ANTHROPOLOGY J
AMERICA
377
canoe, made in three pieces so that it can be taken apart and transported over hills and sewed together, ends the series. The American craft was propelled by poling, paddling, and by rude sails of matting. The aesthetic arts of the American aborigines cannot be studied apart from their languages, industries, social organizations, lore, and worships. Art was Fjae art limited most of all by poverty in technical appliances. There were just as good materials and inspirations, but what could the best of them do without metal tools? One and all, skilful to a surprising degree— weavers, embroiderers, potters, painters, engravers, carvers, sculptors, and jewellers—they were wearied by drudgery and overpowered by a never-absent, weird, and grotesque .a beast of burden throughout the Peruvian highlands, land theology. The Eskimo engraved poorly, the Dene emtravel was on foot, and land transportation on the backs broidered, the North Pacific tribes carved skilfully in horn, of men and women. One of the most interesting topics of slate, and cedar, the California tribes had nimble fingers study is the trails along which the seasonal and annual for basketry, the Sioux, like the Mexicans, gloried in migrations of tribes occurred, becoming in Peru the paved feathers. The mound builders, Pueblo tribes, middle road, with suspension bridges and wayside inns or tambos. Americans, and Peruvians, were potters of many schools, In Mexico, and in Peru especially, the human back was gorgeous colour fascinated the Amazonians, the Patagonians utilized to its utmost extent, and in most parts of America delighted in skins, and even the Fuegians saw beauty in harness adapted for carrying was made and frequently the pretty snail shells of their desolate island shores. Of decorated with the best art. In the Mexican codices the Mexican and Central American sculpture and archipictures of men and women carrying are plentiful. Travel- tecture a competent judge says that Yucatan and the ling on the water was an important activity in aboriginal southern states of Mexico are not rich in sculptures, apart times. Hundreds of thousands of miles of inland waters from architecture j but in the valley of Mexico the human and archipelagoes were traversed. Commencing in the figure, animal forms, fanciful life motives in endless Arctic region, the Eskimo in his kayak, consisting of a variety, were embodied in masks, yokes, tablets, calendars, The framework of drift wood or bone covered with dressed seal- cylinders, disks, boxes, vases, and ornaments. skin, could paddle down East Greenland, up the west Nahuatl lapidary had at hand many varieties of workable shore to Smith Sound, along Baffin Land and Labrador, and beautiful stone; onyx, marble, limestone, quartz and and the shores of Hudson Bay throughout insular Canada quartz crystal, granite, syenite, basalt, trachyte, rhyolite, and the Alaskan coast, around tq Mount St Elias, and for diorite, and obsidian, the best of material prepared for many miles on the eastern shore of Asia. In addition them by nature; while the Mayas had only limestone, to this most delicate and rapid craft, he had his umiak and hard, tenacious rock with which to work it, and or freight boat, sometimes called woman’s boat.. The timber for burning lime. However, looking over the whole Athapascan covered all North-western Canada with his open field of North American achievement, architectural and birch-bark canoe, somewhat resembling the kayak in finish. non-architectural, composite and monolithic, the palm for The Algonkin-Iroquois took up the journey at Bear Lake boldness, magnitude of proportions, and infinity of labour, and its tributaries, and by means of paddling and portages must go to the sculptured mosaics of Yucatan. Maya traversed the area of Middle and Eastern Canada, includ- architecture is the best remaining index of the art achieveing the entire St. Lawrence drainage. The absence of ments of the American race. The construction of such good bark, dugout timber, and chisels of stone, deprived buildings as the palace at Uxmal and the castillo at the whole Mississippi Yalley of creditable watercraft, and Chichen indicates a mastery in architectural design. There reduced the natives to the clumsy trough for a dugout and is lack of unity in plan and grouping, and an enormous miserable bull-boat, made by stretching dressed buffalo waste of material as compared with available room. At hide over a crate. On the Atlantic coast of the United Uxmal the mass of masonry is to chamber space about as States the dugout was improved in form where the waters forty to one. The builders were “ ignorant of some of the were more disturbed. John Smith’s Indians had a fleet of most essential principles of construction, and are to be dugouts. The same may be said of the Gulf States tribes, regarded as hardly more than novices in the art ” (Holmes). although they added rafts made of reed. Along the As for the marvels of Peru, the walls of the temple of the archipelagoes of the North Pacific coast, from Mount St sun in Cuzco, with their circular form and curve inward, Elias to the Columbia river, the dugout attained its best. from the ground upward, are most imposing. Some of The Columbia river canoe resembled that of the Amur, the the gates without lintels are beautiful, and the geometric bow and stern being pointed at the water line. Poor patterns in the walls extremely effective. The same dugouts and rafts, made by tying reeds together, consti- objection to over-massiveness might not apply here as in tuted the watercraft of California and Mexico until Central Mexico, owing to volcanic activity. Institutions in Europe and America have gathered America is reached. abundant material for an intelligent comprehension of The Caribs were the Haidas of the Caribbean Sea and Northern South America. Their craft would vie in form, American Indian sociology. The British Associa- Sociology, in size, and seaworthiness with those of the North Pacific tion has had a committee reporting during coast. The catamaran and the reed boat were known to many years on the tribes of North-west Canada. The the Peruvians. The tribes of Venezuela and Guiana, American Museum in New York has prepared a series of according to Im Thurn, had both the dugout. and the monographs on the tribes of the North Pacific coast, of built-up hull. The simplest form of navigation in Brazil Northern Mexico, and of the Cordilleras of South America. was the woodskin, a piece of bark stripped from, a tree, The reports of the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington and crimped at the ends. The sangada, with, its plat- cover the Eskimo, east and west, and all the tribes of the form and sail, belonging to the Brazilian coast, is. spoken United States. In Mexico the former labours of Pimentel of Bandolier, of as a good seaworthy craft. Finally, the Fuegian bark and Orozco y Berra are supplemented by those S. I. — 48
metrics, clocks, astronomy, history, and the philosophy of .causation. Beliefs and practices with reference to the heavenly world were inspired by zoic activities ; its location, scenery, and environment were the homes of beast gods. It was largely a zoopantheon; thus zootheism influenced the organization of tribes and societies in the tribes. The place, furniture, liturgies, and apparatus of worship were hereby suggested. Myths, folk-lore, hunting charms, fetishes, superstitions, and customs were based on the same idea. Excepting for extensive and rapid travel over the snow in the Arctic regions by means of dog sleds, the extremely limitedgitransportation by dog travail (or sledge) Travel. oux province, and the use of the llama as
