mental traits of the Nahua center. Yet when near the boundary of Costa Rica, we find wilder tribes with cultures suggesting South America. Just across the line we meet with the Chibcha-speaking Talamanca and the Chiriqui. From here down through the Isthmus we seem to find an increasing number of such traits as poisoned arrows, fish poisons, hammocks, and palisaded villages, all highly characteristic of South American cultures. In fact, the whole isthmian country from the lower part of Nicaragua down is a marginal part of the Chibcha culture area, centering about Bogota, Colombia.
Throughout this area we have environmental conditions similar to those surrounding the Maya, for the whole outer marginal circumference is studded with wild tribes and even the highly organized groups comprising the center in Colombia have some of these lowly folk interspersed among them.
The dominating stock was the Chibcha, whose culture may be taken as the type.[1] Like all Andean peoples, they were agricultural, producing maize, potatoes, manioc, beans, and squashes; no domestic animals for transportation; irrigation systems highly developed; salt was made on a large scale and traded to outlying tribes; cotton was raised and weaving highly developed; fine dyeing; no stone buildings, cane and thatch the rule, walls of wattling, plastered with clay; roads and suspension bridges; no copper, but great skill in gold work, in fact, the center of the art for the New World; a clan organization, or maternal descent; a kind of caste system; one tribe, the Panche, is credited with exogamous clans; no evidence of books or calendar systems; human sacrifices to the sun as an incident in sacrifices of all kinds; an infinite number of local shrine where some power was assumed to be manifest to which offerings were made; five sacred lakes; an organized priesthood with a single head; ceremonial foot-races; coca chewing instead of tobacco and great use of chicha; but some tobacco was used both as snuff and for smoking in stone pipes; a mythical white man who was the culture hero called Bochica; a deluge myth; an Atlas idea of the world; a fairly compact political organization; tribute or taxes in gold and cloth chiefly; a commercial system with markets,
- ↑ Joyce, 1912. I.
