Not proofread
New page
<noinclude><pagequality level="1" user="Diverman" /><div class="pagetext">{{rh|{{x-larger|816}}|{{x-larger|{{uc|AMERICA}}}}|ARCHAEOLOGY}}
</noinclude>hangs around the latter has well-nigh obscured the former. As in medicine theory is one thing and practice another, so among these savages must the two be carefully discriminated. Dorsey, again, draws a distinction between lore narratives, which can be rehearsed without fasting or prayer, and rituals which require the most rigid preparation. In each culture province the Indians studied the heavenly bodies. The Arctic peoples regulated their lives by the long day and night in the year; among the tribes in the arid region the place of sunrise was marked on the horizon for each day; the tropical Indians were not so observant, but they worshipped the sun-god above all. The Mayas had a calendar of 360 days, with intercalary days; this solar year was intersected by their sacred year of twenty weeks of thirteen days each, and these assembled in bewildering cycles. Their knowledge of the air and its properties was no less profound. Heat and cold, rain and drought, the winds in relation to the points of the compass, were nearest their wants and supplies, and were never out of their thoughts. In each province they had found the best springs, beds of clay, paint, soapstone, flinty rock, friable stone for sculpture and hard, tenacious stone for tools, and used ashes for salt. The vegetal kingdom was no less familiar to them. Edible plants, and those for dyes and medicines, were on their lists, as well as wood for tools, utensils and weapons, and fibres for textiles. They knew poisonous plants, and could eliminate noxious properties. The universal reliance on animal life stimulated the study of the animal kingdom. Everywhere there were names for a large number of species; industries and fine arts were developed through animal substances. Society was organized in most cases on animal clans, and religion was largely zoomorphic. The hunting tribes knew well the nature and habits of animals, their anatomy, their migrations, and could interpret their voices. Out of this practical knowledge, coupled with the belief in personeity, grew a folk-lore so vast that if it were written down the world would not contain the books.
Textile industries.
The study of Indian textiles includes an account of their fibres, tools, processes, products, ornaments and uses. The fibres were either animal or vegetable; animal fibres were hair, fur on the skin, feathers, hide, sinew and intestines; vegetable fibres were stalks of small trees, brush, straw, cotton, bast, bark, leaves and seed vessels in great variety as one passes from the north southward through all the culture provinces. The products of the textile industry in America were bark cloth, wattling for walls, fences and weirs, paper, basketry, matting, loom products, needle or point work, net-work, lacework and embroidery. In the manufacture of these the substances were reduced to the form of slender filaments, shreds, rods, splints, yarn, twine and sennit or braid. All textile work was done by hand; the only devices known were the bark peeler and beater, the shredder, the flint-knife, the spindle, the rope-twister, the bodkin, the warp- beam and the most primitive harness. The processes involved were gathering the raw material, shredding, splitting, gauging, wrapping, twining, spinning and braiding. Twining and spinning were done with the fingers of both hands, with the palm on the thigh, with the spindle and with the twister. Ornamentation was in form, colour, technical processes and dyes. The uses to which the textiles were put were for clothing, furniture for the house, utensils for a thousand industries, fine arts, social functions and worship.
In order to comprehend the more intricate processes of the higher peoples it is necessary to examine the textile industry in all of the culture areas. It is essentially woman's work, though among the Pueblos, strangely enough, men are weavers.
The Eskimo woman did not weave, but was expert in sewing and embroidering with sinew thread by means of a bodkin. The Dene (Tinneh) peoples used strips of hide for snowshoes and game-bags, sewed their deerskin clothing with sinew thread, and embroidered in split quill. Their basketry, both in Canada and in Arizona, was coiled work. The northern Algonquin and Iroquoian tribes practised similar arts, and in the Atlantic states wove robes of animal and bird skins by cutting the latter into long strips, winding these strips on twine of hemp, and weaving them by the same processes employed in their basketry. Textile work in the Sioux province was chiefly the making of skin garments with sinew thread, but in the Gulf states the existence of excellent cane and grasses gave opportunity for several varieties of weaving. On the Pacific coast of America the efflorescence of basketry in every form of technic was known. This art reached down to the borders of Mexico. Loom-weaving in its simplest form began with the Chilkats of Alaska, who hung the warp over a long pole, and wrought mythological figures into their gorgeous blankets by a process resembling tapestry work. The forming of bird skins, rabbit skins and feathers into robes, and all basketry technic, existed from Vancouver Island to Central America. In northern Mexico net-work, rude lace-work in twine, are followed farther south, where finer material existed, by figured weaving of most intricate type and pattern; warps were crossed and wrapped, wefts were omitted and texture changed, so as to produce marvellous effects upon the surface. This composite art reached its climax in Peru, the llama wool affording the finest staple on the whole hemisphere. Textile work in other parts of South America did not differ from that of the Southern states of the Union. The addition of brilliant ornamentation in shell, teeth, feathers, wings of insects and dyed fibres completed the round of the textile art. A peculiar type of coiled basketry is found at the Strait of Magellan, but the motives are not American. (Consult the works of Boas, Dixon, G. T. Emmons, Holmes, Otis T. Mason, Matthews, John Murdoch, E. W. Nelson, A. P. Niblack, Lucien M. Turner.)
Zootechny.
Since most American tribes lived upon flesh, the activities of life were associated with the animal world. These activities were not confined to the land, but had to do also with those littoral meadows where invertebrate and vertebrate marine animals fed in unlimited numbers. An account of savage life, therefore, includes the knowledge of the animal life of America and its distribution, regarding the continent, not only as a whole, but in those natural history provinces and migrations which governed and characterized the activities of the peoples. This study would include industries connected with capture, those that worked up into products the results of capture, the social organizations and labours which were involved in pursuit of animals, the language, skill, inventions and knowledge resulting therefrom, and, finally, the religious conception united with the animal world, which has been named zootheism. In the capture of animals would be involved the pedagogic influence of animal life; the engineering embraced in taking them in large numbers; the cunning and strategy necessary to hunters so poorly armed giving rise to disguises and lures of many kinds. Capture begins among the lower tribes with the hand, without devices, developing knack and skill in seizing, pursuing, climbing, swimming, and maiming without weapons; and proceeds to gathering with devices that take the place of the hand in dipping, digging, hooking and grasping; weapons for striking, whether clubs, missiles or projectiles; edged weapons of capture, which were rare in America; piercing devices for capture, in lances, barbed spears, harpoons and arrows; traps for enclosing, arresting and killing, such as pens, cages, pits, pen-falls, nets, hooks, nooses, clutches, adhesives, deadfalls, impalers, knife traps and poisons; animals consciously and unconsciously aiding in capture; fire in the form of torches, beacons, burning out and smoking out; poisons and asphyxiators; the accessories to hunting, including such changes in food, dress, shelter, travelling, packing, mechanical tools and intellectual apparatus as demanded by these arts. Finally, in this connexion, the first steps in domestication, beginning with the improvement of natural corrals or spawning ground, and hunting with trained dogs and animals. Zootechnic products include food, clothing, ornaments, habitations, weapons, industrial tools, textiles, money, &c.
In sociology the dependence of the American tribes upon the animal world becomes most apparent. A great majority of all the family names in America were from animal totems. The division of labour among the sexes was based on zootechny. Labour organizations for hunting, communal hunt and migrations had to do with the animal world.
In the duel between the hunter and the beast-mind the intellectual powers of perception, memory, reason and will were developed; experience and knowledge by experience were enlarged, language and the graphic arts were fostered, the inventive faculty was evoked and developed, and primitive science was fostered in the unfolding of numbers, metrics, clocks, astronomy, history and the philosophy of causation. Beliefs and practices with reference to the heavenly world were inspired by zoic activities; its location, scenery and environment were the homes of beast gods. It was largely a zoopantheon; thus zootheism influenced the organization of tribes and societies in the tribes. The place, furniture, liturgies and apparatus of worship were hereby suggested. Myths, folk-lore, hunting charms, fetishes, superstitions and customs were based on the same idea. (For life zones, see C. H. Merriam, Biol. Survey, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.)
Travel.
Excepting for extensive and rapid travel over the snow in the Arctic regions by means of dog sleds, the extremely limited transportation by dog travail (or sledge) in the Sioux province, and the use of the llama as a beast of burden throughout the Peruvian highlands, land travel was on foot, and land transportation on the backs of men and women. One of the most interesting topics of study is the trails along which the seasonal and annual migrations of tribes occurred, becoming in Peru the paved road, with suspension bridges and wayside inns, or tambos. In Mexico, and in Peru especially, the human back was utilized to its utmost extent, and in most parts of America harness adapted for carrying was made and frequently decorated with the best art. In the Mexican codices pictures of men and women carrying are plentiful. Travelling on the water was an important activity in aboriginal times. Hundreds of thousands of miles of inland waters and archipelagoes were traversed. Commencing in the Arctic region, the Eskimo in his kayak, consisting of a framework of driftwood or bone covered with dressed sealskin, could paddle down east Greenland, up the west shore to Smith Sound, along Baffin Land and Labrador, and the shores of Hudson Bay throughout insular Canada and the Alaskan coast, around to Mount St Elias, and for many miles on the eastern shore of Asia. In addition to this most delicate and rapid craft, he had his umiak or freight boat, sometimes called woman's boat. The Athapascan covered all north-western Canada with his open and portable birch-bark canoe, somewhat resembling the kayak in finish. The Algonquin-Iroquois took up the journey at Bear Lake and its tributaries, and by means of paddling and portages traversed the area of middle and eastern Canada, including the entire St Lawrence drainage. The absence of good bark, dugout timber, and chisels of stone deprived the whole Mississippi valley of creditable water-craft, and reduced the natives to the clumsy trough for a dugout and miserable bull-boat, made by stretching dressed buffalo hide over a crate. On the Atlantic coast of the United States the dugout was improved in form where the waters were more disturbed. John Smith's Indians had a fleet of dugouts. The same may be said of the Gulf states tribes, although they added rafts made of reed. Along the archipelagoes of the North Pacific coast, from Mount St Elias to the Columbia river, the dugout attained its best. The Columbia river canoe resembled that of the Amur, the bow and stern being pointed at the water-line. Poor dugouts and rafts, made by tying reeds together, constituted the water-craft of California and Mexico until Central America is reached.
The Caribs were the Haidas of the Caribbean Sea and northern South America. Their craft would vie in form, in size, and seaworthiness with those of the North Pacific coast. The catamaran and the reed boat were known to the Peruvians. The tribes of Venezuela and Guiana, according to Im Thurn, had both the dugout and the built-up hull. The simplest form of navigation in Brazil was the woodskin, a piece of bark stripped from a tree and crimped at the ends. The sangada, with its platform and sail, belonging to the Brazilian coast, is spoken of as a good seaworthy craft. Finally, the Fuegian bark canoe, made in three pieces so that it can be taken apart and transported over hills and sewed together, ends the series. The American craft was propelled by poling, paddling, rowing, and by rude sails of matting.
Fine art.
The aesthetic arts of the American aborigines cannot be studied apart from their languages, industries, social organizations, lore and worships. Art was limited most of all by poverty in technical appliances. There were just as good materials and inspirations, but what could the best of them do without metal tools? One and all skilful to a surpassing degree—weavers, embroiderers, potters, painters, engravers, carvers, sculptors and jewellers,—they were wearied by drudgery and overpowered by a never-absent, weird and grotesque theology. The Eskimo engraved poorly, the Dene (Tinneh) embroidered in quill, the North Pacific tribes carved skilfully in horn, slate and cedar, the California tribes had nimble fingers for basketry, the Sioux gloried in feathers and painted parfleche. The mound builders, Pueblo tribes, middle Americans and Peruvians, were potters of many schools; gorgeous colour fascinated the Amazonians, the Patagonians delighted in skins, and even the Fuegians saw beauty in the pretty snail shells of their desolate island shores. Of the Mexican and Central American sculpture and architecture a competent judge says that Yucatan and the southern states of Mexico are not rich in sculptures, apart from architecture; but in the valley of Mexico the human figure, animal forms, fanciful life motives in endless variety, were embodied in masks, yokes, tablets, calendars, cylinders, disks, boxes, vases and ornaments. The Nahuatl lapidaries had at hand many varieties of workable and beautiful stone—onyx, marble, limestone, quartz and quartz crystal, granite, syenite, basalt, trachyte, rhyolite, diorite and obsidian, the best of material prepared for them by nature; while the Mayas had only limestone, and hard, tenacious rock with which to work it, and timber for burning lime. However, looking over the whole field of North American achievement, architectural and non-architectural, composite and monolithic, the palm for boldness, magnitude of proportions and infinity of labour, must go to the sculptured mosaics of Yucatan. Maya architecture is the best remaining index of the art achievements of the American race. The construction of such buildings as the palace at Uxmal and the castillo at Chichen (Chichenitza) indicates a mastery in architectural design. There is lack of unity in plan and grouping, and an enormous waste of material as compared with available room. At Uxmal the mass of masonry is to chamber space about as forty to one. The builders were "ignorant of some of the most essential principles of construction, and are to be regarded as hardly more than novices in the art" (Holmes, Archaeological Studies, &c.). As for the marvels of Peru, the walls of the temple of the sun in Cuzco, with their circular form and curve inward, from the ground upward, are most imposing. Some of the gates without lintels are beautiful, and the geometric patterns in the walls extremely effective. The same objection to over-massiveness might not apply here as in Mexico, owing to volcanic activity.
Sociology.
Institutions in Europe and America have gathered abundant material for an intelligent comprehension of American Indian sociology. The British Association had a committee reporting during many years on the tribes of northwest Canada. The American Museum in New York has prepared a series of monographs on the tribes of the North Pacific coast, of northern Mexico, and of the Cordilleras of South America. The reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington cover the Eskimo, east and west, and all the tribes of the United States. In Mexico the former labours of Pimentel and Orozco y Berra are supplemented by those of Bandolier, Penafiel, Herrera and Alfredo Chavero. Otto Stoll's studies in Guatemala, Berendt's in Central America, Ernst's in Venezuela, Im Thurn's in Guiana, those of Ehrenreich, von den Steinen, Meyer in Brazil, or of Bandolier, Bastian, Bruhl, Middendorf, von Tschudi in Peru, afford the historian of comparative sociology ample groundwork for a comprehensive grasp of South American tribes. In all parts of the western hemisphere society was organized on cognate kinship, real or artificial, the unit being the clan. There were tribes where the basis of kinship was agnate, but these were the exceptions. The headship of the clan was sometimes hereditary, sometimes elective, but each clan had a totemic name, and the clans together constituted the tribe, the bond being not land, but blood. Women could adopt prisoners of war, in which case the latter became their younger sons. When a confederacy was organized under a council, intermarriage between tribes sometimes occurred; an artificial kinship thus arose, in which event the council established the rank of the tribes as elder and younger brother, grandfather, father and sons, rendering the relationship and its vocabulary most intricate, but necessary in a social system in which age was the predominant consideration and etiquette most exacting. (See Morgan, Tables of Consanguinity, Smithsonian Contributions, xvii.)
The Eskimo have a regular system of animal totem marks and corresponding gentes. Powell sets forth the laws of real and artificial kinship among the North American tribes, as well as tribal organization and government, the formation of confederacies, and the intricate rules of artificial kinship by which rank and courtesy were established. (Many papers in Reports of Bur. Am. Ethnol.) Bandolier declares that in Mexico existed neither state nor nation, nor political society of any kind, but tribes representing dialects, and autonomous in matters of government, and forming confederacies for the purposes of self-defence and conquest. The ancient Mexican tribe was composed of twenty autonomous kins. According to Brinton the social organization of ancient Peru was a government by a council of the gentes. The Inca was a war chief elected by the council to carry out its commands. Among the Caribs a like social order prevailed; indeed, their family system is identical with the totem system of North American Indians. Dominated by the rule of blood relationship, the Indians regulated all co-operative activities on this basis. Not only marriage, but speech and common industries, such as rowing a boat or chasing a buffalo, were under its sway. It obtrudes itself in fine art, behaviour, law-making, lore and religion. In larger or smaller numbers of cognate kindred, for shorter or longer periods of time, near or far from home, the aborigines developed their legislatures, courts, armies, secret societies and priesthoods.
Art of war.
In organization, engineering, strategy, offence and defence, the art of war was in the barbarous and the savage status or grade. One competent to judge asserts that peace, not war, was the normal intertribal habit. They held frequent intercourse, gave feasts and presents, and practised unbounded hospitality. Through this traffic objects travelled far from home, and now come forth out of the tombs to perplex archaeologists. Remembering the organization of the tribe everywhere prevalent, it is not difficult to understand that the army, or horde, that stands for the idea, was assembled on the clan basis. The number of men arrayed under one banner, the time during which they might cohere, the distances from home they could march, their ability to hold permanently what they had gained, together form an excellent metric scale of the culture grade in the several American provinces, and nowhere, even in the most favoured, is this mark high. With the Mexicans war was a passion, but warfare was little above the raid (Bandelier; Farrand). The lower tribes hunted their enemies as they hunted animals. In their war dances, which were only rehearsals, they disguised themselves as animals, and the pantomime was a mimic hunt. They had striking, slashing and piercing weapons held in the hand, fastened to a shaft or thong, hurled from the hand, from a sling, from an atlatl or throwing-stick, or shot from a bow. Their weapons were all individual, not one co-operative device of offence being known among them, although they understood fortification.
The term "slavery" is often applied to the aboriginal American tribes. The truth of this depends upon the definition of the word "slave." If it means the capture of men, and especially of women, and adoption into the tribe, this existed everywhere; but if subjection to a personal owner, who may compel service, sell or put to death the individual, slavery was far from universal. Nieboer finds it only on the North Pacific coast as far south as Oregon, among the Navajo and the Cibola pueblos, and in a few tribes of Middle and South America.
Lore.
The thought life of the American aborigines is expressed in their practical knowledge and their lore. The fascination which hangs around the latter has well-nigh obscured the former. As in medicine theory is one thing and practice another, so among these savages must the two be carefully discriminated. Dorsey, again, draws a distinction between lore narratives, which can be rehearsed without fasting or prayer, and rituals which require the most rigid preparation. In each culture province the Indians studied the heavenly bodies. The Arctic peoples regulated their lives by the long day and night in the year; among the tribes in the arid region the place of sunrise was marked on the horizon for each day; the tropical Indians were not so observant, but they worshipped the sun-god above all. The Mayas had a calendar of 360 days, with intercalary days; this solar year was intersected by their sacred year of twenty weeks of thirteen days each, and these assembled in bewildering cycles. Their knowledge of the air and its properties was no less profound. Heat and cold, rain and drought, the winds in relation to the points of the compass, were nearest their wants and supplies, and were never out of their thoughts. In each province they had found the best springs, beds of clay, paint, soapstone, flinty rock, friable stone for sculpture and hard, tenacious stone for tools, and used ashes for salt. The vegetal kingdom was no less familiar to them. Edible plants, and those for dyes and medicines, were on their lists, as well as wood for tools, utensils and weapons, and fibres for textiles. They knew poisonous plants, and could eliminate noxious properties. The universal reliance on animal life stimulated the study of the animal kingdom. Everywhere there were names for a large number of species; industries and fine arts were developed through animal substances. Society was organized in most cases on animal clans, and religion was largely zoomorphic. The hunting tribes knew well the nature and habits of animals, their anatomy, their migrations, and could interpret their voices. Out of this practical knowledge, coupled with the belief in personeity, grew a folk-lore so vast that if it were written down the world would not contain the books.
Religion.
The religion of the American aborigines, so far as it can be made a subject of investigation, consisted (1) in what the tribes believed about spirits, or shades, and the spirit world—its organization, place, activities and relation to our world; and (2) in what they did in response to these beliefs. The former was their creeds, the latter their cults or worships. In these worships, social organization, religious dramas and paraphernalia, amusement and gambling, and private religion or fetichism, found place. In order to obtain an intelligent grasp of the religion of tribes in their several culture provinces, it must be understood: (1) That the form of belief called animism by Tylor (more correctly speaking, personeity), was universal; everything was somebody, alive, sentient, thoughtful, wilful. This personeity lifts the majority of earthly phenomena out of the merely physical world and places them in the spirit world. Theology and science are one. All is supernatural, wakan. (2) That there existed more than one self or soul or shade in any one of these personalities, and these shades had the power not only to go away, but to transform their bodily tenements at will; a bird, by raising its head, could become a man; the latter, by going on all fours, could become a deer. (3) That the regulative side of the spirit world was the natural outcome of the clan social system and the tribal government in each tribe. Even one's personal name had reference to the world of ghosts. The affirmation that American aborigines believed in an all-pervading, omnipotent Spirit is entirely inconsistent with the very nature of the case. (4) Worship was everywhere dramatic. Only here and there among the higher tribes were bloody sacrifices in vogue, and prayers were in pantomime.
In the culture areas the environment gave specific characters to the religion. In the Arctic province the overpowering influence of meteorological phenomena manifested itself both in the doctrine of shades and in their shamanistic practices. The raven created the world. The Dene (Tinneh) myths resembled those of the Eskimo, and all the hunting tribes of eastern Canada and United States and the Mississippi valley have a mythology based upon their zootechny and their totemism. The religious conceptions of the fishing tribes on the Pacific coast between Mount St Elias and the Columbia river are worked out by Boas; the transformation from the hunting to the agricultural mode of life was accompanied by changes in belief and worship quite as radical. These have been carefully studied by Cushing, Stevenson and Fewkes. The pompous ceremonials of the civilized tribes of Mexico and the Cordilleras in South America, when analysed, reveal only a higher grade of the prevailing idea. Im Thurn says of the Carib: "All objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ in the accident of bodily form." These mythological ideas and symbols of the American aborigines were woven in their textiles, painted on their robes and furniture, burned into their pottery, drawn in sand mosaics on deserts, and perpetuated in the only sculptures worthy of the name, in wood and stone. They are inseparable from industry; language, social organization and custom wait upon them: they explain the universe in the savage mind.
Archaeology.
The archaeology of the western hemisphere should be divided as follows: (1) that of Indian activities; (2) the question of man's existence in a prior geological period. There is no dividing line between first-contact ethnology and pre-contact archaeology. Historians of this time, both north and south of Panama, described tools and products of activities similar to those taken from beneath the soil near by. The archaeologist recovers his specimens from waste places, cave deposits, abandoned villages, caches, shell-heaps, refuse-heaps, enclosures, mounds, hut rings, earthworks, garden beds, quarries and workshops, petroglyphs, trails, graves and cemeteries, cliff and cavate dwellings, ancient pueblos, ruined stone dwellings, forts and temples, canals or reservoirs. The relics found in these places are material records of language, industries, fine arts, social life, lore and religion.
Here and there in the Arctic province remains of old village sites have been examined, and collections brought away by whalers and exploring expeditions. Two facts are established—namely, that the Eskimo lived formerly farther south on the Atlantic coast, and that, aboriginally, they were not specially adept in carving and etching. The old apparatus of hunting and fishing is quite primitive. The Dene (Tinneh) province in Alaska and north-western Canada yields nothing to the spade. Algonquin-Iroquois Canada, thanks to the Geological Survey and the Department of Education in Ontario, has revealed old Indian camps, mounds and earthworks along the northern drainage of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and pottery in a curved line from Montreal to Lake of the Woods. Throughout eastern United States shell-heaps, quarries, workshops and camp sites are in abundance. The Sioux and the Muskhogee province is the mound area, which extends also into Canada along the Red river. The forms of these are earth-heaps, conical mounds, walls of earth, rectangular pyramids and effigies (Putnam). Thomas sums up the work of the Bureau of American Ethnology upon the structure, contents and distribution of these earth monuments, over a vast area from which adobe, building stone and stone-working material were absent. (See Hodge's ''List of Pubs. of the Bur. Am. Ethnol.'') No writings have been recovered, the artisans shaping small objects in stone were specially gifted, the potters in only a few places approached those of the Pueblos, the fine art was poor, and relics found in the mounds do not indicate in their makers a grade of culture above that of the Indian tribes near by. The archaeology of the Pacific coast, from the Aleutian Islands, is written in shell-heaps, village sites, caves, and burial-places (Dall, Harlan I. Smith, Schumacher). The relics of bone, antler, stone, shell and copper are of yesterday. Even the Calaveras man is no exception, since his skull and his polished conical pestle, the latter made of stone more recent than the auriferous gravels, show him to have been of Digger Indian type. In Utah begin the ruins of the Pueblo culture. These cover Arizona and New Mexico, with extensions into Colorado on the north and Mexico on the south. The reports of work done in this province for several years past form a library of text and illustration. Cliff dwellings, cavate houses, pueblos and casas are all brought into a series without a break by Bandelier, Cushing, Fewkes, Holmes, Hough,<noinclude><references/></div></noinclude>