Chapter II: Eastern Indian Crania in General

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

In connection with the study of the Munsee and in order to clarify, if possible, the physical affiliations of this important group of the Lenape, the writer undertook an examination of all crania of the Eastern Indians that now exist in the collections of the United States National Museum, the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology at Cambridge, Phillips Academy at Andover, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Valentine Museum at Richmond, in addition to a number of specimens sent to him from other institutions.[114] The total number of crania studied in the course of this investigation aggregated 253, of which 121 were of males and 132 of females.

Former records on American crania from Eastern Indians are scarce, and in most instances so imperfect or antiquated as to be of little value. The earliest data are those of Morton and Meigs,[115] based on the collections now in The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. In 1862 Sir Daniel Wilson, of Toronto, published his _Prehistoric Man_, in two volumes, in the second volume of which he gives measurements of 39 male and 18 female Huron (Iroquois) skulls. Unfortunately these measurements are few in number, are recorded in inches, and were determined with instruments of whose character there is no record, although presumably they were such as had been used by Morton and Meigs. Later brief references to eastern Canadian crania by Dr. David Boyle will be found in the _Annual Archæological Reports_ of Ontario. In 1867 measurements of five Algonquian and Iroquois skulls were included by Dr. J. Barnard Davis in his _Thesaurus Craniorum_ (pp. 224-5), and in 1879 a few measurements of four Huron skulls were given by Quatrefages and Hamy in their _Crania Ethnica_ (parts 10-11, p. 472).

[114] See the Appendix, page 127.

[115] _Crania Americana_, _Catalogue_, and other contributions. See the bibliographies in the writer’s Physical Anthropology in America, _Amer. Anthropologist_, 1914, XVI, pp. 508-554.

In 1880 there appeared, in the _Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History_, a paper of 10 pages, with 2 plates, by Lucien Carr, at that time assistant curator of the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, on the crania of New England Indians, in which measurements of 67 skulls are given; but, as the present writer found subsequently by examination and remeasurement of some of the same specimens, the sexual identification, as well as the measurements, were too faulty to warrant their use in this report. During the same year there appeared _A List of the Specimens in the Anatomical Collections of the United States Army Medical Museum_, by Dr. George A. Otis, which gave measurements of hundreds of American crania, including a number from the Eastern states; but these measurements also in many instances were made imperfectly, so that the records can not be profitably utilized. Flower’s _Catalogue_ gives the measurements of one Mohawk skull. Virchow, in his _Crania Ethnica Americana_, includes no specimen from the central or northern states bordering on the Atlantic. In 1899 Dr. Frank Russell[116] published some observations and measurements on Indian crania, among which were included a number from the New England states, more particularly from Massachusetts; and finally, in 1902, the writer published his _Crania of Trenton_,[117] which gave measurements of all the Lenape skulls, as well as those of some other Eastern Indians, then known.[118]

[116] _American Naturalist_, 1899, p. 33.

[117] _Bulletin Amer. Museum of Natural History_, XVI, pp. 23-62.

[118] Just as this memoir is about to go to the printer, there appears a study, by Marian Vera Knight, on _The Craniometry of Southern New England Indians_ (Yale Univ. Press, 1915, IV, pp. 1-36, 9 pl.), constituting a report on approximately 90 skulls, many of them imperfect, from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. A majority of the specimens are those that have already been studied by Carr and Russell, and more especially by the present writer. The results agree closely with those shown in this report, although Miss Knight includes some specimens that may safely be regarded as extraneous, and has not been entirely fortunate in the matter of some of her measurements and comparisons.

All the specimens described by the American authors above mentioned and that could still be located (which was possible in a large majority of the cases), were reexamined, consequently the following records are based solely on the measurements and observations by the present writer. Important additional Huron material, which it was found impracticable to include in these studies, exists in the museum of Laval University at Quebec and in the Provincial Museum at Toronto.

The 283 crania here included are not distributed evenly over the Atlantic states. There are fairly representative series from eastern Canada, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, but only a few specimens from Connecticut, and very few from Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The climatic conditions and the soil of the more southerly of these states are not favorable to the preservation of skeletal remains, which, moreover, were probably never very abundant. Furthermore, many of the specimens available for examination were found more or less damaged, so that not all the important measurements could be obtained. Owing to these conditions the present study must necessarily leave many points for future corroboration or correction; however, the results obtained shed much light on the physical characteristics and relations of the Eastern Indians.

As above noted, the collections included cover the territory from southeastern Canada to Virginia, and, roughly speaking, from the easternmost lakes and the Appalachian mountains to the Atlantic. From northward and northwestward of this region skeletal material is scarce, and the same is true of the Southern states until we reach Florida; while to the westward the conditions are more complex and will best form part of a separate discussion.

The entire region covered by the collections, with a single exception, is characterized by a complete absence of both intentional and cradle-board deformation of the skull; the exception applies to the Munsee, among whom prevailed to a moderate extent the practice of frontal (fronto-occipital) compression. As this practice was very general to the southward and southwestward of the section here involved and was completely absent elsewhere beyond its boundaries, its occurrence among the Munsee, even to a limited extent, indicates that this tribe had some close connection in those directions, in which respect it differs from the rest of the Lenape. The well-known accession to the tribe, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, of some Shawnee, whose home was to the southwestward as far as Kentucky and Tennessee, may, as already suggested, explain this occurrence.

A consequential result of the study of the Eastern crania here included is that they all belong to one and the same fundamental type, which we now know in the northeast as that of the Algonquian and Iroquois, in the west as the Shoshonean, farther south as the Piman-Aztec, and in South America as the Andean, “Lagoa Santa,” or Pampas type. However, in the territory under consideration, as elsewhere, this type is far from being homogeneous, differing sometimes in an important way almost from tribe to tribe. The differences are evidently due partly to intermixture with the other or brachycephalic American type and partly to locally developed or perpetuated variations.

In the several series of skulls here dealt with there is plain evidence of admixture in the majority of the groups, which, though mostly slight, increased from the north to the south. This admixture consists uniformly of brachycephalic elements, in some localities males, in others females, which doubtless were derived from farther west, southwest, and south. There are only four groups from which such admixture is absent, namely, those from Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Long Island. The conditions in this respect are presented in the following table: