205. The Southeast
Superficially, Southeastern culture appears different from Southwestern. Much of the seeming difference is due to the wooded and rather humid environment; another portion is accounted for by the failure of the Southeastern tribes to build in stone. But there are differences that go deeper, such as the poverty of Southeastern ritual and the comparative strength of political organization. The religious dwarfing may be attributed to greater distance from Mexico.
The precise routes of diffusion into the Southeast are not wholly clear. The culture center of the area lay on or near the lower Mississippi—sufficiently close to the Southwest. Yet the district which is now Texas intervened, and this was one of distinctly lower culture, largely occupied by tribes with Plains affiliation. Theoretically it would have been possible for cultural elements to travel from Mexico along the Texas coast to the Southeast. Yet what little is known about the tribes of this coast indicates that they were backward. A third possibility for the transmission of culture was from the Antilles, especially by the short voyage from Cuba or the Bahamas to the point of Florida. Some connections by this route almost certainly took place. But they seem to have affected chiefly the peninsula of Florida, and to have brought less into the Southeast as a whole than reached it overland.