Page:The American Indian.djvu/295

Rh of the Amazon we frequently find the lip plug in contrast to the north, though it has a close analogy in Guiana. Again, on the south, urn burial is frequent, on the north, grave burial. Coca chewing and tobacco drinking are found in the west, tobacco smoking in the east, pipes in Brazil, and cigars in Guiana. Also, in eastern Brazil we have the pellet bow and the palisaded village. These, however, do not negate the unity of Amazon culture.

Consistent with the wide distribution of these traits is the fact that we have in reality an area of canoe culture. Constant river travel made diffusion easy and sufficiently accounts for the wide range of certain stocks, for the low Amazon Basin is a dense tropical forest through which the rivers are the only roads open to man. Consequently, we have a well-developed canoe complex. Temporary canoes are formed by scraping out the soft interior of a palm trunk and expanding the sides by a brace, and true bark boats are sometimes made by stripping the bark from a large tree, precisely as the Iroquois and some other North American tribes do, in contrast to the fine birch-covered canoe of their Algonkin neighbors. But the real boat is the wooden dug-out. As to the absolute universality of the canoe in the Amazon Basin, there is some difference of opinion, but since it is found wherever we have good data, we may expect that it is a common trait of all.

While more data will certainly bring out greater tribal differences, yet it appears that an unusual degree of uniformity is found from the mouth of the Orinoco down through the entire Amazon basin. As we have noted, the only lines of movement are the rivers, and since these are gathered into one great system, we may expect culture traits to travel far. Colonel Church has shown how certain stocks have moved westward in the open country along the southern rim, detached groups starting down the tributaries of the Amazon here and there, to be dispersed far and wide over its great expanse. One can scarcely escape the conviction that the peopling of the interior was relatively late in consequence of which the culture at the center is quite like that upon the edges of the basin. On the other hand, the apparent remark