Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/195

 BOOK REVIEWS 183

Space is lacking to point out all the vagaries which fill the pages of this extraordinary chapter. These range from misstatements, such as when (p. 189) it is said that Alarcon in 1540 described Indians of the Northwest (sic) as "addicted to smoking, carrying the tobacco and the pipe in a bag tied to their arms," to the quite incomprehensible attempt to make the Mexican "chapopotli" (which was by the author's own statements, a bituminous, reddish-purple, aromatic material mixed with other substances in the filling of cigarettes) equivalent to meerschaum (pp. 149, 181-184); from the credulity which accepts without question Squier's identification of "manatee" and "toucan" pipes in the Ohio mounds (p. 168) to the assurance which, in utter disregard of all archaeological data, declares the pottery heads of San Juan Teotihuacan "negroid" and hence post-Columbian (p. 174); from the theory that the face tatu pattern shown on Arkansas pottery vessels is a direct copy of Mande cicatrices (p. 174) to the "amazing similarity" of African and North American Indian pipes. Professor Wiener's climax, however, is reached at the close of the chapter (pp. 189-190) in his discussion of the mounds, where he declares that "the very last vestige of a pre-Columbian existence of the mounds disappears" and asserts that all of the mounds were "fortifications which the traders, whether Whites or Indians, erected all the way up from Florida to the Huron country, in order to vouchsafe the trade which was established in the beginning of the six- teenth century . . . between Canada and the south." Before so simple, so comprehensive, so grandiose a conception as this, one can only stand in awe!

Much of the chapter on Bread Roots is vitiated by the same faulty reasoning and acceptance of unverified assumptions as facts, the same mis- representations and contradictions, the same total neglect of important historical and all archaeological data. He shows, and shows clearly, that there is much confusion in regard to the yam, sweet-potato, manioc and peanut and their names in the accounts of the writers of the early sixteenth century, and that many of the names apparently have a dis- tribution far beyond linguistic stock lines. He brings considerable evi- dence to show that some of these names may have been of Old World origin; but all of this does not entitle him to insist that the plants them- selves were also foreign! His inconsistency here is very apparent, for while in the case of the words for monkey, he admits and indeed tries to prove " the rapidity with which foreign words were adopted by the natives even for native commodities, if these formed a subject of commerce" (p. 206), yet in the parallel case of manioc (whose commercial use he is

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