Page:The American Indian.djvu/397

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
331

that XVII affiliates with XIX and XX rather than with XVI, indicating that they have a great deal in common.

Perhaps the most complicated is the superposition in eastern North America. Thus, in Area 8 we find two archæological centers, and in 7, three, if not four. In Area III, the home of the Iroquois, stratified deposits have been reported showing Iroquois remains over and above what are regarded as Algonkin. The latter have affiliations to Area I and V, and since the ancestral home of the Iroquois seems to have been farther south, we assume that the prehistoric Area III is due to this intrusion. In the discussion of culture Area 7, we found the Iroquois to be intermediate to 8 and hence, not typical. That their archæology seems more sharply divergent than their historic culture, may be due to the leveling effect of contact with the surrounding tribes. In Areas I and V we have no very satisfactory chronological determinations, so that further discussion is useless.

Looking back over this comparison, we see, first of all, that the greater disparities between the two classifications fall in the regions of higher culture. In the case of 10 and 11, it is suggested that the chronological factor is the chief disturbing element. For 7 and 8, we are less clear, but some students attribute the divergence to shiftings in the population, as the data for the Iroquois suggest.[1] To generalize, we may say that on the whole, the tendency is for the historic cultures to coincide with those of the prehistoric classification, but that in the region of intense culture and the eastern maize province, the archæological areas are more numerous than the historic classifications would lead us to anticipate. A natural inference would be that this is explicable as an expression of relative age, those areas in which the people had lived through only one culture cycle, being the ones in which the two maps most nearly coincide. This, however, does not seem consistent with other data, and may be disregarded at present.


LINGUISTICS AND CULTURE

The reader is, no doubt, quite familiar with the idea of no correlations between culture and linguistic type, which is

  1. Dixon, 1914. I.