Chapter XIII: The History of Civilization in Native America (2)

But by the end of the first half of the duration of American antiquity, let us guess somewhere about 3000 B.C., a perceptible differentiation appears to have taken place between the culture of the Middle American[24] highland and the remainder of the Americas. The highland had forged ahead. Especially, perhaps, was this true of the region of southern Mexico and Guatemala. Why it was here that civilization first gathered a notable momentum, it is difficult to say; we are dealing with obscure beginnings at a remote period. An unusual concentration of population is likely to have been an important factor. This in turn may have rested on the ease of existence in a sub-tropical area. Advanced civilizations in general find their greatest opportunities in fairly temperate environment; incipient ones in semi-tropical climates or unforested regions in the tropics. At least there are the parallels of Egypt, Babylonia, India. Possibly the environmental feature of greatest value to cultural progress in Middle America was its diversity. Mountain and coast, temperate highland and hot lowland, humid and arid tracts, tropical jungle and open country, were only a few hours apart. In each locality the population worked out its necessary adaptations, and yet it was near enough others of a different adaptation for them to trade, to depend on one another, to learn. Custom therefore came in contact with custom, invention with invention. The discrepancies, the very competitions, would lead to reconciliations, readaptations, new combinations. Cultural movement and stimulus would normally be greater than in a culturally uniform area.

Be that as it may, Middle America took the lead. It is in the region of southern Mexico that a wild maize grows—teocentli, “divine maize,”[25] the Aztecs called it. From this, in a remote archaic period, the cultivated plant was derived. At least, such seems to be the probability in a somewhat tangled mass of botanical evidence. Here then the dominant plant of American agriculture was evolved: with it, very likely, the cultivated beans and squashes that are generally associated in native farming even in parts remote from Mexico.

Pottery has so nearly the same distribution as maize agriculture, as to suggest a substantially contemporaneous origin, probably at the same center. This is the more likely because the art is of chief value to a sessile people, and farming operates more strongly than any other mode of life to bring about a sedentary condition.

Agriculture almost certainly increased the population. The food supply was greater and more regular; people got used to living near each other where before they had unconsciously drifted apart through distrust; and the proximity in turn, as well as the new stability, would lessen many of the local famines, hostilities, and other hardships to which the smaller and less settled communities had been exposed. As the death rate went down and numbers mounted, specialization of labor would be first made possible, and then almost forced. A self-contained community of a hundred cannot permit much specialization of accomplishment and none of occupation. Every man must be first of all an immediate food getter. On the other hand a community of a million inevitably segregates somewhat into classes, trades, guilds, or castes. The individual with decided tastes and gifts in a particular direction finds his products in enough demand to devote himself largely or wholly to their manufacture. The very size of the community as it were forces him to specialization, and thus diversity, with its train of effects leading to further stimulation, is attained independently of environment.

184. TOBACCO

For some culture elements, the evidence of early origin in Middle America is less direct. The use of tobacco, for instance, is as widely spread as agriculture, but is not necessarily as ancient. Its diffusion in the eastern hemisphere has been so rapid (§ 98) as to make necessary the admission that it might have spread rapidly in the New World also—faster, at any rate, than maize. Moreover, a distinction must be made between the smoking or chewing or snuffing of tobacco and its cultivation. There are some modern tribes—mostly near the margins of the tobacco area—that gather the plant as it grows wild. It is extremely probable that wild tobacco was used for some time before cultivation was attempted. Nevertheless tobacco growing, whenever it may have originated, evidently had its beginning in the northern part of Middle America, either in Mexico or the adjacent Antillean province. It is here that _Nicotiana tabacum_ was raised. The tribes to the north contented themselves with allied species, mostly so inferior from the consumer’s point of view that they have not been taken up by western civilization. These varieties look like peripheral substitutes for the central and original _Nicotiana tabacum_.

The Colombian and Andean culture-areas used little or no tobacco, but chewed the stimulating coca leaf. This is a case of one of two competing culture traits preventing or perhaps superseding the other, not of tobacco never having reached the Andes. Most of the remainder of South America used tobacco.

185. THE SEQUENCE OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

The most peripheral and backward peoples of both North and South America even to-day remain without clans, moieties, hereditary totems, or exogamic groupings (§ 110). Some of these, like the Eskimo and Fuegians, live at the extreme ends of the continents, under conditions of hardships which might be imagined to have directed all their energies toward the material sides of life and thus left over little interest for the development of institutions. But this argument will not apply to the many clanless tribes of the California, Plains, and Tropical Forest areas. It must accordingly be concluded that those American nations that show no formal organization of society on a hereditary basis—or at least the more primitive ones who possess no equivalent or substitute—do without this organization because they never acquired it. This negative condition may then be inferred as the original one of the whole American race.

Somewhat more advanced culturally, on the whole, and less definitely marginal, at any rate in North America, are several series of tribes that do possess exogamic groups—either sibs or moieties—in which descent goes in the male line and is generally associated with totemic beliefs or practices. These comprise the tribes of one segment of the Northwest Coast area; those of one end of the Southwest with some extension into California; and those of most of the Northern Woodland, with some extension into the Plains.

Another series of tribes live under the same sort of organization but with descent reckoned in the female instead of the male line. These comprise the peoples of one end of the Northwest Coast; those of one portion of the Southwest; and those of the Southeast, with some extensions into the Northeast and Plains.

These exogamic-totemic series of tribes average higher in their general culture than the clanless and totemless ones. On the whole, too, they are situated nearer the focus of civilization in Middle America. As between the two exogamic-totemic series the matrilinear tribes must be accredited with a more complex and better organized culture than the patrilinear ones. The finest carving in North America, for instance, is that of the Northwest—totem poles, masks, and the like. Within the Northwest, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—matrilinear tribes—excel in the quality of this work. They far surpass the patrilinear Kwakiutl and Salish. So in the Southwest: the matrilinear Pueblos build stone towns, obey a priestly hierarchy, and possess an elaborate series of cult societies. The patrilinear Pimas and southern Californians live in villages of brush or earth-covered houses, are priestless, and know at most a single religious society. Again, the matrilineal Southern Woodlanders had made some approach to a system of town life and political institutions, the patrilineal Northern Woodlanders did without any serious institutions in these directions. The one Northeastern group that established a successful political organization, the Iroquois with their League of the Five Nations, were matrilinear among patrilinear neighbors and possessed positive affiliations with the Southeast.

It would be extravagant to maintain that throughout the North American continent every matrilineal tribe was culturally more advanced than every patrilineal one. But it is clear that within each area or type of culture the matrilineal tribes manifest superiority over the patrilineal tribes in a preponderance of cultural aspects. The matrilineal clan organization thus represents a higher and presumably later stage in North America than patrilineal clan organization, as this in turn ranks and temporally follows the clanless condition.

With one exception, the distribution of the same tribes with reference to the South Mexican center agrees with their advancement. The Northeast is distinctly peripheral, the Southeast a half-way tract connected with Mexico by way both of the Southwest and the Antilles. The matrilineal Pueblo portion of the Southwest occupies part of the plateau backbone near the southern end of which the Mexican culture developed. It was along this backbone that civilization flowed up through northern Mexico. The coasts lagged behind. They were marginal in Mexico, more marginal still in the Southwest, where the patrilineal tribes lived on or near the Pacific.

The one exception is in the Northwest Coast, where the more remote northerly tribes are matrilinear, the nearer southerly ones patrilinear. This reversed distribution raises the suspicion that the Northwestern social organization may have had nothing to do with Mexico, but may be a purely local product. This suspicion is hardened by the fact that the Northwest shows a number of other culture traits—some peculiar to itself, others recurring in well separated areas—which it seems impossible to connect with Mexico. Several of these traits will be discussed farther on. For the present it is enough to note their existence as an indication favorable to the interpretation of the Northwest social organization as unrelated to Mexico. Thus the abnormal matrilineal-patrilineal distribution in the Northwest is no bar to the generic finding for North America that clanless, patrilinear, and matrilinear organizations of society rank in this order both as regards developmental sequence and distance from Middle America.

For South America the data are too scattering to discuss profitably without rather detailed consideration.

The distributional facts outside Middle America thus point to this reconstruction of events. The original Americans were non-exogamous, non-totemic, without sibs or unilateral reckoning of descent. The first institution of exogamic groups was on the basis of descent in the male line, occurred in or near Middle America, and flowed outwards, though not to the very peripheries and remotest tracts of the continents. Somewhat later, perhaps also in Middle America, possibly at the same center, the institution was altered: descent became matrilinear. This new type of organization diffused, but in its briefer history traveled less far and remained confined to the tribes that were in most active cultural connection with Middle America.

Now, however, a seeming difficulty arises. Middle America, which appears to have evolved patrilinear and then matrilinear clans, was itself clanless at the time of European discovery.[26] The solution is that Middle America indeed evolved these institutions and then went a step beyond by abandoning or transforming them. Obviously this explanation will be validated in the degree that it can be shown that probable causes or products of the transformation existed.

186. RISE OF POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS: CONFEDERACY AND EMPIRE

In general, the transformation would seem to have been along the line of a substitution of political for social organization. Struggling villages confederated, with a fixed meeting place and established council; the authority of elected or hereditary chiefs grew, until these gave the larger part of their time to communal affairs; towns consolidated. Public works could thus be undertaken. Not only irrigating ditches and defenses, but pyramid temples were constructed. In Middle America this condition must have been attained several thousand years ago. The Mayas had passed beyond it early in the Christian era. They were then ruled by a governing class and priesthood, and were erecting dated monuments that testify to a settled existence of the more successful of their communities.

In the area of the United States, which may be reckoned as perhaps two thousand years more belated than southern Mexico, political organization was still in the incipient stage at the time of discovery. The Pueblos of the Southwest had achieved town life and considerable priestly control. They had not taken the further step of welding groups of towns into larger coherent units. In the Southeast, however, while the towns were less compact physically, and probably less populous, political integration on a democratic basis had made some headway. The institution evolved was essentially a confederacy of the members of a language group, with civil and military chiefs, council houses, and representation by “tribes” or towns and clans. From the Southeast the idea of the confederacy was carried into the Northeast by the Iroquois, whose famous league, founded perhaps before Columbus reached America, attained its culmination after the French and English settlement and the introduction of firearms. The Iroquois league was an astounding accomplishment for a culturally backward people. Its success was due to the high degree of political integration achieved. Yet it did not destroy the older clan system, in fact made skilful use of it for its own purposes of political, almost imperialistic, organization.[27]

Some stage of this sort the Mexican peoples may have passed through. The Maya form of political organization was evidently similar to that of the Pueblos, the Aztec development more like that of the Muskogeans and Iroquois. A thousand years before Columbus the Maya cities were contending for hegemony like the Greek city-states a millenium earlier. Then the Nahua peoples forged to the front; and about two centuries before the invasion of Cortez, Tenochtitlan, to-day the city of Mexico, began a series of conquests that ended in some sort of empire. It was a straggling domain of subjected and reconquered towns and tribes, interspersed with others that maintained their independence, extending from middle Mexico to Central America, containing probably several million inhabitants paying regular tribute, held together by well-directed military force, and governed by a hereditary line of half-elected or confirmed rulers of great state and considerable power. The exogamic clan organization as such had disappeared. Groups called calpulli were important in Aztec society, but they were local, or based on true kinship, and non-totemic. They may have been the made-over survivals of clans; they were not clans like those of the Southwest, Southeast, or Northwest.

Five successive stages, then, were probably gone through in the evolution of south Mexican society. First there was the pre-clan condition, without notable organization either social or political; next, a patrilinear clan system; third, a matrilinear clan system, with more important functions attaching to the clans, especially on the side of ceremonial; fourth, the beginnings of the state, as embodied in the confederacy, the clans continuing but being made use of chiefly as instruments of political machinery; fifth, the empire, loose and simple indeed, judged by Old World standards, but nevertheless an organized political achievement, in which the clans had disappeared or had been transformed into units of a different nature.

187. DEVELOPMENTS IN WEAVING

In the textile arts, since the successive stages rank one another rather obviously, and the distributions coincide well with them, the course of development is indicated plainly.

The first phase was that of hand-woven basketry, which has already been accredited to the period of immigration, and is beyond doubt ancient. All Americans made baskets at one time or another. The few tribes that were not making them at the time of discovery had evidently shelved the art because their environment provided them with birch bark, or their food habits with buffalo rawhide, with exceptional ease, and because their wants of receptacles and cooking utensils were of the simplest. That basket making goes back to a rudimentary as well as early stage of civilization is further suggested by the fact that perhaps the finest ware is made in the distinctly backward areas, such as the Plateau and California.

A second and a third phase, which are sometimes difficult to distinguish, are those of loose suspended warps and of a simple frame or incomplete loom. Pliable cords of some sort, or coarse bast threads, are employed. The objects manufactured are chiefly wallets or bags, blankets of strips of fur or feathers, hammocks, and the like. These two processes are widely spread, but not quite as far as basketry; the northern and southern extremes of the double continent do not know them. Occasionally, very fine work is done by one or the other of these two methods. The most striking example is the so-called Chilkat blanket of the Northwest Coast, a cloth-like cape, woven, without a complete loom, of mountain goat wool on cedar bark warps to a complicated pattern—a high development of a low type process.

The fourth stage is that of the true or complete loom. In America the loom is intimately associated with the cultivation of cotton. The two have the same distribution, except for some use of the plant for the twining of hammocks on a half-loom in portions of the Tropical Forest area. Disregarding this case as a probable part adaptation of a higher culture trait to a lower culture, we may define the distribution of both loom and cotton as restricted to the Middle American areas, the adjacent Southwest, and perhaps the adjacent Antilles. This is certainly central.

The fifth stage is the loom with a handle or mechanical shedding device, obviating tedious hand picking of the weft in and out of the warps. The heddle is proved only for Peru. It was probably used in Mexico. It may therefore be tentatively assumed to have been known also in the intervening Chibcha area. It is used to-day in the Southwest, but may have been introduced there by the Spaniards. This stage accordingly is limited even more strictly to the vicinity of Middle America.

The sixth stage, that of the loom whose heddles are operated by treadles, and what may be considered a seventh, the use of multiple heddles to work patterns mechanically, were never attained by any American people.

The best and finest fabrics were made in Peru, in part probably as consequence of the addition of wool to the previous repertory of cotton. This addition in turn probably followed the domestication of the llama by the Peruvians. The Mexicans had no corresponding animal to tame, and their textiles lagged behind in quality.

188. PROGRESS IN SPINNING: COTTON

Spinning and weaving are interdependent. Baskets are made of woody rods, cane splints, root fibers, or straws, all untwisted, but it is probable that the ability to twist cordage is about equally old as basketry. At any rate there is no American people ignorant of cord making. The materials are occasionally sinews, more frequently bast—that is, bark fibers. These are rolled together, almost invariably two at a time, between the palm and the naked thigh. Cordage is used for the second and third stages of weaving. The cotton employed in loom weaving does not spin well by this rolling method. It was therefore spun by being twisted between the fingers, the completed thread being wound on a spindle. This spindle served primarily as a spool or bobbin. In the Old World the distaff has been used for thousands of years. This is a spindle with a whorl or flywheel. It is dropped with a twirl, giving both twist and tension to the loose roving of linen or wool and thus converting it into yarn by a mechanical means. The New World never fully utilized this device. The Southwest to-day uses the wheeled spindle, but evidently as the result of European introduction. Old Mexican pictures and modern Maya photographs show the spindle stood in a bowl, not dropped. The whorl which it possessed was therefore little more than a button to keep the thread from slipping off the slender spindle. For Peru this is established. Thousands of spindles have been found there, normally with whorls too small and light to serve as an effective flywheel. It may then be concluded that all American spinning was essentially by hand; which is in accord with the absence from all America of any form of the wheel. The Indian spinning methods were only two: thigh rolling for bast, finger twisting for cotton.

The origin of the higher forms of spinning and weaving in Middle America is confirmed by the tropical origin of cotton, on which these developments depend. The cotton of the Southwest, for instance, was introduced from Mexico as a cultivated plant. It is derived by some botanists from a Guatemalan wild species. This may well have been the first variety to be cultivated in the hemisphere.

189. TEXTILE CLOTHING

Clothing in general is too much an adaptation to climate to render satisfactory its consideration wholly by the method here followed. But clothing of textiles shows a distribution that is culturally significant. The distribution is that of loom-woven cotton; the salient characteristic is rectangular shape: the blanket shawl, the poncho, the square shirt and skirt. In the Northwest Coast region hand and half-loom woven capes and skirts of bast were worn more or less. But these were flaring—trapezoidal, not rectangular—and thus evidently represent a separate development.

In all the cloth weaving areas, and in them only, sandals were worn. The spatial correlation is so close that there must be a connection. It may be suggested that the sandal originated, or at least owed its spread, to textile progress. Again the Northwest Coast corroborates by being unique; it is essentially a barefoot area.

To summarize. The original textile arts of the race were probably first advanced to the stages intermediate between basket and cloth making in Middle America. Thence they spread north and south, but not quite to the limits of the hemisphere, being retained in special usage chiefly in the Northwest. With the cultivation of cotton in Middle America, spinning and the loom came into use, and were ultimately carried to the Southwest, but not beyond. Cloth garments and sandals promptly followed. The heddle was evidently devised last, and did not diffuse beyond Middle America.

190. CULTS: SHAMANISM

In the matter of religious cults, seven entries have been included in Figure 35: (1h) shamanism, and (1i) crisis ceremonies, especially for girls at puberty and the whipping of adolescent boys, two more or less synchronous traits; (6a) initiating societies, and (6b) masks—also about contemporaneous; (16) priesthood; and (22) human sacrifice and (23) temples.

The shaman is an individual without official authority but often of great personal influence. His supposed power comes to him directly from the spirits as a gift or grant. He himself, as a personality, has been able to enter into a special relationship, denied to normal persons, with the supernatural world or some member thereof. The community recognizes his power after it is his: the community does not elect him to his special position, nor accept him in it by inheritance. His communion with spirits enables the shaman to foretell the future, change the weather, blast the crops or multiply game, avert catastrophes or precipitate them on foes; above all, to inflict and cure disease. He is therefore the medicine-man; a word which in American ethnology is synonymous with shaman. The terms doctor, wizard, juggler, which have established themselves in usage in certain regions, are also more or less appropriate: they all denote shamans. When he wishes to kill his private or public enemy, the shaman by his preternatural faculties injects some foreign object or destructive substance into his victim, or abstracts his soul. To cure his friends or clients, he extracts the disease object, sometimes by singing, dancing, blowing, stroking, or kneading, most often by sucking; or he finds, recaptures, and restores the soul. Of the two concepts, that of the concrete disease object is more widely spread; that of the soul theft is apparently characteristic of the more advanced tribes; but the exact distribution remains to be worked out.

The territorial extent of shamanistic ideas and practices is from the Arctic to Cape Horn. The method of acquiring power from spirits, the nature of the disease object and its process of extraction, the conviction that sickness must be caused by malevolent shamanistic power, there being no such thing as natural death; these and other specific features of the institution are sometimes surprisingly similar in North and South America. In fact, they recur in peripheral parts of the eastern hemisphere—Siberia, Australia, Africa—with such close resemblance as strongly to suggest their being the remnants of a once world-wide rudimentary form of religion or religious magic.

191. CRISIS RITES AND INITIATIONS

Crisis rites are of equally broad diffusion and apparent antiquity. They concern the critical points of human life: birth, death, sometimes marriage and childbirth; but most frequently, or at least most sacredly, they are wont to concern themselves with maturity. They are thus often puberty ceremonials, made for the welfare both of the individual and of the community, and fitting him or her for reproductive functions as well as for a career as a useful and successful community member. The girls’ adolescence rites have been described (§ 154) in some detail for California. With but minor variations, the account there given applies to the customs of many American and in fact Old World peoples. The boys’ rites come at the corresponding period of life, but their reference to sex and marriage is generally less definite. Fortitude, manliness, understanding are the qualities they are chiefly intended to test and fix. Privations like fasting, ordeals of pain, admonitions by the elders, are therefore characteristic elements of these rites. It is thus not as surprising as it might seem at first acquaintance that identical practices, such as having the boys stung by vicious ants, are occasionally found in regions as remote as California and Brazil: even the particular method may be a local survival of a wide ancient diffusion. Perhaps most common of all specific ingredients of the rite in America is a whipping of the boys. Possibly this commended itself as combining a test of fortitude and an emotional memento of the counsel imparted. At any rate it evidently became an established part of the puberty rites thousands of years ago, and thus acquired the added social momentum of an immemorial custom in many parts of both North and South America.

192. SECRET SOCIETIES AND MASKS

Out of the puberty crisis rite for boys there grew gradually a society of initiates who recruited their ranks by new initiations. As emphasis shifted from the individual to the community as represented by those already initiated, the ceremony came to be performed less for the benefit of the individual than for the maintenance of the group, the society as such, with its rites, secrets, and privileges. Very often, no one was excluded but immature boys and females; yet, if the act of admittance was to have any psychic significance, the exclusion of these elements of the community had to be made much of. Thus secrecy toward women and children was emphasized, although often the secrets simmered down largely to the fact that there were secrets.

The girls’ adolescence ceremony does not seem to have taken this course of growth, because of its more personal and bodily character, puberty in women being so much more definite a physiological event. There are women’s societies among some American tribes. But they seem to be generally a weaker imitation of the men’s societies after these were fully developed, not a direct outgrowth of the original girls’ rite.

Shamanism entered as another strain into the formation of the secret society. Medicine-men often would come to act for the public good, the occasion would be repeated regularly, and a communal ceremony with an esoteric nucleus resulted. Also, the shamans at times helped the novice shamans train and consolidate their spiritual powers. The extension of this habit perhaps sometimes led, or contributed, to the establishment of a secret society (§ 158).

Masks are closely associated with secret societies. They disguise the members to the women and boys, who are told, and often believe, that the masked personages are not human beings at all. Of course this adds to the mystery and impressiveness of the initiations, especially when the masks are fantastic or terrifying. Masks and societies thus are two related aspects of one thing. But they are by no means inseparable. There are tribes, like some of the Eskimo, who use masks but can scarcely be said to possess societies, while in the Plains and elsewhere there are definite societies that initiate without masks. Physical and economic conditions in the Arctic operating against large-scale community life or social elaboration, the masks of the Eskimo may represent merely that part of a mask-society “complex” which these people could conveniently take over when the complex reached them.

In the Southwest, among the Pueblos, there are two types of societies. There is a communal society, embracing all adult males, who are initiated at puberty by whipping and who later wear masks to impersonate spirits and dance thus for the public good. There are several smaller societies, also with secret rites, which cure sickness, recruit their membership from the cured, and use masks little or not at all. It is clear here how the two component strains, namely crisis rites and shamanistic practices, have flowed into the common mold of the society idea and become patterned by it without quite amalgamating.

193. PRIESTHOOD

This, then, was the second general stage of American religion. The third is marked by the development of the priesthood. The priest is an official recognized by the community. He has duties and powers. He may inherit, be elected, or succeed by virtue of lineage subject to confirmation. But he steps into a specific office which existed before him and continues after his death. His power is the result of his induction into the office and the knowledge and authority that go with it. He thus contrasts sharply with the shaman—logically at least. The shaman makes his position. Any person possessed of the necessary mediumistic faculty, or able to convince a part of the community of his ability to operate supernaturally, is thereby a shaman. His influence is essentially personal. In actuality, the demarcation cannot always be made so sharply. There are peoples whose religious leaders are borderline shaman-priests. Yet there are other tribes that align clearly. The Eskimo have pure shamans and nothing like priests. The Pueblos have true priests but no real shamans. Even the heads of their curing societies, the men who do the doctoring for the community, are officials, and do not go into trances or converse with spirits.

Obviously a priesthood is possible only in a well constructed society. Specialization of function is presupposed. People so unorganized as to remain in a pre-clan condition could hardly be expected to have developed permanent officials for religion. As a matter of fact they have not. There are not even clear instances of a full fledged priesthood among patrilinear sib tribes. The first indubitable priests are found among the matrilinear Southwesterners and a few of their neighbors. Thence they extend throughout the region of more or less accomplished political development in Middle America. Beyond that, they disappear.

Here once more, then, we encounter a trait substantially confined to the area of intensive culture and evidently superimposed upon the preceding stages. This makes it likely that the second stage, that of societies and masks, originated in the same center, but so long ago as to have been mostly obliterated by later developments, while continuing to flourish half way to the peripheries.

Even the priesthood is old in Middle America. This seems reasonably demonstrable. We do not know its actual beginnings there. But its surviving conditions at the edge of its area of occurrence may be taken as roughly indicative of its origin. Among the Pueblos, each priest, with his assistants, is the curator of a sacred object or fetish, carefully bundled and preserved. The fetish serves the public good, but he is its keeper. In fact he might well be said to be priest in virtue of his custodianship thereof. Associated is the concept of an altar, a painting which he makes of colored earth or meal. In the Plains area, some tribes may be somewhat hesitatingly described as having a priest or group of old men as priests. Wherever such is the case, these half-priests are the keepers of fetish-bundles; usually they make something like an altar of a space of painted earth. Areas as advanced as the Northwest Coast, where distinctive priests are wanting, lack also the bundles and altars. It looks, therefore, as if the American priesthood had originated in association with these two ceremonial traits of the fetish bundle and painted altar—both of which are conspicuously unknown in the eastern hemisphere.

194. TEMPLES AND SACRIFICE

In Middle America the fetish bundle and picture altar do not appear, apparently through supersedence by elements characteristic of the next or fourth cult stage, characterized by the temple and the stone altar used in sacrifice. Temples, however, were already in luxuriant bloom among the Maya in their Great Period of 400 to 600 A. D. The beginnings of their remarkable architecture and sculpture must of course lie much farther back; certainly toward the opening of the Christian era, very likely earlier. Before this came the presumptive initial stage of priesthood, with bundles and altar paintings or some local equivalent. If a thousand years be allowed for this phase, the commencement of the priesthood would fall in southern Mexico or Guatemala at least three thousand years ago; possibly much longer. Peru, perhaps, did not lag far behind.

Temples mark the last phase of native American religion, but the most purely religious characteristic of the period, independent of mechanical or æsthetic developments, is human sacrifice. This had long been practised by the Mayas and in Peru, but reached its culmination in the New World and probably on the planet, at least as regards frequency and routine-like character, among the Aztecs. These were a late people, by their own traditions, to rise to culture and power, attaining to little consequence before the fourteenth century. It looks therefore as if human sacrifice had been a comparatively recent practice, perhaps only one or two thousand years old when America was discovered, and still moving toward its peak.

Outside Middle America, human sacrifice was virtually nonexistent. There was considerable cannibalism in the Tropical Forest and Antilles, but no taking of life as a purely ceremonial act. For the Pueblos of the Southwest, there are some slight and doubtful suggestions, but it appears that such deaths as were inflicted were rather punishments than offerings. The one North American people admittedly sacrificing human life were the Pawnee, a Plains tribe, who once a year shot to death a girl captive amid a ritual reminiscent of that of Mexico. This has always been interpreted as suggestive of a historical connection with Mexico. In fact, the Pawnee appear to have moved northward rather recently, and most of their Caddoan relatives had remained not far from the Gulf of Mexico when discovered.

The precise origin of sacrifice is obscure, although it is significant that it was restricted to the area of concentrated population and towns. In Mexico at least there were no domesticated mammals available. The ultimate foundation of human sacrifice is no doubt the widespread and very ancient custom of offerings. It is, however, a long leap from the offering of a pinch of tobacco, a strew of meal, an arrowpoint or some feathers, or even a few bits of turquoise, to the deliberate taking of a life. Possibly the idea of self-inflicted torture served as a connection. The Plains tribes sometimes hacked off finger joints as offerings, and in their Sun Dance tore skewers out of their skins. In the northern part of the Tropical Forest knotted cords were drawn through the nose and out of the mouth—a sufficiently painful process—in magico-religious preparation. In Mexico it was common for worshipers to pierce their own ears or tongues, the idea of a blood offering combining with that of penance and mortification.

It may seem strange that so shocking a custom as human sacrifice represented the climax of American religious development. Yet in a few thousand years more of undisturbed growth, it would probably have been superseded. This is precisely what happened in the Old World, which may be reckoned as about four to five thousand years ahead of the New. In the Old World also the really lowly and backward peoples did not sacrifice men. The practice is a symptom of incipient civilization.

195. ARCHITECTURE, SCULPTURE, TOWNS

To construct stone-walled buildings seems a simple accomplishment, especially in an environment of stratified rocks that break into natural slabs. Such flat pieces pile up into a stable wall of room height without mortar, and a few log beams suffice to support a roof. Yet the greater area of the two continents seems never to have had such structures. Stone buildings are confined to Middle America and the Southwest. Outside these regions only the wholly timberless divisions of the Eskimo make huts of stone, and for their winter dwellings they are limited to choice of this material or blocks of snow. The Eskimo hut is tiny, not more than eight or ten feet across, and the weather is kept out not by any skill in masonry or plastering, but by the rude device of stuffing all crevices with sod. The Eskimo style of “building” in stone would be inapplicable in a structure of pretension. Made larger, the edifice would collapse.

The art of masonry, like agriculture, pottery, and loom weaving, may therefore be set down as having had its origin in Mexico or Peru, or possibly in both. It shows, however, this peculiarity of distribution: at both ends of the area, among the Pueblos of the Southwest in North America and among the Calchaqui of northwest Argentina in South America, living houses were stone-walled. In the intervening regions, most dwellings were of thatch or mud, public buildings of stone. The Aztec, Maya, and Inca areas have therefore left stone temples, pyramids, palaces, forts, and the like, but few towns; the Pueblo and Calchaqui, only towns.[28] How the Middle Americans were first brought to use stone is not known; but a temple built as such being a more specialized, decorative, organized edifice than a dwelling, as well as involving some degree of communal coöperation, it can safely be regarded as a later type than private dwellings. The occurrence of the stone living houses at the peripheries confirms their priority. Evidently masonry was first employed in Middle America for simple public structures: chiefs’ tombs, water works, platforms for worship. In its diffusion the art reached peoples like the Pueblos, who lived in small communities, interred their leaders without great rites, and offered no sacrifices in sight of multitudes. These marginal nations therefore took over the new accomplishment but applied it only to their homes. Meanwhile, however, the central “inventors” of masonry had grown more ambitious and were rearing ever finer and larger structures, until the superb architecture of the Mayas and the consummate stone fitting of the Incas reached their climax.

Stone sculpture grew as an accompaniment. It remained rude in Peru, and chiefly limited to idols, in keeping with the simple, massive style of architecture. But the Mayas covered their structurally bolder and more diversified religious buildings with sculpture in relief and frescoed stucco, and between them set up great carvings of animal and mythical divinities, as well as luxuriantly inscribed obelisks. Their sculpture is æsthetically the finest in America and compares in quality with that of Egypt, India, and China.

Recent excavations in the Southwest have revealed a succession of stages as regards buildings. The first houses in this region may have been thatched or earth-roofed. The earliest in which stone was used were small, dug out a few feet, the sides of the excavation lined with, upright rock slabs, and a superstructure of poles or mud-filled wattling added. Then followed a period of detached one-room houses, with rectangular walls of masonry; and finally the stage of drawing these together in clusters and raising them in terraced stories. This whole development can be traced within the area. Yet it by no means follows that it originated wholly within the area. The knowledge of laying stone in courses, the impulse or habit of doing so, might, theoretically, just as well have come from without; and evidently did actually come into the Southwest from Mexico.

This is a type of situation frequently encountered in culture history problems. A group of data seem to point to a spontaneous origin on the spot so long as they are viewed only locally, whereas a broader perspective at once reveals them as merely part of a development whose ultimate source usually lies far away. For instance, the backward Igorot tribes of the interior Philippines rear imposing terraces for their rice plots; their more advanced coastal neighbors do not. It has therefore been debated whether the Igorot invented this large-scaled terracing or learned it from the Chinese. Yet the terracing is only an incident to rice culture, which is widespread in the Orient, ancient, and evidently of mainland origin. The knowledge of terracing was therefore no doubt long ago imported into the Philippines along with rice cultivation, and the Igorot only added the special local development of carrying the terraces to a more impressive height. There is no question that the increase and better concatenation of knowledge is gradually leading to more and more certain instances of wide diffusions and fewer and fewer cases of independent origin.

Town life possesses a material aspect—that of the type and arrangement of dwellings—as well as the social and political aspects already touched on. The largest towns in America were those of Mexico and Peru, whose capitals may have attained populations of fifty to a hundred thousand. The Maya towns were smaller, in keeping with the Maya failure to develop an empire. The largest towns of the Chibcha of Colombia may have held ten or twenty thousand souls. The most flourishing pueblos of the Southwest seem never to have exceeded three thousand inhabitants. The Calchaqui towns in Andean Argentina were no larger, probably smaller. Southeastern and Northwest Coast towns ran to hundreds instead of thousands of population. These figures tell the usual story of thinning away from center to peripheries.

But local differences were sometimes significant. The Southeastern town, except for its court and rude public buildings, was straggling and semi-rural compared with the compact, storied, and alleyed Southwestern pueblo; often it was less populous. Yet its political and military development was more advanced, at any rate as a unit in the larger group of the confederacy.

196. METALLURGY

The use of metals in America falls into three stages. The peripheral and backward areas, such as Patagonia and California, and those parts of the Tropical Forest in which nature had denied a supply and remoteness had shut off trade, did wholly without metals.

In the areas of medium advancement, like the Northwest, Southwest, and the ancient Mound Builder region of the Ohio Valley, native copper was beaten out into sheets, trimmed, bent, gouged, and engraved. It was not smelted from ore nor cast. Its treatment was thus essentially by stone age processes. Gold, silver, and other metals were not used; iron only sporadically when it could be obtained in the native metallic state from a fallen meteorite. The supply even of copper was rarely large. It flowed in trade, much like precious stones among ourselves, to the wealthier groups of nations able to part with their own products in exchange for this substance prized by them for jewelry and insignia but rarely made into tools.

The third stage is that of true metallurgical processes, and is confined to the three Middle American areas. Here, copper, gold, silver, and so far as they were available tin and platinum, were sought after and worked. Copper at any rate was extracted from its ores by smelting; all the known metals were fused and cast, both in permanent molds and by the method of melting wax out of a single-time mold. Wire was beaten or drawn out; gold leaf and acid plating practised; and welding, hardening by hammering, and self-soldering were known. Alloys were made: copper-tin bronze in Bolivia and the south Peruvian highland, whence its use later spread north, perhaps being carried as far as Mexico (§ 108); copper-arsenic bronze and copper-silver alloy on the Peruvian coast; copper-gold in Colombia and Mexico; copper-lead bronze in Mexico.

Nowhere, however, was metal the standard material for tools, which continued to be mostly of stone or wood. Metallic tools and utensils, especially knives and axes, were not altogether rare in the bronze region of South America. The superior hardness of bronze as compared with copper no doubt proved a stimulus in this direction. But Maya temple-cities were built with stone tools, and the Aztecs cut and fought with obsidian. In general, metal remained treasure or ornament. There were not even the beginnings of an iron culture anywhere in the hemisphere.

In the larger outlines, the history of American metallurgy is thus simple enough, as something developed late and never diffused beyond the central region of intensive culture. As to the sequence of use of the several metals and processes, on the other hand, rather little has been ascertained. It seems that in these matters South America might have been somewhat in advance of Mexico, both in time and in degree of attainments. The age of the metallurgical arts in Middle America must not be underestimated. In spite of their relative recency, they can hardly have been less than several thousand years old.

197. CALENDARS AND ASTRONOMY

The earliest stage of anything like time reckoning in America was what might be called the descriptive moon series. The return of the seasons marked the year. Within the year, rude track was kept of the passage of time by following a series of “natural” months or lunations named after events, such as “heavy cold,” “flying geese,” “deer rutting,” or “falling leaves.” No one cared and perhaps no one knew how many days there were in a moon, let alone in a year. No one knew his age, nor, as a rule, how many years ago any event had taken place. It is a mark of pretty high civilization when people know how old they are.

From the point of view of accuracy, the moon series calendar left much to be desired, since there are something over twelve and considerably under thirteen visible lunations in a solar or seasonal year. Some tribes allowed twelve moons, others thirteen, in some different individuals disagreed. Whenever the geese actually flew, debates were settled: it was flying geese month, and every one went on with the series from there. If he had happened to get a moon ahead or behind, he accepted the event as a correction.

The moon series calendar was used by the majority of tribes in the United States and Canada.

Somewhat more advanced is the solstitial moon series. This takes one of the solstices, usually the one just before our Christmas, as the fixed beginning and end of the year. The days are noticeably shortest then. Some tribes went farther and employed landmarks to observe the place on the horizon of the sun’s rising. Until the solstice this place shifts daily southward, after it northward. Also, the noonday shadows fall longest at the winter solstice. Here then was a point in the year which was always the same, whereas the geese might fly or the leaves fall early one year and late the next. The definiteness thus obtained was followed up by numbering the moons instead of describing them, or by recognizing both solstices as a frame within which there fell two parallel groups of six moons, or of five moons and a slightly longer solstitial period.

This method also did not solve the really difficult problem of making twelve lunations and an irregular fraction fit automatically and permanently into the solar year; and provision for counting days and years was still wholly lacking. Yet the first beginnings of exact astronomical observations had been made and were utilized to give the year and its subdivisions a certain fixity.

The occurrence of the simple solstitial calendar in North America is significant. It occurs in the Southwest and Northwest: that is, in the area most directly influenced by the higher Mexican center, and the area which made most progress independently of Mexico.[29]

These two stages of the descriptive and the solstitial moon series were long ago passed through in southern Mexico and a need felt for a more precise time reckoning. No calendar can either serve accuracy or cover long periods which fails to concern itself with the exact arithmetical relation of its smaller units to its larger ones: the number of days in the month and year, for instance. This concern, would not be difficult if the relations were simple; but nature has put something over 29½ days into a lunation, something under 365¼ days and a little over 12⅓ lunations into the year. The first step ahead was undoubtedly a day count, as previously the numbering of the moons had marked an advance over their descriptive naming. The day count must have revealed the discrepancy between the actual numbers and those assumed for the larger units, such as 30 and 360. A great advance was therefore made when the natural lunation was wholly abandoned and artificial units substituted. The Mayas, or possibly some previous and forgotten people, invented a “month” of twenty days, probably because they counted by twenties instead of tens. Eighteen of these months, with five added leap days, made a 365-day year. Thirteen 20-day months made another and wholly arbitrary period of 260 days, which the Aztecs, who borrowed the system, called tonalamatl.[30] The tonalamatl had no basis in nature or astronomy and was a pure invention: a reckoning device. It ran its course concurrently with the year as two wheels of 260 and 365 cogs might engage. The same cogs would meet again at the end of 73 and 52 revolutions respectively, that is, 365 and 260 divided by 5, their highest common factor. At the end of each 52 years, therefore, the beginning of the year and of the tonalamatl again coincided, giving a “calendar round” of that duration. This 52-year period is the one by which the Aztecs dated.

The Mayas, however, did not content themselves with the 52-year period, but reckoned time by katuns of 20 and cycles of 400 years.[31] The dates on Maya inscriptions are mostly from their ninth cycle, with some from the end of the eighth and beginning of the tenth. This period corresponds approximately to the first six centuries of the Christian era. The beginning of the first cycle would fall more than 3,000 years before Christ. There is no reason to believe that this time reckoning began then. It is more likely that a little before the time of Christ the Mayas perfected this system of chronology and gave it dignity by imagining some seven or eight cycles to have passed between the beginning of the world, or some other mythological event, and the actual commencement of their record. From the close of their eighth cycle, however, the dates are apparently contemporary with the events to which they refer.

This system is so elaborate that it could scarcely have been devised and adopted all at once. There must have been a time lasting some centuries, perhaps over a thousand years, previous to the Christian era, during which the first day count was being elaborated and perfected into the classical calendar of the early post-Christian Maya monuments.

This calendar did not exhaust the astronomical and mathematical accomplishments of the Mayas. They ascertained that eight solar years correspond almost exactly with five “years” or apparent revolutions (584 days) of the planet Venus, and that 65 Venus years of a total of 37,960 days coincide with two calendar rounds of 52 solar years. They knew that their 365-day year was a fraction of a day short of the true year, determined the error rather exactly, and, while they did not interpolate any leap days, they computed the necessary correction at 25 days in 104 years or two calendar rounds. This is greater accuracy than has been attained by any calendar other than our modern Gregorian one. As regards the moon, they brought its revolutions into accord with their day count with an error of only one day in 300 years. These are high attainments, and for a people without astronomical instruments involved accurate and protracted observations as well as calculatory ability.

Much less is known of South American calendars; but, like the dwindling away from Maya to Aztec to Pueblo and finally to the rudiments of the descriptive moon series of the backward tribes in the northern continent, so there is discernible a retardation of progress as the Maya focus is left behind toward the south. The most developed calendar in South America was that of the Chibchan peoples of Colombia. Beyond them, the Inca, in their greater empire, got along with a system intermediate in its degree of development between the Aztec and the Pueblo ones. In the Tropical Forest and Patagonian areas there do not seem to have been more than moon name series comparable to those of peripheral North America.

198. WRITING