Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/396

384 later is represented in Johnson Canyon, a tributary of the Mancos on the opposite side from the flows that drain the Mesa Verde. This is but an extension of the Mesa Verde cliff-dweller culture and at least approximately contemporaneous. On the mesas at the head of Johnson and parallel southern canyons were discovered the remains of an earlier culture characterized by the absence of terrace architecture and corrugated pottery. Rooms were usually sunk into the ground, lined with upright slabs, and the walls carried up by means of mud-coated poles. They were grouped into houses of as many as a hundred contiguous rooms. Corn was grown. The pottery is remarkably variable in form, crude technically, and more often than not unpainted. The designs appeal to the reviewer as being more similar to those of modern Yuman pottery than any others in the Southwest. Obviously this is a pre-pueblo culture more or less allied to that sometimes called "slab-house."

It is out of investigations like this that the history of the region is being pieced into an ever more coherent and well-founded whole. The author cannot be commended too highly for the terse excellence of his descriptions; and his illustrations illustrate.

This is the third of a series of ethnobotanical monographs brought out by the Bureau of Ethnology, and covers the subject for the Plains as the Zuni and Tewa studies have dealt with the Southwest. The region specially represented is Nebraska, the tribes from which data were obtained by the author being the Teton Dakota, Omaha, Ponka, and Pawnee. Eastern tribes as far as the Atlantic coast are adduced in comparisons, but there is almost no reference to the ethnobotany of the Southwest, intermountain region, or Pacific coast. The first-hand information from the four Nebraska tribes seems to have been gathered reliably and accurately. There are some interesting notes on cultivation of plants that it has recently become difficult for the Indians to secure wild; and an argument that the watermelon is part of indigenous American agriculture. Some weight must be given the evidence presented on this point; but there can be no final verdict until an unprejudiced monographic botanical judgment is rendered.

Like the numerous previous ethnobotanical studies of the compilatory kind, this one leaves the impression of having been made in