Page:The American Indian.djvu/287

Rh raise a little maize, etc., just as did some of the intermediate Plains area tribes of North America. All of the central group seem to have woven some cloth, but developed work in skins more extensively; the weapons were the lance, bola, and lasso. A skin boat suggesting the bull-boat of the Plains area was used for fording rivers; warriors rode into battle naked; dead were placed upon platforms, but the bones were afterward buried; smokers mixed tobacco with wood shavings, as in North America.

In the historic period the natives of this area developed an intense horse culture. In many respects this complex was like the horse culture of the North American plains, because it was acquired from the same foreign source. Yet we find in the guanaco area several new features, as the bola, the lasso, and the toe-stirrup. These highly original traits of the horse complex are found among all the typical tribes enumerated above, making it clear that even though they were original inventions, they must have been in their present form diffused from one center along with the horse. Habitation vary a great deal, but still are simple affairs of skin or mats supported by a ridge pole, in many cases without smoke holes. A common form is a kind of skin-covered lean-to. Infants are secured on a board or frame, as in North America (Fig. 12). Among the more primitive tribes the men wear aprons and a robe, the latter giving way to a cotton breechcloth among the Araucans. The footwear consists of a kind of skin boot with long trailing hair from which we get the name Patagonia (duck feet). This boot has an open toe so that the toe stirrup can be used. Yet the prevailing tendency of the area as a whole was to go barefoot.

As we go south in the area, the culture becomes more primitive until at last we reach the Fuegians, who are a seashore people. Still they have much in common with the horse-using tribes of the mainland and are often taken as the surviving remnant of the older population in the area. It is clear that in the period of horse culture the Araucan, Puelchean, Guaycuruan, and Calchaquian tribes were the most strongly developed. The former had a kind of confederacy