part of the eastern maize area, the coast tribes of the salmon area, and a portion of the manioc area. It is thus clear that it tends to appear in the regions of more intense culture and particularly wherever there is an appearance of political solidarity. If we consider only the gentile form, we find it somewhat in the majority, dominating among the Siouan peoples of the bison area, the Algonkin of the Great Lakes, the Nahua, Maya, and Inca peoples, with outlying localizations in both continents. Yet, the clan also has a respectable distribution, comprising a large part of the coast tribes in the salmon area, the eastern and southern parts of the eastern maize area, the Pueblo tribes, the Antilles, the Arawak of South America, and the Chibcha of Colombia and Central America. There is thus no great disparity, but considering them as merely two forms of the same grouping, we see that the clan-gentile system does prevail and is in general a correlate of political solidarity.
However, the clan or gens is not necessarily the ultimate social unit, but may by expansion come to have unexpected relations to the tribal group. Kroeber's[1] investigations of the Pueblo peoples of southwestern United States show that many clans have members in each village, a condition somewhat similar to that of the Iroquois as analyzed by Morgan[2] many years ago. In these cases, we see that the clan organization simply cross-sections the community or tribal grouping, the one being, as it were, vertical and the other horizontal. In the Iroquoian system, we find a close federation between the tribal groups which stopped little short of a compact political state. Unfortunately, we do not know just how the clans were distributed in the confederated tribes of southeastern United States, nor the gens in the ancient states of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca, but we find the two systems together—compact government and the clan-gens organization. It is, therefore, fair to raise the question as to whether the real basic unity that made possible these aboriginal political states did not rest with their clan and gentile relations, since in these they had a definite bond. A study of the Arawak would be interesting in this connection, for though they are scattered
