Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/863

ARCHAEOLOGY] historic tribes makes plain the motives in gorgeous Mexican sculptures.

The tribal system of family organization, universal in America, dominated the dwelling. The Eskimo underground houses of sod and snow, the Déné (Tinneh) and Sioux bunch of bark or skin wigwams, the Pawnee earth lodge, the Iroquois long house, the Tlinkit great plank house, the Pueblo with its honeycomb of chambers, the small groups of thatched houses in tropical America and the Patagonian toldos of skin are examples. The Indian habitation was made up of this composite abode, with whatever out-structures and garden plots were needed. A group of abodes, however joined together, constituted the village or home of the tribe, and there was added to these a town hall or large assembly structure where men gathered and gossiped, and where all dramatic and religious ceremonies were held. Powell contends that in a proper sense none of the Indian tribes was nomadic, but that, governed by water-supply, bad seasons and superstition (and discomfort from vermin must be added), even the Pueblo tribes often tore down and rebuilt their domiciles. The fur trade, the horse, the gun, disturbed the sedentary habit of American tribes. Little attention was paid to furniture. In the smoke-infested wigwam and hut the ground was the best place for sitting or sleeping. The communal houses of the Pacific coast had bunks. The hammock was universal in the tropics, and chairs of wood or stone. Eating was from the pot, with the hand or spoon. Tables, knives, forks and other prandial apparatus were as lacking as they were in the palaces of kings a few centuries before. (Morgan, Houses and House Life; Farrand, p. 286.)

Stone-working was universal in America. The tribes quarried by means of crowbars and picks of wood and bone. They split the silicious rocks with stone hammers, and then chipped them into shape with bone tools. Soapstone for pottery was partly cut into the desired shape in the native ledge, broken or prised loose, and afterwards scraped into form. Paint was excavated with the ubiquitous digging-stick, and rubbed fine on stones with water or grease. For polished stonework the material was pecked by blows, ground with other stones, and smoothed with fine material. Sawing was done by means of sand or with a thin piece of harder stuff. Boring was effected with the sand-drill; the hardest rocks may have been pierced with specially hard sand. At any rate stones were sawed, shaped, polished, carved and perforated, not only by the Mexicans, but among other tribes. For building purposes stones were got out, dressed, carved and sculptured with stone hammers and chisels made of hard and tenacious rock. Stone-cutters’ tools of metal are not known to have existed, and they were not needed. Their quarrying and stone-working were most wasteful. Those localities where chipping was done reveal hundreds of tons of splinters and failures, and these are often counted as ruder implements of an earlier time. The dressed stones for great buildings were pecked out of the ledges, and broken off with levers in pieces much too large for their needs. (McGuire, “The Stone Hammer,” Am. Anthrop. iv., 1891; Holmes, Archaeological Studies; see Hodge’s List, Bur. Am. Ethnol., 1906, and Handbook.)

Metals were treated as malleable stones by the American aborigines. No evidence of smelting ores with fluxes is offered, but casting from metal melted in open fires is assumed. Gold, silver, copper, pure or mixed with tin or silver, are to be found here and there in both continents, and nuggets were objects of worship. Tools and appliances for working metals were of the rudest kind, and if moulds for casting were employed these were broken up; at least no museum contains samples of them, and the processes are not described. In the Arctic and Pacific coast provinces, about Lake Superior, in Virginia and North Carolina, as well as in ruder parts of Mexico and South America, metals were cold-hammered into plates, weapons, rods and wire, ground and polished, fashioned into carved blocks of hard, tenacious stone by pressure or blow, overlaid, cold-welded and plated. Soldering, brazing and the blowpipe in the Cordilleran provinces are suspected, but the evidence of their existence must be further examined. A deal of study has been devoted to the cunning Tubal Cains, the surprising productions of whose handiwork have been recovered in the art provinces of Mexico and the Cordilleras, especially in Chiriqui, between Costa Rica and Colombia. It must be admitted, however, that both the tools and the processes have escaped the archaeologist, as they did “the ablest goldsmiths in Spain, for they never could conceive how they had been made, there being no sign of a hammer or an engraver or any other instrument used by them, the Indians having none such” (Herrera).

The potter’s wheel did not exist in the western world, but it was almost invented. Time and muscle, knack and touch, a trained eye and brain and an unlimited array of patterns hanging on fancy’s walls, aided by a box of dry sand, were competent to give the charming results. No more striking contrast can be found between forlorn conditions and refined art products. Art in clay was far from universal in the two Americas. The Eskimo on Bering Sea had learned to model shallow bowls for lamps. No pottery existed in Athapascan boundaries. Algonquin-Iroquois tribes made creditable ware in Canada and eastern United States. Muskhogean tribes were potters, but Siouan tribes, as a rule, in all the Mississippi drainage were not. In their area, however, dwelt clay-working tribes, and the Mandans had the art. Moreover, the mound-builders in the eastern half of this vast plain, being sedentary, were excellent potters. The efflorescence of aboriginal pottery is to be found in the Pueblo region of south-western United States, in Mexico, Central America, Caribbean Islands, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and restricted areas of eastern Brazil. (The literature on this subject is extensive. See Cushing, Fewkes, Holmes, Hough, Stevenson.) On the Pacific side of the continent not one of the forty linguistic families made pottery. The only workers in clay west of the Rockies and north of the Pueblo country belonged to the Shoshonean family of the Interior Basin.

The study of Indian textiles includes an account of their fibres, tools, processes, products, ornaments and uses. The fibres were either animal or vegetable; animal fibres were hair, fur on the skin, feathers, hide, sinew and intestines; vegetable fibres were stalks of small trees, brush, straw, cotton, bast, bark, leaves and seed vessels in great variety as one passes from the north southward through all the culture provinces. The products of the textile industry in America were bark cloth, wattling for walls, fences and weirs, paper, basketry, matting, loom products, needle or point work, net-work, lacework and embroidery. In the manufacture of these the substances were reduced to the form of slender filaments, shreds, rods, splints, yarn, twine and sennit or braid. All textile work was done by hand; the only devices known were the bark peeler and beater, the shredder, the flint-knife, the spindle, the rope-twister, the bodkin, the warp-beam and the most primitive harness. The processes involved were gathering the raw material, shredding, splitting, gauging, wrapping, twining, spinning and braiding. Twining and spinning were done with the fingers of both hands, with the palm on the thigh, with the spindle and with the twister. Ornamentation was in form, colour, technical processes and dyes. The uses to which the textiles were put were for clothing, furniture for the house, utensils for a thousand industries, fine arts, social functions and worship.

In order to comprehend the more intricate processes of the higher peoples it is necessary to examine the textile industry in all of the culture areas. It is essentially woman’s work, though among the Pueblos, strangely enough, men are weavers.

The Eskimo woman did not weave, but was expert in sewing and embroidering with sinew thread by means of a bodkin. The Déné (Tinneh) peoples used strips of hide for snowshoes and game-bags, sewed their deerskin clothing with sinew thread, and embroidered in split quill. Their basketry, both in Canada and in Arizona, was coiled work. The northern Algonquin and Iroquoian tribes practised similar arts, and in the Atlantic states wove robes of animal and bird skins by cutting the latter into long strips, winding these strips on twine of hemp, and weaving them by the same processes employed in their basketry. Textile work in the Sioux province was chiefly the making of skin garments with sinew