Chapter XIII: The History of Civilization in Native America (3)

Related to calendar and mathematics in its origin was writing, which passed out of the stage of pictographs and simple ideograms only in the Mexican area. The Aztecs used the rebus method (§ 130), but chiefly for proper names, as in tribute lists and the like. The Mayas had gone farther. Their glyphs are highly worn down or conventionalized pictures, true symbols; often indeed combinations of symbols. They mostly remain illegible to us, and while they appear to contain phonetic elements, these do not seem to be the dominant constituents. The Maya writing thus also did not go beyond the mixed or transitional stage. The Chibcha may have had a less advanced system of similar type, though the fact that no remains of it have survived argues against its having been of any considerable development. The Peruvians did not write at all. They scarcely even used simple pictography. Their records were wholly oral, fortified by mnemonic devices known as quipus, series of knotted strings. These were useful in keeping account of numbers, but could of course not be read by any one but the knotter of the strings: a given knot might stand equally for ten llamas, ten men, ten war clubs, or ten jars of maize. The remainder of South America used no quipus, and while occasional pictographs have been found on rocks, they seem to have been less developed, as something customary, than among the North American tribes. All such primitive carvings or paintings were rather expressions of emotion over some event, concrete or spiritual, intelligible to the maker of the carving and perhaps to his friends, than records intended to be understood by strangers or future generations.

Connected with the fact that the highest development of American writing took place in southern Mexico, is another: it was only there that books were produced. These were mostly ritualistic or astrological, and were painted on long folded strips of maguey fiber paper or deerskin. They were probably never numerous, and intelligible chiefly to certain priests or officials.

199. THE SEVERAL PROVINCIAL DEVELOPMENTS: MEXICO

Since the calendrical and graphic achievements enumerated, together with temple sculpture, lie in the fields of science, knowledge, and art, and since they show a definite localization in southern Mexico, in fact point to an origin in the Maya area, they almost compel the recognition of this culture center as having constituted the peak of civilization in the New World.

This localization establishes at least some presumption that it was there rather than in South America that the beginnings of cultural progress, the emergence out of primitive uniformity, occurred. To be sure, it is conceivable that agriculture and other inventions grew up in Andean South America, were transported to Mexico, for some reason gained a more rapid development there, until, under the stimulus of this forward movement, further discoveries were made which the more steadily and slowly progressing Peruvian motherland of culture failed to equal. Conjectures of this sort cannot yet be confirmed or disproved. Civilization was sufficiently advanced in both Mexico and Peru to render it certain that these first beginnings now referred to, lay some thousands of years back. In the main, Mexican and Peruvian cultures were nearly on an equality, and in their fundamentals they were sufficiently alike, and sufficiently different from all Old World cultures, to necessitate the belief that they are, broadly, a common product.

Still, the superiority of the Mexicans in the sciences and arts carries a certain weight. If to this superiority are added the indications that maize and cotton were first cultivated in the south Mexican area, in other words, that the fundamentals of American agriculture and loom-weaving seem more likely to have been developed there than elsewhere; and if further the close association of pottery with agriculture throughout the western hemisphere is borne in mind, it seems likely that the seat of the first forward impetus out of the wholly primitive status of American culture is to be sought in the vicinity of southern Mexico.

200. THE ANDEAN AREA

The triumphs of Mexican civilization were in the spiritual or intellectual field; those of Peru lay rather in practical and material matters. The empire of the Incas was larger and much more rigorously organized and controlled, their roads longer and more ambitious as engineering undertakings, their masonry more massive; their mining operations and metal working more extensive. The domestication of the llama and the cultivation of certain food plants such as the potato gave their culture an added stability on the economic side.

The extent of the Inca empire, and of the smaller states that no doubt preceded it, was of influence in shaping Andean culture. Organized and directed efforts of large numbers of men were made available to a greater degree than ever before in the New World. The empire also operated in the direction of more steady industry, but its close organization and routine probably helped dwarf the higher flights of the mind. In the quality of their fabrics, jewelry, stone fitting, and road building, as well as in exactness of governmental administration, the Peruvians excelled. It is remarkable how little, with all their progress in these directions, they seem to have felt the need of advance in knowledge or art for its own sake. They thought with their hands rather than their heads. They practised skill and inhibited imagination.

The Incas, like the Aztecs in Mexico, represent merely the controlling nation during the last stage of development. Their specific culture was the local one of the highlands about Cuzco. Prehistoric remains from the coast both north and south, and in the Andean highland southward of Cuzco in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca and the adjacent parts of Bolivia, demonstrate that this Inca or Cuzco culture was only the latest of several forms of Andean culture. At the time of Inca dominion, the great temple of Tiahuanaco near Lake Titicaca was already a ruin. Pottery of a type characteristic of the Tiahuanaco district, and similar in style to its stone carvings, has been found in remote parts of the Andean area, thus indicating the district as an early center of diffusion. Other centers, more or less contemporaneous, some of them perhaps still earlier, can be distinguished along the coast. In short, the inner history of the Andean region is by no means summed up in that picture of it which the Inca domination at the time of discovery presented. New scientifically conducted excavations throughout the area will no doubt unravel further the succession of local cultural developments.

201. COLOMBIA

The Chibchas of Colombia, the intermediate member of the three-linked Middle American chain, fell somewhat, but not very far, below the Mexicans and Peruvians in their cultural accomplishments. Their deficiency lay in their lack of specific developments. They do not show a single cultural element of importance peculiar to themselves. They chewed coca, slept in hammocks, sat on low chairs or stools; but these are traits common to a large part of South America. Consequently the absence or weak development of these traits in Mexico is no indication of any superiority of the Chibchas as such. The great bulk of Colombian culture was a substratum which underlay the higher local developments of Mexico and Peru; and this substratum—varied agriculture, temples, priesthood, political organization—the Chibchas possessed without notable gaps. Whatever elements flowed from Mexico to Peru or from Peru to Mexico at either an early or a late period, therefore probably passed through them. In isolated matters they may have added their contribution. On the whole, though, their rôle must have been that of sharers, recipients, and transmitters in the general Middle American civilization.

202. THE TROPICAL FOREST

The line of demarcation between the narrow Pacific slope of South America and the broad Atlantic drainage is sharp, especially in the region of Peru. The Cordilleran stretch is arid along the coast, sub-arid in the mountains, unforested in all its most characteristic portions. East of the crest of the Andes, on the other hand, the rainfall is heavy, often excessive, the jungle thick, communication difficult and largely dependent on the waterways. Even the Caucasian has made but the slightest impression on the virgin Amazonian forest at its densest. The Inca stretched his empire a thousand miles north and a thousand to the south with comparative ease, establishing uniformity and maintaining order. He did not penetrate the Tropical Forest a hundred miles. At his borders, where the forest began, lived tribes as wild and shy as any on earth. The Andean civilization would have had to be profoundly modified to flourish in the jungle, and the jungle had too little that was attractive to incite to the endeavor. Some thousands of years more, perhaps, might have witnessed an attempt to open up the forest and make it accessible. Yet when one recalls how little has been done in this direction by Caucasian civilization in four centuries, and how superficial its exploitation for rubber and like products has been, it is clear that such a task would have been accomplished by the Peruvians only with the utmost slowness.

Yet various culture elements filtered over the Andes into the hidden lowlands. The Pan’s pipe, for instance, an element common to the Andes and the Forest, is likely to have originated in the higher center. Elements like the blowgun, the hammock, the chair or stool, are typical of the northern Forest and Antilles, and may have infiltrated these areas from Colombia or even been locally developed. The same is true of the cultivation of the cassava or manioc plant, from which we draw our tapioca. This, the great staple of the Forest region, is better adapted to its humid climate than is maize, which flourishes best in a sub-arid environment. Cassava may therefore be looked upon as perhaps a local substitute for maize, evolved as a domesticated plant under the stimulus of an already established maize agriculture. Its cultivation has evidently spread through the Forest region from a single source, since the specialized processes of preparing it for food—the untreated root is poisonous—are relatively uniform wherever it is grown. Maize is not unknown in the area, but less used than cassava wherever the forest is dense.

A characteristic quality of those Forest culture-traits which are not common ancient American inheritance, is that, whether of Middle American or local origin, they are detached fragments, particular devices having little or no relation to one another, like the hammock and the blowgun, or cassava and the Pan’s pipe. Original fundamental processes, higher accomplishments necessitating order or organization of effort, are lacking. This is precisely the condition which might be anticipated when a culture too low to take over a higher one in its entirety had borrowed from it here and there, as the Forest peoples undoubtedly have borrowed from Middle America.

Three districts within the Forest area have previously been mentioned (§ 174) as regions in which the forest becomes open or disappears, and whose type of culture is locally modified: Guiana, eastern Brazil, and the Chaco. Of these the Brazilian highlands constitute an area of unusually deficient culture. In parts of them agriculture and pottery seem to be lacking. These highlands are perhaps to be construed as an interior marginal region representing an isolation within the greater Forest area. Had these highlands been in juxtaposition to the Andean area, or even situated near it, they would presumably have been able to take over Andean culture elements more successfully than the low-lying Forest, and would then have stood out from this through superiorities instead of absences. Their remoteness, however, enabled the intervening Forest region to shut them off from Andean influences of consequence, while giving to them only part of its own low cultural content.

The peculiarities of the Chaco are due to the opposite reason. The Chaco is a partly open country at the southerly extremity of the Forest. It lies close to the foot of the Andes where these broaden out into the southern Bolivian plateau. It also shades off into the treeless Patagonian region. It is thus open to influences from three sides, and its culture appears to represent a mixture of the three adjacent ones. The basis would seem to be the culture of the Tropical Forest, but definite Patagonian as well as Andean elements are traceable.

203. PATAGONIA

Patagonia is par excellence the peripheral region of South America, culturally as well as geographically. As regards civilization, this is true in the highest degree at the extreme tip of the continent about Tierra del Fuego. Many of the most widely spread South American culture traits being lacking here, there is a curious resemblance to the northerly tribes of North America.

Yet even this culturally disinherited area is not without a few local developments of relatively high order. The most striking is the plank-built canoe of the south Chilean archipelago. The skill to carpenter such boats was exercised in only one other region in the hemisphere; the Santa Barbara Islands of California. Curiously enough the latter is also a district of comparatively backward culture. In any event this built-up canoe of the rude people of the extreme south contrasts strikingly with the lack of any real boats among the advanced nations in the Andean area. The moral would seem to be that it is speculative to base much theory or explanation on any single culture trait.

Of other elements specific to the Patagonian region, there might be mentioned coiled basketry (§ 104) and the bolas. This is a hunting weapon of three stones attached to ropes swung so as to wind around the neck or legs of game. Except at the extreme south, Patagonian culture was profoundly modified by the introduction of the horse, which soon after the arrival of the Spaniards multiplied on the open plains. The horse enlarged the ability of the Patagonian tribes to take game, especially in the Pampas in the north, increased their wealth, and strengthened their warlike interests. The same change occurred in the Chaco.

204. NORTH AMERICA: THE SOUTHWEST

In North America the Southwest area lies at the point where the continent spreads out fanwise. It is therefore the gate or transforming station through which Mexican influences flowed on their way to the various areas beyond. Whatever of Mexican culture the Pueblos received and accepted, they worked over before they passed it on. This reconstitution gave the culture a new color. Nearly every one on first coming in contact with Southwestern culture has been struck with its distinctive cast. Analysis, however, shows few intrinsic elements peculiar to it. The novelty as compared with Mexico lies in a different emphasis or a new arrangement of the elements. Masonry, for instance, is used for dwellings instead of temples. Town life is well developed, but the political organization which accompanies it in Mexico is much weaker in the Southwest.

205. THE SOUTHEAST

Superficially, Southeastern culture appears different from Southwestern. Much of the seeming difference is due to the wooded and rather humid environment; another portion is accounted for by the failure of the Southeastern tribes to build in stone. But there are differences that go deeper, such as the poverty of Southeastern ritual and the comparative strength of political organization. The religious dwarfing may be attributed to greater distance from Mexico.

The precise routes of diffusion into the Southeast are not wholly clear. The culture center of the area lay on or near the lower Mississippi—sufficiently close to the Southwest. Yet the district which is now Texas intervened, and this was one of distinctly lower culture, largely occupied by tribes with Plains affiliation. Theoretically it would have been possible for cultural elements to travel from Mexico along the Texas coast to the Southeast. Yet what little is known about the tribes of this coast indicates that they were backward. A third possibility for the transmission of culture was from the Antilles, especially by the short voyage from Cuba or the Bahamas to the point of Florida. Some connections by this route almost certainly took place. But they seem to have affected chiefly the peninsula of Florida, and to have brought less into the Southeast as a whole than reached it overland.

206. THE NORTHERN WOODLAND

The Northeast was historically dependent on the Southeast as this was on the Southwest and the Southwest on Mexico. It was thus the third stage removed from the origins in Middle America. It was inferior to the Southeast in several points. Pottery was cruder, clans mostly patrilinear instead of matrilinear, town and tribal life less organized. Some exceptions within the Northeast can be traced to direct influences or migrations from the Southeast. The matrilinear and confederated Iroquoian tribes of the Northeast, for instance, were linguistic relatives of the Cherokee in the Southeast.

A similar movement of culture or peoples, or both, occurred at an earlier time and has left as its remains the mounds of the Ohio valley—local equivalents of the Mexican temple pyramid. Some of these are of surprising bulk, and others have the form of animals. Associated with them are earthwork fortifications which indicate coherent populational groups of some size. The industries of the Mound Builders were also on a somewhat higher level, especially as regards artistic quality, than those of the historic tribes of the region. In detail the Mound Builder culture represents many interesting points that remain to be cleared up. In the large, however, it was a temporary local extension of the Southeastern culture, from which flowed its occasional resemblances to Middle America.

207. PLAINS AREA

The Plains area is adjacent to the Southwest, but a review of its culture elements shows that a surprisingly small fragment of Southwestern civilization penetrated it. The most advanced Plains tribes seem rather to have been in dependence on the Southeast. This is probably to be explained as the result of a flow of culture up the more immediate Mississippi valley. The western Plains, close to the Rocky mountains, were sparsely populated in aboriginal times, and life there must have been both unsettled and narrow in its scope. Contacts between these western Plains and the Southwest no doubt existed, but presumably the Plains tribes were too backward, and too engrossed in their own special adaptation to their environment, to profit much by what they might have borrowed from the Pueblos.

Certain specific culture traits were developed on the Plains. The nearly exclusive dependence on buffalo stunted the culture in some directions, but led to the originating of other features. Thus the Plains tribes came to live in tipis—tents made of the skin of the buffalo—pitched these in regular order in the camp circle, and traveled with the bundled tents lashed to a “travois” frame dragged by dogs. While they never accomplished anything notable in the way of confederating themselves into larger stable groups, nor even in effective warfare, they did develop a system of “coup counting” or military honors which loomed large in their life.

During the seventeenth century the horse was introduced or became abundant on the Plains. It reached the Indians from Spanish sources, as is shown by their adopting modifications of Spanish riding gear and methods of mounting. The horse gave them an extension of range and a greater sureness of food supply; more leisure also resulted. The consequence was a general upward swing of the culture, which put it, as regards outward appearances, on a par with the cultures of other areas that in purely aboriginal times had outranked the Plains. This development due to the horse is in many ways comparable to that which occurred in the Patagonian area, but with one difference. The Patagonians possessed a meager culture. The introduction of the horse resulted in their hybridizing two elements so dissimilar as their own low civilization and the Caucasian one. The Plains culture had a somewhat fuller content. The Plains tribes were also protected from intimate Caucasian contacts for nearly two centuries, during which they were able to use the new and valuable acquisition of the horse to enrich and deepen their culture without essentially remodeling it. Horse transport was substituted for dog transport, tipis became more commodious and comfortable, the camp circle spread out larger, more property could be accumulated. Warfare continued to be carried on as a species of game with military honors as prizes, but now provided the added incentive of substantial booty of herds easily driven off.

208. THE NORTHWEST COAST

The North Pacific coast is the most anomalous of the North American areas, and its history is in many ways unique. It is nearer in miles to the Southwest and Mexico than is the Northeast, yet agriculture and pottery never reached it. At the same time the Northwest culture is obviously more than a marginal one. People with so elaborate a social organization as these Coast tribes, and with so outstanding an art, were certainly not peripheral dependents. The explanation is that much of the development of culture in the Middle American region never became established in the Northwest, but that this area manifested a vitality and initiative of its own which led to the independent development of a number of important culture constituents. The art is in the main of such local origin, since it does not affiliate closely with the art of other areas. Very important too was the stress increasingly laid on wealth in the Northwest. Society was stratified in terms of it. The potlatch, a combination of feast, religious ceremony, and distribution of property, is another peculiar outcome of the same tendency. The use of dentalium shells as a sort of standard currency is a further manifestation. The working of wood was carried farther than anywhere else. Several traits, such as the solstitial calendar and matrilinear clans, which the Northwest Coast shares with other areas, have already been cited as probable instances of independent evolution on the spot.

All in all, then, it is necessary to look upon the Northwest Coast culture as one that fell far short of the high civilizations of Middle America, in fact barely equaled that of the Southwest, yet as the only one in the New World that grew to any notability with but slight dependence on Middle America. It is an isolated secondary peak standing aloof from the greater one that culminated in Mexico and Peru and to which all the remainder of the hemisphere was subordinate. Figure 35 visualizes this historic relation.

209. NORTHERN MARGINAL AREAS

The Arctic, Mackenzie, Plateau, and California areas were also but little influenced by Middle American civilization. In fact, most of the elements which they share with it may be considered direct survivals of the general proto-American culture out of which the early Middle American civilization emerged. Yet why these areas on the Pacific side of North America should have profited so much less by the diffusion of Mexican advancement than the areas on the Atlantic, is not clear. In the mostly frozen Arctic and Mackenzie tracts, the hostile environment may have forbidden. But this explanation certainly does not apply to the California area which lies at the very doors of the Southwest and yet refrained from taking over such fundamentals as agriculture and pottery. Sparseness of population cannot be invoked as a cause, since at least along the coast the density of population was greater than in almost all the eastern half of the continent.

Of the people of these four areas, the Eskimo are the only ones that evinced notable originality. It is easy to attribute this quality of theirs to the stern rigor of environment. In fact, it has been customary to appeal to the Eskimo as an example of the popular maxim that necessity is the mother of invention. Yet it is clear that no great weight can be attached to this simple philosophy. It is true that without his delicately adjusted harpoon, his skin boat, his snow hut, his dog sled, and his seal oil lamp, the Eskimo could not have maintained an existence on the terrifically inhospitable shores of the Arctic. But there is nothing to show that he was forced to live in this environment. Stretches of mountains, desert, and tundra in other parts of the world were often left uninhabited by uncivilized peoples. Why did not the Eskimo abandon his Arctic shore or refuse to settle it in the first place, crowding his way instead into some more favorable habitat? His was a sturdy stock that should have had at least an equal chance in a competition with other peoples.

Furthermore it is evident that rigorous environment does not always force development or special cultural adaptations. The tribes of the Mackenzie-Yukon and the most northerly part of the Northeast area lived under a climate about as harsh as that of the Eskimo. In fact they were immediate neighbors; yet their culture is definitely more meager. A series of the most skilled devices of the Eskimo were wanting among them. If necessity were truly as productive a cause of cultural progress as is commonly thought, these Athabascan and Algonkin Indians should have been stimulated into a mechanical ingenuity comparable to that of the Eskimo, instead of continuing to rank below them.

These considerations compel the conclusion that the Eskimo did not develop the achievements of his culture because he lived in his difficult environment, but that he lived in the environment because he possessed a culture capable of coping with it. This does not mean that he had his culture worked out to the last detail before he settled on the American shores of the Arctic ocean. It does mean that he possessed the fundamentals of the culture, and the habits of ingenuity, the mechanical and practical turn of mind, which enabled him to carry it farther and meet new requirements as they came up. Where and how he acquired the fundamentals is obscure. It is well to remember in this connection that the physical type of the Eskimo is the most distinctive in the New World, and that his speech has as yet shown no inclination to connect with any other American language. It is conceivable that the origin of the Eskimo is to be set at a time later than that of the American race and somewhere in Asia. The fact that at present there are Eskimo villages on the Siberian side of Behring Strait is too recent and local a phenomenon to afford strong confirmation of such a view, but certainly does not operate against it. Somewhere in the Siberian region, then, within occasional reach of influences emanating from higher centers of civilization in Asia or Europe, the Eskimo may have laid the foundations of their culture, specialized it further as they encountered new conditions in new Asiatic habitats, and evolved only the finishing touches of their remarkable adaptation after they spread along the northernmost shores of America. Some of the Old World culture influences which had reached them before they entered America may go back to the Magdalenian culture of the Palæolithic. There are at any rate certain resemblances between Magdalenian and Eskimo cultures that have repeatedly impressed observers: the harpoon, spear thrower, lamp, carving, and graphic art (§ 67).

210. LATER ASIATIC INFLUENCES

One set of influences the Eskimo, and to a lesser degree the peoples of adjacent areas, were unquestionably subject to and profited by: sporadic culture radiations of fairly late date from Asia. Such influences were probably not specially important, but they are discernible. They came probably as disjected bits independent of one another. There may have been as many that reached America and failed of acceptance as were actually taken up. In another connection (§ 92) it has been pointed out how the tale known as the “Magic Flight” has spread from its Old World center of origin well into northwestern America. A similar case has been made out for a material element: the sinew-backed or composite bow (§ 101), first found some three to four thousand years ago in western Asia. This is constructed, in Asia, of a layer each of wood, sinew, and horn; in its simpler American form, which barely extends as far south as the Mexican frontier, of either wood or horn reinforced with sinew. Body armor of slats, sewn or wound into a garment, seems to have spread from Asia to the Northwest Coast. The skin boat, represented in its most perfect type by the Eskimo kayak; the tipi or conical tent of skins; birchbark vessels; sleds or toboggans with dog traction; bark canoes with underhung ends; and garments of skin tailored—cut and sewn—to follow the contours of the body, may all prove to represent culture importations from Asia. At any rate they are all restricted in America to the part north and west of a line connecting the St. Lawrence and Colorado rivers, the part of the continent that is nearest to Asia. South and east of this line, apparently, Middle American influences were strong enough to provide the local groups with an adequate culture of American source; and, the Asiatic influences being feeble on account of remoteness, Asiatic culture traits failed of acceptance. It is also noteworthy that all of the traits last mentioned are absent on the Northwest Coast, in spite of its proximity to Asia. The presumable reason is that the Northwest Coast, having worked out a relatively advanced and satisfactory culture adaptation of its own, had nothing to gain by taking over these elementary devices; whereas to the culturally poorer peoples of the Arctic, Mackenzie, Plateau, and in part of the California, Plains, and Northeastern areas, they proved a valuable acquisition.

A careful analysis of Eskimo culture in comparison with north and east Asiatic culture may reveal further instances of elements that have spread from one hemisphere to the other. Yet the sum total of such relatively late contributions from the civilization of the Old World to that of the New, during the last one or two or three or four thousand years, is not likely to aggregate any great bulk. Since the early culture importation of the period of the settlement of America eight or ten thousand years ago, the influences of the Old World have always been slight as compared with the independent developments within the New World. Even within the northwestern segment of North America, the bulk of culture would seem to have been evolved on the spot. But mingled with this local growth, more or less modifying it in the nearer regions, and reaching its greatest strength among the Eskimo, has been a trickling series of later Asiatic influences which it would be mistaken wholly to overlook.