American Indian life. Various
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first, then such inferences as are warranted.” “All facts” means not only all items but also these items in their natural order: the sequence in which they occur, their geographical relation, the degree to which they are associated.
The anthropologist no longer compares marriage customs from all over the world as they come to hand. He realizes that marriage is likely to be a different rite as it is practiced respectively among peoples, with and without civil government, or among nations that have come under the influence of a world religion or remain in a status of tribal ceremony. The whole culture of the group must be more or less known before the history and meaning of an institution can become intelligible. Detached from its culture mass, a custom reveals as little of its functioning as an organ dissected out of the living body.
Equally important for the interpretation of ethnic facts, are their geographical associations, their distribution. Is a custom or invention peculiar to one people or is it shared by many distinct peoples occupying a continuous area? Such a question may seem trivial. But the answer usually bears heavy significance. A unique institution, or one found in various spots but in disconnected ones, is, other things equal, either of recent and independent origin in each locality, or it is a lingering survival of a custom that was once wide-spread. In short, it represents the beginning or end of a process of development.
On the other hand, where we find an art or institution possessed in common by dozens or hundreds of tribes situated without any gaps between them on the map, it would be far-fetched to assume that each of them independently evolved this identical phenomenon. Why presuppose a hundred parallel causes, each operating quite separately, when one will suffice, in view of the fact that human beings imitate each other’s manners and borrow knowledge. We know that Christianity, gun-powder, the printing press, were originated but once. Even with history wiped out, we could infer as much, from their universality among the nations of Europe.
Now this is just the situation as regards primitive peoples. Their history has been wiped out—it was never preserved by themselves or their neighbors. But knowledge of the geographical occurrence of a custom or invention, usually affords rather reliable insight into its history, sometimes into its origin. When the available information shows that Indian corn was grown by all the tribes from Chile and Brazil to Arizona and Quebec, it is evident that the history of native American agriculture is as much of a unit, essentially, as the history of Christianity or of fire-arms. It is a story of invention only at its outset, of diffusion and amplification through its greater length. When pottery is further discovered to possess almost exactly the same aboriginal distribution as maize, it becomes likely that this art, too, was devised but once; and likely, further, that it was invented at about the same time as maize culture and diffused with it.
By evidence such as this, reënforced by the insight gained from the stratification of prehistoric objects preserved in caves and in the ground, native, American history is being reconstructed for some thousands of years past. The outline of this history runs about as follows.
Eight, ten, or twelve thousand years ago, contemporary with the last phase of the Old Stone Age of Europe or the opening there of the New Stone Age, man, for the first time, entered the New World. He came from Asia across Behring Strait, a narrow gap with an island stepping-stone in the middle, and probably frozen over solidly in midwinter. In race he was Mongoloid—not Chinese, Japanese, or Mongol proper, but proto-Mongoloid; a straight-haired type, medium in complexion, jaw protrusion, nose-breadth, and inclining probably to round-headedness; an early type, in short, from which the Chinese, the Malay, and the Indian grew out, like so many limbs from a tree. This proto-Mongoloid stock must have been well established in Asia long before. This is morally certain from the fact that the proto-Negroids and proto-Caucasians were living at least ten to fifteen thousand years earlier, as attested by their discovered fossils, Grimaldi man and Cro-Magnon man.
Well, somewhere about 8000 BC, then, bands of proto-Mongolians began to filter in through the easy, northwest gate of America. Others pushed them behind; before them, to the south, the country was ever more pleasantly tempting, and life easier. They multiplied, streamed down the Pacific coast, wandered across to the Atlantic, entered the tropics in fertile Mexico, defiled through Panama, and slowly overran South America. Separate groups of entrants into Alaska may have brought distinct languages with them; or, if they all came with one mother-tongue, their migrations to diverse environments and long, long separations provided ample opportunity for differentiation into dialects, languages, and families. The history of speech in the Old World covered by records, is but little more than three thousand years old, just a third of the ten thousand years with which we are dealing in America. Multiply by three the difference between twentieth-century English and ancient Sanskrit or one of its modern representatives such as Bengali, and there is just about the degree of speech distinctness that exists between the American language families, such as Siouan and Algonkin, Aztec and Maya.
So with the racial type. Fundamentally, one physical type stretches from Cape Horn to Alaska. Superficially, it is intricately variegated—here with round heads, there with long—with short faces or hooked noses or tall statures or wavy hair, in this or that group of tribes. In fact, it might seem that during ten thousand years the variety of climates and habitats might have succeeded in moulding the Indian into racial types of even greater distinctness than we encounter; until we remember that he found the two continents empty, and was never subjected to mixtures with white or black or dwarf races, to mixtures such as were experienced by many of the peoples of the eastern hemisphere.
What the first immigrants brought with them in culture was rudimentary. They kept dogs, but no other domesticated animal. They were not yet agricultural, and subsisted on what they wrested from nature. They knew something of weaving baskets and mats; clothed and housed themselves; probably had harpoons and possibly bows; made fire with the drill; cut with flint knives; and believed in magic, spirits, and the perpetuity of the soul.
In and about southern Mexico they prospered the fastest, became most numerous, acquired some leisure, began to organize themselves socially, and developed cults of increasing elaborateness. They “invented” maize-agriculture and pottery; architecture in stone; irrigation; cloth weaving and cotton growing; the smelting and casting of copper, silver, and gold; a priesthood, calendar system, picture-writing, pantheon of gods, and sacrifices; and accustomed themselves to town life.
Gradually these 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,