amplifications of culture spread: slowly to the north, more rapidly and completely to the south, into the similar environment of Colombia and Peru. Not all of the civilization devised in Yucatan and Guatemala, was carried into South America. Writing and time reckoning, for instance, never squeezed through the Isthmus, and the Incas got along with traditions and records of strings. On the other hand the South Americans, also growing populous and wealthy, added some culture elements of their own—bronze alloying, the hammock, the Pan’s pipe, the balance scale, the surgical art of trephining the skull, the idea of a vast, compactly organized empire.
In Peru then, and in Mexico, two nearly parallel centers of civilization grew up during thousands of years; sprung from the same foundation, differentiated in their superstructures, that of Mexico evidently the earlier, and, at the time of discovery, slightly more advanced. The Peruvian civilization, if we include with it those of western Colombia and Bolivia, rayed itself out through the whole southern continent, becoming feebler and more abbreviated with increasing distance from its focus.
The South Mexican center similarly diffused its light through most of the northern continent. First its influences traveled to northern Mexico and the Southwest of the United States—Arizona and New Mexico, the seat of the Cliff-dwellers. There they took new root and then spread northward and eastward—altered, diluted, with much omitted. We may compare Mexico to a manufacturing district, where capital, inventiveness, resources and industry, flourish in mutual alliance; the Southwest to one of its outlets, a sort of distributing point or jobbing center, which imports, both for its own consumption and for re-export; the articles of trade in this case being elements of civilization—inventions, knowledge, arts.
Throughout, it was a flow of things of the mind, not a drift of the bodies of men; of culture, not of populations. And the radiation was ever northward, counter to the drift of the migrations which had begun thousands of years before, and which, in part, seem to have continued to crowd southward even during the period of northward spread of civilization. It was much as in Europe fifteen hundred years ago, when Goth and Vandal and Frank and Lombard pounded their way southward into the Roman empire, but the civilization of Rome—writing, learning, money, metallurgy, architecture, Christianity, laws—streamed ever against the human pressure, until the farthest barbarians of the North Sea had become, in some measure, humanized.
Thus the Southwest learned from Mexico to build in stone, to grow and weave cotton, to irrigate, to obey priests, and in some rude measure to organize the year into a calendar. None of these culture elements traveled farther. But the maize-beans-squash agriculture, pottery making, the organization of cult societies, the division of the community into clans, reckoning descent from one parent only, some tendency toward town life and the confederation of towns, all of which the Southwest had also acquired from Mexico, it passed on to its neighbors, notably to those of the Gulf States between Louisiana and Georgia. Here, these institutions were once more worked over and, in the main, reduced, and then some of them passed on northward, first to the Mound-builders of the Ohio valley, and then to the Iroquois of New York. From the Iroquois, in turn, some of their Algonkian neighbors and foes were just beginning to be ready to learn certain betterments, when the white man came and swept their cultures into memory.
We have thus, a series of culture centers—Mexico, Southwest, Southeast, Iroquois, Atlantic Algonkins—of descending order of advancement, and subsequent to one another in time. They constitute a ladder of culture development, and, although undated, represent a real sequence of history.
One area was but haltingly and sparsely infiltrated from the Southwest: the North Pacific Coast, centering in British Colombia. In this mild and rich environment a native culture grew up that, in the main, went its own way. It did not attain to the heights of Mexico, scarcely even equaled the Southwest. Pottery and agriculture failed to reach it. But out of its own resources, it developed, independently, a number of the arts and institutions which the remainder of North America drew from Mexico: clan organization and cult societies, for instance, the beginnings of a calendar and cloth weaving. And it added features, all its own: plank houses, totem poles, a remarkable style of decorative art, a society based on wealth. Here then we have a minor, but mainly independent culture center of the greatest interest.
In a still smaller way, and without as great a freedom from southern influences, the tribes of the treeless Plains, in the heart of the continent, developed a little civilization of their own. This was founded on what they had originally got from the Southwest and Southeast, was remodeled on the basis of an almost exclusive dependence on the buffalo, and underwent a brief and stirring efflorescence from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, after the Plains tribes had got horses from the Spaniards. Here, then, grew up customs and appliances like the tepee, the travois, the camp circle, warfare as a game with “coups” as counters.
Similarly in the far north, along the shores of the Arctic, where the Eskimo spread themselves. Here, almost nothing penetrated from Mexico, but stern necessity forced a special inventiveness on the mechanical side and the way was near for the entrance of influences from Asia, some few of which may have diffused beyond the Eskimo to the North Pacific Coast tribes.
Such, then, are the outlines of the history of the native, American race and civilization. It is a long and complexly rich story, only partly unraveled. Those who wish it in greater fullness will find it in Wissler’s The American Indian. Only enough has been sketched here to show that modern anthropology is an inductive science with a minimum of speculation; that it aims at truly historical reconstructions and is beginning to achieve them; and that it lies in the nature of its tasks to distinguish and analyze the several native culture areas or local types of Indians before proceeding to conclusions based on combinations.
Therefore it is, that many small items of ethnic knowledge acquire considerable importance. From the average man’s point of view, it is of little moment that the Zuñi farm and the Yurok and Nootka do not, or that the former refuse to marry their dead wives’ sisters and the latter insist on it. At best, such bits of facts have for the layman only the interest of idle curiosities, of antiquarian fragments. To the specialist, however, they become dependable means to a useful end, much as intimate knowledge of the position of arteries and nerves serves the surgeon.
But, just as the exact understanding of anatomy which modern medicine enjoys, bulks to infinitely more than any one anatomist could ever have discovered, so with ethnology. No one mind could ever observe or assemble and digest all the cultural facts that are needed. Many workers are busy, have been systematically busy for two or three generations. Though they may, now and then, enliven their toil by a scientific quarrel over this or that set of facts or interpretation, they are inherently coöperating, laboring cumulatively at a great joint enterprise. Sometimes, they divide their interests topically: one specializes on social customs, another on material arts, a third along lines of religion. But, in the main, the cultural context is so important that it has been found most productive for each investigator to try to learn everything possible about all the phases of culture of a single tribe, or, at most, of two or three tribes.
To do this, he “goes into the field.” That is, he takes up his residence, for a continuous period or repeatedly for several years, among a tribe, on its reservation or habitat. He enters into as close relations as possible with its most intelligent or authoritative members. He acquires all he can of their language, reduces it to writing, perhaps compiles texts, a dictionary or grammar. Day after day he records notes from visual observation or the memory of the best informants available on the industries, beliefs, government, family life, ceremonies, wars, and daily occupations of his chosen people. And with all this, there flow in his personal experiences and reactions. The final outcome is a monograph—a bulky, detailed, often tedious, but fundamental volume, issued by the government or a scientific institution.
It is from intensive studies such as these, that the stories which form the present volume have sprung as a by-product. Have sprung as a sort of volunteer crop, it might be said, under the stimulus of the editorial suggestion of Dr. Parsons. The monographs have a way of sticking pretty
