Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/860

Rh Paraguay R.;, Ecuador; , Peru; Laman, N.E. Peru; Lulean, Vermejo R.; Mainan, S. Ecuador; Matacoan, Vermejo R.; Mocoan, Colombia; Mosetenan, E. Bolivia; , T. del Fuego; Paniquitan, Colombia; Panoan, Ucayali R., Peru; Payaguan, Chaco; Puquinan, Titicaca L.; Samucan, Bolivia; Tacanan, N. Bolivia; , Brazil; Timotean, Venezuela; , Amazon R.; , Patagonia; , T. del Fuego; Yuncan, Truxillo, Peru; Yurucarian, E. Bolivia; , Ecuador.

Written language was largely hierographic and heroic. The drama, the cult image, the pictograph, the synecdochic picture, the ideaglyph, were steps in a progress without a break. The warrior painted the story of conflicts on his robe only in part, to help him recount the history of his life; the Eskimo etched the prompters of his legend on ivory; the Tlinkit carved them on his totem post; the women fixed them in pottery, basketry, or blankets. At last, the central advanced tribes made the names of the abbreviated pictures useful in other connexions, and were far on the way to a syllabary. Intertribal communication was through gestures; it may be, survivals of a primordial speech, antedating the differentiated spoken languages. See publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, by F. W. Hodge (1906); Farrand, ''Basis of Am. History'', chap. xviii.; and Orozco y Berra, Geografia de las lenguas, &c. (Mexico, 1868).

To supply their wants the Americans invented modifications in natural materials, the working of which was their industries. The vast collections in richly endowed European and American museums are the witnesses and types of these. There is danger of confounding the products of native industries. The following classes must be carefully discriminated:—(a) pre-Columbian, (b) Columbian, (c) pre-contact, (d) first contact, (e) post-contact, (f&#8202;) present, and (g) spurious. Pre-Columbian or pre-historic material is further classified into that which had been used by Indians before the discovery, and such as is claimed to be of a prior geological period. Columbian, or 15th-century material, still exists in museums of Europe and America, and good descriptions are to be found in the writings of contemporary historians. Pre-contact material is such as continued to exist in any tribe down to the time when they were touched by the presence of the trade of the whites. In some tribes this would bring the student very near to the present time; for example, before Steinen, the Indians in Matto Grosso were in the pre-contact period. Post-contact material is genuine Indian work more or less influenced by acculturation. It is interesting in this connexion to study also first contact in its lists of articles, and the effects produced upon aboriginal minds and methods. For example, a tribe that would jump at iron arrow-heads stoutly declined to modify the shafts. Present material is such as the Indian tribes of the two Americas are making to-day. Spurious material includes all that mass of objects made by whites and sold as of Indian manufacture; some of it follows native models and methods; the rest is fraudulent and pernicious. The question whether similarities in technology argue for contact of tribes, or whether they merely show corresponding states of culture, with modifications produced by environment, divides ethnologists. (See Farrand, chap. xviii.)

The study of mechanics involves materials, tools, processes and products. No iron tools existed in America before the invasion of the whites. Mineral, vegetable and animal substances, soft and hard, were wrought into the supply of wants by means of tools and apparatus of stone, wood and bone—tools for cutting, or edged tools; tools for abrading and smoothing the surfaces of substances, like planes, rasps and sand-paper; tools for striking, that is, pounding for the sake of pounding, or for crushing and fracturing violently; perforating tools; devices for grasping and holding firmly. These varied in the different culture provinces according to the natural supply, and the presence or absence of good tool material counted for as much as the presence or absence of good substances on which to work. As a means of grading progress among the various tribes, the tool is valuable both in its working part and its hafting, or manual part. Fire drills were universal.

Besides chipped stone knives, the teeth of rodents, sharks, and other animals served an excellent purpose. In north-west America and in the Caribbean area the adze was highly developed. In Mexico, Colombia and Peru the cutting of friable stone with tough volcanic hammers and chisels, as well as rude metallurgy, obtained, but the evidences of smelting are not convincing. Engineering devices were almost wanting. The Eskimo lifted his weighted boat with sheer-legs made of two paddles; he also had a tackle without sheaves, formed by reaving a greased thong through slits cut in the hide of a walrus. The north-west coast Indians hoisted the logs that formed the plates of their house frames into position with skids and parbuckles of rope. The architectural Mexicans, Central Americans, and especially the Peruvians, had no derricks or other hoisting devices, but rolled great stones into place along prepared ways and up inclined planes of earth, which were afterwards removed. In building the fortress of Sacsahuaman, heights had to be scaled; in Tiahuanaco stones weighing 400 tons were carried seventeen miles; in the edifices of Ollantaytambo not only were large stones hauled up an ascent, but were fitted perfectly. The moving of vast objects by these simple processes shows what great numbers of men could be enlisted in a single effort, and how high a grade of government it was which could hold them together and feed them. In Arizona, Mexico and Peru, reservoirs and aqueducts prove that hydrotechny was understood. (Hodge, Am. Anthrop. vi. 323.)

Time-keeping devices were not common. Sun-dials and calendar monuments were known among the more advanced tribes. Fractional portions of time were gauged by shadows, and time of day indicated by the position of the sun with reference to natural features. No standards of weighing or measuring were known, but the parts of the body were the units, and money consisted in rare and durable vegetable and animal substances, which scarcely reached the dignity of a mechanism of exchange. If the interpretation of the Maya calculiform glyphs be trustworthy, these people had carried their numeral system into the hundreds of thousands and devised symbols for recording such high numbers. (See Bulletin 28, Bur. Am. Ethnol.)

The Americans were, in most places, flesh-eaters. The air, the waters and the land were their base of supplies, and cannibalism, it is admitted, was widespread. With this animal diet everywhere vegetable substances were mixed, even in the boreal regions. Where the temperature allowed, vegetable diet increased, and fruits, seeds and roots were laid under tribute. Storage was common, and also the drying of ripened fruits. The most favoured areas were those where corn and other plants could be artificially produced, and there barbaric cultures were elaborated. This farming was of the rudest kind. Plots of ground were burned over, trees were girdled, and seeds were planted by means of sharpened sticks. The first year the crop would be free from weeds, the second year only those grew whose seeds were wafted or carried by birds, the third year the crop required hoeing, which was done with sticks, and then the space was abandoned for new ground. Irrigation and terrace culture were practised at several points on the Pacific slope from Arizona to Peru. The steps along which plant and animal domestication passed upwards in artificiality are graphically illustrated in the aboriginal food quest.

Except in the boreal areas the breech-clout was nearly universal with men, and the cincture or short petticoat with women. Even in Mexican and Mayan sculptures the gods are arrayed in gorgeous breech-clouts. The foot-gear in the tropics was the sandal, and, passing northward, the moccasin, becoming the long boot in the Arctic. Trousers and the blouse were known only among the Eskimo, and it is difficult to say how much these have been modified by contact. Leggings and skin robes took their place southward, giving way at last to the nearly nude. Head coverings also were gradually tabooed south of the 49th parallel. Tattooing and painting the body were well-nigh universal. Labrets, i.e. pieces of bone, stone, shell, &c., were worn as ornaments in the lip (Latin, labrum) or cheek by Eskimo, Tlinkit, Nahuatlas and tribes on the Brazilian coast. For ceremonial purposes all American tribes were expert in the masquerade and dramatic apparel. A study of these in the