Indians of North America

Harold E. Driver

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780226164670, 9780226164663
• eBook ISBN: 9780226221304
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The art of reconstructing civilizations from the artifacts of daily life demands integrity and imagination. Indians of North America displays both in its description of the enormous variation of culture patterns among Indians from the Arctic to Panama at the high points of their histories—a variation which was greater than that among the nations of Europe.

For this second edition, Harold Driver made extensive revisions in chapter content and organization, incorporating many new discoveries and interpretations in archeology and related fields. He also revised several of the maps and added more than 100 bibliographical items. Since the publication of the first edition, there has been an increased interest in the activities of Indians in the twentieth century; accordingly, the author placed much more emphasis on this period.

1

Origin and Prehistory

RECENT discoveries by Louis S. B. Leakey and others in east Africa have pushed back the first appearance of fossil men (hominids) in the Old World to about two and a half million years ago (Patterson and Howells, 1967). Still older fossils, intermediate between apes and men, demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that man evolved from fossil monkey and ape ancestry in the Old World. In the New World, in contrast, all fossil human bones so far discovered have been classed as Homo sapiens sapiens (doubly wise man), the subspecies to which all living forms of man belong. It is obvious that until man had evolved into a full-fledged human being with the ability to make fire, fur clothing, and semisubterranean houses, and to capture arctic game, he could not have lived in the arctic climate of Siberia in the Pleistocene and eventually worked his way east over a land bridge into Alaska and the New World. Although in the preceding Tertiary epoch there were warmer periods, which made it possible for monkeys to get to South America, this was before any form of man existed, and the records show that these monkeys did not serve as the springboard for evolution upward to man in the New World.

There is abundant evidence of the presence of man in the New World as early as about 10,000 B.C., and no trained anthropologist doubts these facts. A growing number, however, believe that the earliest entry of man into the New World from Siberia took place as early as about 40,000 B.C. The evidence consists of large quantities of crude chipped stone implements found mostly on the surface in both North and South America and not yet dated accurately. None of these implements can pass as a spear point or arrowhead; so this early horizon has been labeled pre-projectile-point (Krieger, 1964). Such tools were probably used in the butchering and skinning of game killed with spears or clubs of wood, which is rarely preserved in the soil more than a few years. At a later date, perhaps between 25,000 and 10,000 B.C., hunters from Siberia may have come over a land bridge bringing both unifacial and bifacial chipped stone spear points of a widespread Eurasian Levallois-Mousterian tradition. Although these tools appeared earlier in Europe and western Asia (50,000 to 150,000 B.C.), they survived in the marginal area of Siberia until the period 25,000 to 10,000 B.C. and may have given rise to the later lanceolate and fluted stone blade forms of America.

Although the Eskimos have regularly and frequently negotiated Bering Strait in hide boats filled with trade goods in historic times, and archeological evidence suggests that they and their ancestors have paddled their way back and forth across this strait for several millenia (Giddings, 1960: 128, 133), the earliest immigrants to the New World were not Eskimos and more likely walked across on a land bridge as much as 1,000 miles wide at its maximum. There is overwhelming zoological and geological evidence of land bridges from Siberia to Alaska at several times during the Pleistocene. The native animals in northern Asia and North America are so much alike that zoologists have combined the two areas into a single major life zone. Geologists estimate that during the maximum periods of the major glaciations the ice cap was a mile high over vast areas of land and as much as 9,000 feet high in some localities. The enormous amount of water contained in these ice caps came ultimately from the oceans in the form of fog and clouds and later fell in the form of snow, which still later became compressed into solid ice. The result was a lowering of the ocean level by as much as several hundred feet. Because the ocean bottom at Bering Strait today is only about 120 feet deep, it is clear that a modest lowering of ocean depths could produce a land bridge there.

Recently assembled evidence indicates that there were two land bridges in the late Pleistocene between Siberia and Alaska which might have been used by early immigrants to the New World (Müller-Beck, 1966: 1203–4). The first existed between about 50,000 and 40,000 B.C., and the second between about 26,000 and 8000 B.C. The second was wider than the first and reached its maximum width of 1,000 miles at about 18,000 B.C. However, the climate during the time of the earlier land bridge was a little milder and more favorable to man than it is today, and it was at this time that the woolly mammoth, caribou, and other species later hunted by early man first migrated from Asia to North America. At the time of both of these land bridges the climate was so cold that a people not equipped with tailored fur clothing and pit houses could not have survived in what is now the Bering Sea area. The landscape of the land bridge was arctic tundra, without trees, and temperatures were about as cold as those of the tundra today. Evidence of pit houses and fur clothing has been found in Mongolia near Lake Baikal at sites dated between 13,000 and 8000 B.C., and may well have been continuously distributed across the land bridge into Alaska. An impediment to migration into North America over this second bridge was an ice barrier just south of Alaska between about 21,000 and 11,000 B.C. That this ice barrier was broken by ice-free corridors, and that human groups were traversing it at this time, is suggested by the apparently sudden appearance of Paleoindians at many localities in the Americas around 10,000 B.C. or soon after. The evidence of early man in Tierra del Fuego by about 8000 B.C. suggests that his ancestors had passed through this so-called ice barrier thousands of years earlier.

Spruce pollen recently collected by Colinvaux (1967) on the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea proves that spruce forests extended farther to the west in Alaska at about 8000 B.C. than they do at present. This, in turn, shows that the climate at the land bridge was a little milder for a short period at this time than it is today, although it was never mild enough in the late Pleistocene for the forests of Siberia and Alaska to join one another on the land bridge.

Physically, Indians resemble Asians more closely than they do any other major physical type in the Old World; but resemblance is closer to the marginal Mongoloids of Indonesia, west central Asia, and Tibet than to the central ones of Mongolia, China, or Japan. The marginal Mongoloids represent an earlier and less specialized racial type than do the central Mongoloids. The American Indians sprang from the ancestors of this marginal Mongoloid population, which at one time covered most of Asia north and east of India. These marginal Mongoloids share more physical characteristics with Europeans than do the central Mongoloids; this fact is explained by the hypothesis that the separation of Europeans and Mongoloids had not progressed very far when the latter in northeast Asia began to migrate into Alaska via the land bridge across Bering Strait.

The physical anthropologist Imbelloni (1958) has classified the Indians of both continents into 11 subvarieties; Georg Neumann (1952) has divided the Indians of North America north of Mexico into 8 subvarieties. Neumann postulated that all but one of his sub-varieties represented a separate migration of a physical subtype already differentiated from the others when it entered the New World. At the opposite pole is the theory of Marshall Newman (1962), who postulates that most of the physical variations among subvarieties of American Indians are to be explained by adaptations of a single ancestral type to the various environments of the New World. The truth of the matter probably lies somewhere between these extreme views.

A recent quantitative test by Long (1966) of the reality of Georg Neumann’s subvarieties in the eastern United States found strong supporting evidence for some, no evidence at all for others, and postulated a new Iroquoian group not distinguished by Neumann. Although no published criticism of Marshall Newman’s environmental explanation has been as explicit, it seems likely that the populations in California, the Southwest, the Southeast, and central Mexico were not as stable and free of migration as he believes. Language classification alone suggests many migrations into these areas during the past 5,000 years and probably earlier (Map 37; Voegelin and Voegelin, 1966). Whole languages do not spread by relay diffusion, but require the migration of considerable numbers of speakers or of a powerful political and military elite, such as that of the Romans in their colonies. The plethora of unrelated language families and phyla found in the areas that Marshall Newman considered the most stable calls for more migration than his theory can tolerate. If we allow for the immigration of several distinct subtypes into the New World and also permit a moderate amount of adaptation to environment, we arrive at a more plausible explanation of the physical subvarieties of the American Indians. It has been a complicated development which cannot be explained by any single overriding process, as Newman and Neumann have agreed in more recent writings.

Until recently linguists have been unable to relate any of the languages and language groups of the Americas with those of Asia. Swadesh (1962) has finally assembled considerable evidence to indicate that the Eskimo-Aleutian languages of the North American Arctic are historically related to the Kamchadal-Chukchi-Koryak group in Siberia. The former group is called Eskaleutian, and the latter Chukotian. These two language families diverged from a common ancestral language about 2500 B.C., as estimated from glottochronology. This is the strongest case of its kind so far. Earlier attempts by Shafer (1952) and Swadesh (1952) to relate Athapaskan to the Sino-Tibetan phylum were less conclusive. As more and more comparative linguistic knowledge accumulates, we may anticipate more evidence on the historical relationship of other language groups in Asia and the Americas, but the time depths are likely to be great.

The earliest major culture type to emerge unchallenged in the archeological record is the Big-Game Hunting tradition. It flourished in the grasslands which covered not only the area now known as the Great Plains but also parts of the Southwest and the Eastern Woodland. It is characterized by lanceolate projectile points retouched on both sides. These fall into several major types: the fluted Clovis, Folsom, and related forms; the single-shouldered Sandia; and the groups called Plano. Although none of these so far discovered can be dated with certainty earlier than 10,000 B.C., they may be several millenia older in light of their possible derivation from older Old World forms and the excellent workmanship that suggests the need of an apprentice period of development. The demise of this Big-Game tradition began as early as 8000–7000 B.C. in some localities, but it survived in the Plains area to as late as 4000 B.C. Because the weapon points were much larger and heavier than the arrowheads of historic hunting peoples, it is universally assumed that they were attached to the ends of spears which could either have been thrust and retained in the hands or hurled like a javelin. Some might have been thrown with the spear-thrower, although there is no direct evidence of this implement in this early period.

From 10,000 to 8000 B.C. the principal animals hunted were the mammoth and mastodon, huge animals larger than any modern elephant. As these animals became scarcer, an extinct bison larger than any form alive today was the most important animal; this species gave way later to the smaller bison hunted by historic Plains Indians. Although these Big-Game Hunters certainly killed and ate smaller game too and even ate a little vegetable food from time to time, their principal occupation and diet centered in the big game. They have left no evidence of houses or of food storage pits, suggesting that they were constantly on the move. They must have had a close-knit social organization with a maximum of teamwork within their hunting parties in order to kill such large animals as the mammoth. The Big-Game Hunting culture gave rise to the Archaic traditions of the Plains and Eastern Woodlands.

From about 9000 to 5000 B.C. a cultural tradition called Old Cordilleran flourished in the northwestern part of North America from the Rocky Mountain divide to the Pacific Ocean and from Alaska south to Oregon. This is distinct from the Big-Game Hunting tradition, and, although the two overlap in time, they occupied mutually exclusive areas. The most diagnostic single trait of the Old Cordilleran Culture is a willow-leaf-shaped stone point chipped on both sides and retouched on all edges. These points are thought to have been used as points on spears or darts and possibly also as knives in a wooden or horn handle. They are associated with other chipped stone tools presumably used for chopping, cutting, scraping, and perforating—all suggesting a predominantly hunting subsistence. No seed-grinding stones occur in this tradition. The Old Cordilleran tradition was the forerunner of the later cultures that appeared in the Arctic, Northwest Coast, Plateau, and parts of California.

A third major early culture is called the Desert tradition, which was found in the Great Basin, the Southwest, and Northeast Mexico. The two most diagnostic traits are baskets and milling stones to grind wild seeds. The baskets were used to collect the seeds, to carry them home, to store them, and to boil them by means of hot stones placed in water in the basket. Projectile points were broader and shorter and generally smaller than those of the Big-Game Hunters or the Old Cordillerans. They were mounted on darts or spears hurled with the aid of the spear-thrower. Animals of various sizes were hunted, but the larger ones were most often wild sheep, antelope, and deer, although some bison bones have also been found in Desert sites. Beginning about 8500 B.C., this Desert tradition persisted with little change in the Great Basin area of Nevada, Utah, eastern Oregon, and southern Idaho until the middle of the nineteenth century. The Paiute and Shoshoni Indians are the descendants of the Desert people. Because there were never any desert areas in Alaska and Canada, the Desert tradition must have arisen after the early Indians had reached the desert area well within the boundaries of what is now the United States. The ancestors of the earliest Desert people were probably the Old Cordillerans.

THE FIRST FARMERS

The earliest archeological sites in the highlands of central and southern Mexico reveal a hunting culture generically akin to those of the Big-Game Hunters and Old Cordillerans. By about 7000 B.C. the peoples of these areas were subsisting principally on wild plants, and the first evidence of farming also appears at this time. Caves in the mountains of southern Tamaulipas have yielded evidence for the domestication of the bottle gourd (Lagenaria), the chili pepper (Capsicum annum or frutescens), and the summer squash or pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo) during the Infiernillo phase, from 7000 to 5000 B.C. In the same horizon the remains of a number of wild plants, such as maguey (Agave), the cactus pear (Opuntia), and the runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus), have been found at camp sites in these caves. All of these plants were eaten except the gourd, which was used as a container. These people made twilled and checkered mats, rod-foundation baskets, and net bags. The latter two were used to collect and store the plant products. They also made chipped stone projectile points, scrapers, and choppers used in hunting, butchering, and dressing hides, but remains of plants far outnumber those of animals, suggesting that these people possessed a Desert culture.

In Tamaulipas, stone mortars and manos, used for grinding plant seeds, first appear between 5000 and 3000 B.C. It is estimated that at this time wild plants provided about 80 per cent of the diet, domesticated plants about 7 per cent, and wild animals about 13 per cent. Maize (corn) (Zea mays) did not appear in this area until 2500 B.C., and squash (Cucurbita moschata) not until 2000 B.C., when domesticated plants furnished about 20 per cent of the diet. The house remains in the open sites of this period suggest a more sedentary way of life. Permanent farming villages with pottery were achieved in the next millenium, 2000–1000 B.C.

Four hundred miles to the south, in what is now the Mexican state of Puebla, a partly independent but parallel development of farming cultures was going on at the same ti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1: Origin and Prehistory
• 2: Culture Areas
• 3: Language
• 4: Subsistence Patterns
• 5: Horticulture
• 6: Other Aspects of Subsistence
• 7: Narcotics and Stimulants
• 8: Housing and Architecture
• 9: Clothing
• 10: Crafts
• 11: Art
• 12: Music and Dance
• 13: Exchange and Trade
• 14: Marriage and the Family
• 15: Larger Kin Groups and Kinship Terminology
• 16: Property and Inheritance
• 17: Government and Social Controls
• 18: Violence, Feuds, Raids, and War
• 19: Rank and Social Classes
• 20: Sodalities and their Ceremonies
• 21: Life Cycle
• 22: Education
• 23: Religion, Magic, and Medicine
• 24: Personality and Culture
• 25: History and Culture Change in Mexico
• 26: Indian-White Relations in the United States
• 27: Indian Culture Change in the United States
• 28: History and Culture Change in Canada, Alaska, and Greenland
• 29: Achievements and Contributions
• Plates
• Maps
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index