The Pina[1] once lived in adobe houses but not of the Pueblo type; they developed irrigation but also made extensive use of wild plants (mesquite, saguaro, etc.). They raised cotton and wove cloth, were indifferent potters, but experts in basketry. The kindred Papago were similar, though less advanced. The Mohave, Yuma, Cocopa, Maricopa, and Yavapai used a square, flat-roofed house of wood, did not practise irrigation, were not good basket makers (excepting the Yavapai), but were otherwise similar to the Pima. The Walapai and Havasupai were somewhat more nomadic. Among all these ritualism was weak in contrast to the Pueblos, but we have very little data on the subject.
In some respects the Pima and their ethnic neighbors appear to be transitional to the Pueblo type, but when we come to the Athapascan-speaking tribes of the eastern side of the area we find some intermediate cultures. Thus, the Jicarilla and Mescalero used the Plains tipi; they raised but little; gathered wild vegetable foods and hunted buffalo and other animals; no weaving, but costumes of skin in the Plains type; made a little pottery; good coil baskets; used glass-bead technique of the Plains. The southern Ute were also in this class. The western Apache differed little from these, but rarely used tipis and gave a little more attention to agriculture. All used shields of buffalo hide and roasted certain roots in holes. In general, while the Apache have certain undoubted Pueblo traits, they also remind one of the Plains and the Plateaus.
The Navajo seem to have taken on their most striking traits under European influence; but their old type of shelter is again the up-ended stick type of the North, while their costume, pottery, and feeble attempts at basketry and formerly at agriculture, with their strong leaning toward ritualism, all suggest Pueblo influence.
Thus, in the widely diffused traits of agriculture, metate, pottery, and, to a less degree, the weaving of cloth with loom and spindle, former use of sandals, a similar social system, and intense ritualism, we have common cultural bonds between all the tribes of the Southwest, uniting them in one culture area.
- ↑ Russell, 1908. I.
