the first brunt of invasion and were quickly eliminated or absorbed. Wherever marginal, or low-level horticultural people came into direct contact with Europeans, they either submitted or were destroyed. For those who found some tenuous ground for co-operation with the invaders, a brief efflorescence became a possibility. For example, the constituent tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found temporary power by acting together cooperatively as middlemen in the flow of furs and guns between Europeans and other tribes. The late eighteenth century witnessed the collapse of this economic role and its power, and consequently the confederation weakened. Few Indian groups found collaboration with Europeans to their long-term advantage; in the end, disease, alcohol, or political intrigue struck down even the so-called friendlies.

The story was different among the people of the Nuclear area. Here, although millions and millions died by pox or sword, millions survived. Royalty and nobility, those who had provided political, scientific, and theological leadership to the peasants of the Inca, Maya, Aztec and other chiefdoms and states, were systematically eliminated by the Spaniards. They were replaced by new leaders, conquistadors, common soldiers, missionaries, and administrators appointed by the Spanish kings to establish Christianity and to introduce the material and social rudiments of Spanish culture. Individuals, groups, and even whole populations were uprooted and transported elsewhere in the colonies. Such people often lost their culture, becoming extensively acculturated. On the other hand, thousands of communities were relatively undisturbed as long as they paid tax or tribute, gave up overt native religion, and were so located as to escape either labor draft or land expropriation. Such communities maintained many traditional ways, but were now enriched by new iron tools, European crops such as wheat, and domestic animals such as the donkey and horse. Many such folk communities continue in existence at the present time.

Some of the most tragic pages of contact history were the least typical and often involved relatively small numbers of peoples. The inhabitants of the plains in both North and South America were the protagonists in one such tragedy. In both areas acquisition of the horse and gun led to an immediately increased effectiveness in hunting, a decrease in sedentism, and greater hostility between bands than had previously existed among the plains inhabitants. Inevitably, conflict developed between the plains people and the expanding, land-hungry Europeans. The same outcome occurred in both areas—the Indians were suppressed by the military.

In the United States, in Canada and in Brazil, and to a lesser degree, in many other American nations, lands were set aside for Indians either as formal legal reservations or, as sometimes is the case in Mexico, on the traditional sufferance of local officialdom. Most Indians’ lands were but a portion of their aboriginal needs, and often consisted of the least desirable land within their aboriginal range. Many groups were moved to reservations totally outside their native habitat and onto land unsuitable for aboriginal subsistence methods (or for that matter least desired by early farmers). Such people had little choice other than to change their lifestyle.

Some Indian societies managed to avoid either intense contact with Europeans or to compartmentalize the impact of such contacts. In the Amazon forest, many horticulturists have maintained their cultures nearly intact into the mid-twentieth century. Others, in the Canadian north woods, in the Mexican Sierra Madre, in south Chile, have survived culturally to a lesser degree by virtue of living in regions unsought by any number of non-Indians.

A few aboriginal band and tribal cultures have undergone intense acculturation (i.e. have engaged in cultural borrowing), yet have maintained an ongoing core of their ancient ways. Tarahumara, Navajo, some Araucanians, and some tribal Amazonians exemplify this type of post-contact change.

THE PRESENT

North America

All Inuit and Indians have undergone extensive acculturation, but perhaps only one-third to one-half of the known groups have totally disappeared since contact. Extensive intermarriage between Indians, whites, and blacks, has brought about greater physical variability among Indians than existed in pre-Columbian times. Also, since the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of Indians has increased so that one million or so Indians north of Mexico are at least as numerous as were their ancestors in A.D. 1500.

General and governmental attitudes toward Indians in the United States and Canada have been predominantly integrationist. although a growing tolerance of cultural pluralism is noticeable. All Indians are citizens with the full legal rights of citizens. Substantial prejudice, however, exists against Indians, especially in those areas where they are numerous. About half of the Indians in the United States live on or have rights to reservation land which is held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the United States Department of the Interior. The federal Department of Indian Affairs plays the same role in Canada. Most Indians resent governmental interference in their affairs, but few seek a total elimination of the Indian bureaus.

One hundred or so mutually unintelligible languages and dialects are still spoken, although nearly all Indians speak English or French as well. There is a growing tend toward migration from rural areas to the cities where most Indians join the urban poor. Some analysts have noted that the Indians have few problems not shared by the poor throughout many countries.

The degree of acculturation varies from group to group and from individual to individual. All Indians participate to some degree in the dominant economy, and most aspire to some or all of the luxuries and symbols of wealth their nations can provide. Many Indian societies possess factions that are conservative (usually the poorer and least powerful) and progressive (usually the best educated and most acculturated). Recently, a pan-Indian movement has developed, based principally among urban Indians. It offers hope that Indians, collectively, may come to exert political and economic influence as other ethnic and special interest groups have come to do before them. The Navajo, one hundred forty thousand in number, are by far the largest and, socio-culturally, the most successful of any of the relatively independent Indian societies in the New World.

Latin America

Any discussion of the situation of Indians in Latin America must deal with the question, who is an Indian? (This is also true to a lesser degree in North America.) Indian throughout Latin America is often used as a synonym for poor or lower class. If the term Indian is confined to those still living under tribal conditions, then there are fewer than one million; if all who speak Indian languages are counted, then the number is probably more than 10 million with the greatest concentration in the Andean countries. Without doubt there are millions more today speaking Indian languages than there were at the time of first contact with the Europeans.

In Latin America, only tribal Indians are accorded any differential status by their states of residence, this being often very negative in nature. In some parts of Amazonia, Indians are still killed on sight. In Bolivia, for example, two-thirds of the total population of the nation is Indian and, in many rural areas, only Indians live. Thus, most rural development programs are de facto Indian programs.

In most nations throughout the hemisphere there is a growing concern with the perpetuation of Indian culture, fostered by Indians and non-Indians alike. This movement is most often led by educated Indians, but what is actually espoused is a kind of indigenismo (borrowing) rather than traditional American culture itself. Music, dances, painting and sculpture, handicrafts (especially jewelry), and other visible attributes of the native past are increasingly supported and encouraged. But maintenance of Indian religion, socio-political organization, and similar activities are not permitted. As a consumer market for native wares develops, marketing forces come into play. Artifacts and jewelry, once scarcely sold to a few collectors or tourists, have become important products entering the competitive marketplace of the world.

It is unlikely that few if any Indians formerly of band or tribal structure can survive this century with any substantial portion of their cultures intact. The simple need of states to develop monolingual populations results in the disappearance of native languages, which is perhaps the single most important retention if a culture is to survive. When this is combined with the expansion of road systems and schools, the acculturation of formerly isolated populations is virtually assured. One notable exception to this generality may prove to be the Navajo who, before the twentieth century is out, may become a state within the United States. In the Andean region, and elsewhere in Latin America, where millions of monolingual Indians are still to be found, growing world-wide humanism may bring about increased tolerance of ethnic pluralism as these nation states develop further. It is within reason to expect Bolivia, Ecuador, or Peru to continue to exhibit and perhaps to increase the role of the indigenous past in the cultural present.

SIGNIFICANCE OF AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURES

Cultures developed by the native inhabitants of the Americas form a vital component in total cultures; only through examination of New and Old World forms may students of cultural growth and development come to view the whole range of human genius. Because American Indians were possessed of the same intellectual endowments as other human populations, their achievements become another important segment in the study of culture itself. Through comparisons of Old and New World patterns perhaps it will become possible to specify with some exactitude the course of cultural evolution on this planet.

The most visible impact of New World cultures upon other areas of the globe was brought about by the diffusion of food plants, especially the potato and maize, followed closely by sweet potato, manioc, peanut (groundnut), and others. One or another of these crops became the bases for whole economies—for example the potato in Ireland. Tobacco, rubber, coca, the hammock, sisal fiber, the parka, and the canoe have had greater or lesser acceptance throughout the world. Several dozen more plants (tomato, chile pepper, squash, beans, avocado, pineapple, medicinals, etc.) and hundreds of lesser products (coiled baskets, syringes, kayaks, moccasins, tumplines, quill and bead decorative work, etc.) have enriched the cultures of the world. In the main, however, the flow of diffusion was in the other direction, from Europe and Asia to the Americas, and, from an overall view, the technology of Europe was influenced but not radically changed as a result of New World contact.

It is in the realm of political and military developments that the discovery of the New World had the greatest result. Wealth and power accumulated by the colonial nations brought to Europe as well as to North America a series of wars and territorial readjustments that are still unresolved. Spain, and then France and England, accumulated markets and raw materials that permitted primary economic growth. The economic power of England and France, first in North America, later in Africa and Asia, has resulted in continuous friction as other nations-Italy, Russia, China, and Japan moved into world commerce. Thus, the discovery of the New World and the resulting exploitation has had a critical and continuing influence upon the course of world history.

It is also possible that sectors of the New World, especially those retaining extensive American Indian cultural survivals, may yet have greater significance in centuries to come. It has been frequently noted by anthropologists that many American Indians reflect substantially different attitudes toward one another and toward the world than is common to most Europeans. Indians tend to see nature as a partner with man, a partner to be respected and utilized with care; their perspective contrasts with those who see man as the center of creation having unrestricted rights over all he surveys—nature, land, and people. As the voice of America’s Indian citizens comes to be heard more loudly, perhaps in positions of considerable political and economic power, their traditional ways may yet infiltrate the world of their conquerors and bring about a closer rapprochement than has heretofore been possible between members of the assimilating cultural traditions.

A

ABRADING TOOLS were implements used to alter or shape objects through rubbing or wearing away. They were extensively used by the native peoples of the Americas in the manufacture of a wide variety of implements and ornaments. The tools were made from many different materials, including bone, deerskin, gourds, bamboo, and sandstone. Even the human hand was at times used as an abrading tool.

Major types

Abrading tools may be divided into four categories: those used for grinding, sawing, drilling, or engraving.

Grinding tools. Of the many types of grinding tools, the most easily identifiable are grinding stones, whetstones, arrowshaft smoothers, and scrapers. Grinding stones, which are distinguished by their grooves, were used to sharpen tools, such as axes. They might be pieces of exposed rock used in situ or large stationary pieces of rock used on the ground or held in the lap. Many were sandstone. Whetstones, or handheld sharpening stones, were common among the Inui (Eskimo), whose whetstone was often a slender tongue of nephrite, a type of jade. Arrowshaft smoothers have been found in many locations; they are stones, often sandstone, that have a groove shaped like a shaft along one surface. Scrapers were of many types and materials. One common type, the so-called thumbnail scraper, was a piece of stone small enough to be held between the fingers, with a steep cutting edge. This scraper was often used to work on animal skins. Although designed to cut, it was probably also used for abrasive purposes at certain stages in the skin-dressing process or to shape harder materials such as bone or stone. Other scrapers were made from bone, wood, fish tooth, and turtle shell.

Many grinding tools had no definite shape. Unshaped hand-held grinding stones were used to smooth stone tools that had been shaped by pecking (crumbling by repeated blows of a hammer-like instrument), as well as to shape a variety of miscellaneous implements such as fishnet weights, bone awls, and shell fishhooks. Grinding stones were also used to elaborate and smooth ornamental or artistic objects, such as the stone pipes common to tribes living in eastern North America and the wood, bone, ivory, and slate sculptures created by some Northwest Coast tribes. They also may have been used to help shape the stone used in building by Mesoamerican and Peruvian Indians. Grinding tools made from wood and bone were used by the Aztecs to polish opal, jade, and other precious stones; wood, gourd, bone, and shell grinding tools were used to polish pottery. Sometimes sand was used as a grinding tool. The Aztecs, for example, scoured the stones used in their lapidary work with special sands.

Saws. Saws were used to cut many materials, including metal, stone, and bone. Indians living in the Subarctic region used them to cut nephrite for adzes. Artisans living in Teotihuacan in central Mexico during the period AD 1-800 sawed plates of jade that were eventually reduced to a thickness of 1 mm. Any thin-bladed object might be used as a saw. Sandstone was an often-used material, and sandstone blades were frequently unshaped. The Inuits used thin pieces of shale to saw. Some saw blades were carefully shaped and their edges serrated. The Napa Indians in particular were expert at producing bone saw blades with serrated edges.

Saw blades might be harder or softer than the material to be sawed. When softer, an abrasive such as sand was added to the groove to assist the sawing action. The people of Teotihuacan, for example, probably used a hardwood saw aided by some kind of sand to cut their jade. Sometimes a thin strip of material, such as rawhide, was used in place of a blade. Sand was worked back and forth in the groove underneath the strip, or else it became imbedded in the strip. giving the Indian the equivalent of the modern-day rasp or file.

Drills. Drills were used throughout the Americas. The list of objects perforated by drill work is extensive. It includes leather skins, jade beads, stone tablets, shell columella, and other objects of bone, pottery, stone, and wood. Drills were also used to excavate stone vessels.

Drills consisted of a bit and a rotating apparatus. Bits were either solid or hollow. Solid bits, the most common type to be found in North America, were often made of stone or wood, although grass or bristles were sometimes used. Solid bits made of hard material were generally edged. Most had two edges; the pyramid-shaped bits produced by Indians of the Southwest and California, however, had three cutting, edges, as did the jade bits used by the Inuits. Solid bits made of softer materials and most hollow bits were used in conjunction with an abrasive substance such as sand which was placed into the hole. Hollow bits, found often in mounds in Ohio and extensively in Mesoamerica, might be made of copper, bronze, bamboo, or bird bone. Extensive trial and error was needed to find an effective combination of bit and abrasive for the material being drilled.

Long drill bits, such as reeds or grasses, could be twirled between the fingers. Short stone bits were often manufactured with a base that expanded into a Y or a T shape. Such a bit could be held in the hand and turned. Short bits were also fastened onto shafts of varying lengths. The shafts could then be twirled between the palms of the hands or between a hand and a thigh. Drills of this type were in use throughout North and Middle America and probably also had a wide distribution in South America. The bits were attached to the shafts in different ways. The tribes of the upper Xingu River basin in Brazil, for example, used wax and cotton thread to bind stone points onto shafts.

Ojibwa (Chippewa) flesher and scraper.

By the end of the 19th century, two mechanical innovations that increased the speed with which an object could be drilled were in use throughout North America. One was a strap wound around the drill shaft in various configurations and variously pulled or pumped to increase the rotational speed of the drill. The other was a drill cap or socket that was placed on top of the shaft and used to press the drill into the material being drilled. Modern-day anthropologists have not decided whether these innovations originated in Europe or in America. Evidence suggesting a pre-Columbian origin is strongest for the strap drill used by the Inuits.

Alaskan drills. Pictured are a drill bow, drill, and mouthpiece (center); a seal-headed wooden mouthpiece (left) with a stone inset for a drill; and five jadeite drill points (foreground).

Engravers. Engraving was most often accomplished using sharp-pointed instruments. Tribes in the northern regions of North America, for example, used sharp bone points to engrave on bark. Other types of tools were also used. In Mexico, hollow drills held vertically or inclined at an angle were used by the Indians of Oaxaca to engrave stone, and the Indians of Teotihuacan may have engraved jade with a wood or stone abrader used in conjunction with sand. The materials upon which engravers worked varied widely. Pottery engraving was developed to a high art by the craftsmen of the Gulf states and by the Pueblo potters of the Southwest. Indians also engraved wood, horn, metal, and ivory.

General characteristics

Abrading tools were in use at least as early as 10,000-9,000 BC. At this time, Indians living in the western plains of North America who were manufacturing Clovis Fluted projectile points used abrading tools to grind the fluting on these points near the base. The coming of Europeans to the Americas occasioned gradual changes: certain abrading tools — e.g., the engraving points of the Northwest Coast tribes and the Inuit — were at least partially replaced by steel or iron points, and the replacement of pecked stone blades on tools such as axes reduced the need for grinding stones. European contact may also have taught Indians the use of such mechanical drilling apparatus as the pump and the bow. In the mid-20th century, traditional abrading tools were still in use in some areas. Tribes of the upper Xingu River basin in Brazil, for example, used a stone point attached to a shaft as a drill.

Although the process of abrasion was used in all regions of the Americas, the tools used to abrade differed from region to region. Some, such as the arrow-shaft smoother and the grooved grinding stone, were widely distributed. Others, such as the disk drill were used only by certain tribes. The ingenuity of each tribe, the materials available to it for abrading tools, and the materials to be abraded all helped to determine the types of tools that were finally developed.

Modern attempts to test the effectiveness of traditional abrading tools have led to the conclusion that the traditional tools do work but that they must have taken considerable skill mixed with a large amount of trial and error to operate successfully. One investigator, for example, drilled a hole five inches deep in a piece of catlinite with a pump drill in three hours, but only after switching bits from one made of jasper, to one made of pine and assisted by wet sand, and finally to a bit made of ash assisted with dry sand.

Shretta, or Old Mary, a Klamath River Indian of California, leaching acorn meal to prepare it for soup c. 1900.

ACORN, the decorative fruit of the oak tree, has remarkable, though generally neglected, value as a food source. Some European cultures have used it sparingly for human consumption and more extensively for fattening pigs. The American Indians, how-ever have gone far beyond other cultures in its growth range (temperate and mountainous tropical zones) in exploiting the acorn, recognizing its many advantages, and learning to deal with its drawbacks.

The most obvious disadvantage of the acorn is the bitter taste resulting from the high content of tannin (tannic acid), which makes it not only unpalatable but also indigestible. Some acorns of the white oak (Quercus alba) can be eaten untreated; few acorns, however, have this ready-to-eat property. A second disadvantage is that an acorn diet can cause severe constipation. Nevertheless, the Indians recognized several advantages: ease of harvest, high fat and satisfactory protein content, remarkable versatility, and relative ease of storage.

The California Indians had the greatest knowledge of and dependence on acorns; of the more than 50 species of oak in the United States, 15 occur in California. Three of the most popular trees were the California live oak (Q. agrifolia), the California black oak (Q. kelloggii), and the California white oak (Q. lobata). Different tribes of California had quite distinct preferences in acorns, and there were laws concerning property rights to oak groves.

The Luiseño, a typical acorn-eating tribe of southern California, hulled and pulverized the nuts, then leached the meal with warm water and cooked it as a mush. The sand-basket technique of leaching was known in California from the southern Cahuilla to the Hupa of the Northwest Coast. Large baskets, filled with sand to contain the acorn meal, were placed in streams; this saved the labor of pouring water but presented the problem of the disastrous effect of sand on the teeth. To combat constipation, many Indians chewed the bark of the cascara bush (Rhamnus purshiana).

Several tribes stored the acorns in wicker sheds, sheltered from rain and vermin; the Wintun of northern California buried them in bogs.

The Indians of the Eastern Woodlands area generally favored the sweet, white oak acorns. The Potawatomi treated acorns in a lye solution made from hardwood ashes, then ground the dried nuts. The Ojibwa ate the fruits of the northern red oak (Q. rubra). The Menominee ground the fruit of the northern pin oak (Q. ellipsoidalis) into coffee and, after contact with the Europeans, used white oak acorns to make pies.

In other regions the acorn was less popular and abundant. Indians of the Southwest, such as the Tewa, used the nuts of the Gambel oak (Q. gambelii) and the Utah oak (Q. utahensis). The Navajo boiled acorns like beans. In the Southeast, the Choctaw used a leaching technique on the acorns of the water oak (Q. aguatica). The Klamath of the Plateau area established acorn camps during the harvest season.

Nonfood uses were common. The Luiseño used the acorns of the canyon live oak (Q. chrysolepsis) for gambling. The children of the Lacandon Indians of Mexico’s Chiapas state used large acorns as spinning tops.

The Indians regarded the acorn as a bounty from above: it required no planting, cultivating, or difficult harvest. Several tribes founded oak societies to revere the tree. Although the acorn lore of California was rapidly vanishing in the 1970s, it was still seen by some as a possible help to forest all the dire threats of world food shortages.

ADAPTATION, HUMAN. Man, since his initial evolutionary development in the central latitudes of the Old World, has demonstrated a high degree of geographic mobility. As a result of his wanderings, he has encountered a number of new habitats. In many cases, such encounters have required adjustments in both his biology and his culture in order to ensure his survival. This experience has in part been responsible for much of the biogeographical variability that can be observed in the human species at the present time.

By the onset of the last glacial stage in North America, the Wisconsin (between 64,000 and 11,000 years ago). Homo sapiens (modern man) had successfully spread into temperate and possibly the Subarctic zones of the Old World. Still to he colonized at this time were the island groups of Oceania, the continent of Australia, and the New World. At some period, during either the maximal expansion of the Wisconsin Stage or its terminal phases, men crossed the Bering Land Bridge (Beringia) from Asia and entered the New World for the first time. After this initial invasion, it appears (from inferential archaeological evidence) that there were a series of migratory waves from Asia. The earliest migrations were probably dependent upon the periodic movement of glaciers over Beringia during the various substages of the Wisconsin.

General aspects of adaptation

Theoretically, there are two avenues that a population can take in adapting biologically to a new habitat. They are genetic adaptation (adaptive changes in gene frequency) and acclimatization (adaptive morphological and physiological changes in response to stress).

Genetic adaptation operates at the population level. It is the result of the temporal interaction between the genetic variability existing in the population when it enters a specific habitat and the selective stresses present in the habitat, mutation, gene flow, genetic drift (random changes in gene frequencies from generation to generation), breeding structure (mating patterns), and size of the population. Selection will set the general direction of evolution and the population will survive if it possesses and maintains sufficient genetic variability (i.e., the necessary genes and genotypes) in the face of the selection pressures imposed upon it. For evolution to occur in small populations, those forces tending to promote genetic variability (mutation and gene flow) must override or balance the effects of genetic drift, which tends (along with directional selection) to reduce genetic variability.

Acclimatization, on the other hand, requires no genetic change in the population as a whole because it operates on the individual phenotype (biological character; the outward expression of genetic and environmental factors). Nevertheless, if genetic differences exist between individuals in their capability to acclimatize to stress and, as a result, the reproductive capacity is affected, this may lead over time to genetic changes in the population for those biological characters involved.

Acclimatizational processes in man may generally be regarded as either short-term or long-term. The first includes those phenotypic adjustments taking several seconds (e.g., changes in heart rate during heat stress) to those requiring weeks or months (e.g., tanning) to achieve. Because of the inherent physiological capability for change in those biological characters responsive to short-term acclimatization, many of the adjustments are reversible: i.e., the phenotype can return to (or close to) its original state if the stress is alleviated. Long-term acclimatization, however, takes place in biological characters in which phenotypic adjustments are less rapid. Most of these processes are ontogenetic (i.e., occurring during growth and development). In general, the resultant phenotypic adjustments display less reversibility, and most of the ontogenetic changes are completely irreversible if the stress is alleviated after the attainment of adulthood.

In order to discuss human biological adaptability and diversity in the native peoples of the Americas, it is necessary to examine some of the major environmental stresses encountered by human populations and the typology and etiology (origin) of the resultant adaptations. Six of these stresses which have been investigated in varying degrees are humid and dry heat, cold, differentials in ultraviolet radiation, nutritional (especially caloric) conditions, disease, and — for a small portion of mankind — hypoxia (the lowered oxygen content of the atmosphere in high-altitude habitats).

Morphology and physiology

There is some evidence that two general statements can be made in reference to the geographical distribution of body size and shape in warm-blooded species. including man. With some exceptions, the largest animals are found in the coldest parts of the geographical range (Bergman’s rule), and the length of the extremities tend to be reduced in the coldest parts of the range (Allen’s rule). Bergman’s and Allen’s rules appear to be different facets of the same biophysical phenomenon — that it is beneficial for a warm-blooded animal to have a reduced surface area-to-volume ratio (SA/V) in a cold climate and an increased SA/V in a hot climate. Since the amount of heat produced by metabolism is related to body size and mass, these rules are apparently associated with the need to reduce radiant heat loss from the body surface during cold stress and increase it during heat stress. Both rules have their bases in two physical laws which state that (I) when two bodies of dissimilar size have the same shape, the larger has a smaller SA/V, and (2) when two bodies of dissimilar shape have the same size, the more linear one has the larger SA/V.

Nutrition, disease, and hypoxia may also act, individually or collectively, to limit body size in some populations by affecting the metabolic process during growth and development. Nutritional stress does this by lowering the energy levels and/or dietary components necessary for the normal processes of anabolism (growth). Disease may operate to limit body size by increasing the metabolic requirements or, like hypoxia, by direct interference with anabolism, catabolism (energy release from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins), or growth-related endocrine function.

Skin color is another character that demonstrates geographical variability, tending to decrease from areas of high to low ultraviolet radiation (u-v). Skin pigmentation affects the amount of u-v reaching the lower levels of the epidermis, where ergosterol (an essential growth factor) is synthesized by the action of u-v. W. F. Loomis and other scientists believe that u-v has acted as a selective agent in causing genetic differences in skin color between geographically dispersed populations.

Finally, there are differences between geographic populations in their short-term physiological responses to heat and cold stress. These differences are more marked in the latter case and shall be briefly discussed below.

Genetic polymorphisms

Genetic polymorphisms such as blood groups and other serological variants also show geographical variability. Since the expression of these characters is controlled completely by genetic factors, they are theoretically subject to direct environmental selection. This is in contrast to those biological characters that possess the ability to undergo phenotypic modification, thus allowing some amelioration of the selective action of the environmental stress being imposed.

For many of the polymorphic systems, the interpopulation variability in phenotypic frequencies does not fit any apparent geographic pattern. Consequently, it is difficult to determine whether