87. Cultural Distribution
The Southwest also provides an example of how cultural phenomena can be seen to be arranged geographically so as to yield a meaning or to outline their history, without reference to climate or natural influences. Near the center of the area, in northern New Mexico and Arizona, live four groups of Pueblo or town building Indians—the Hopi, Zuñi, Keres, and Tewa or Tano—who represent a sort of élite of the native culture. They farm, make pottery, accumulate wealth in turquoise, are governed by priests, worship under a remarkably complex set of rituals, which involve altars, masks, symbols of all sorts, and a rude sort of philosophy.
As one goes from the Pueblo center to the less settled tribes, one encounters first the Navaho, who are earth hut builders and farm but little, yet share much of the Pueblo elaborateness of ritual, including altars, masks, and symbols. A little farther out, among the Apache and Pima, the cults have perceptibly diminished in intricacy and symbolic value: altars and masks are lacking.
The simplification increases among the more remote Mohave, whose cults are based on dreams instead of priestly tradition. Still farther, on the shores of the Pacific among the Luiseño and Gabrielino, some Pueblo traits can still be found; cult altars and pottery, for instance. But agriculture, homes of stone, turquoise, priests, and the majority of Pueblo institutions are unknown. Finally, still farther away in central California, the Yokuts now and then show a culture trait reminiscent of the Pueblos: grooved arrow straighteners, perhaps, or occasional rudely made pottery vessels. These are suggestive bits; fragments that have been whittled away or toned down. Pueblo culture as a whole has vanished at this distance. In its place the Yokuts possess quite different arts and institutions and beliefs.
What is the significance of this gradual fading away of one type of civilization and its replacement by others? Evidently that certain influences have radiated out from the higher Pueblo center, and that the effect of these has diminished in proportion to the number of tribes they have passed through. The Pueblos have succeeded in handing over the largest share of their civilization to the adjacent Navaho—and no doubt also received most from them. The Apache being more remote, were less affected; and so on to the farthest limits of the influences.
It is also clear that a time element is involved. A people receiving an art from another obviously acquires this later than the inventors. Most traits which the central Pueblos share with peripheral tribes may be assumed to have existed longer among the Pueblos, simply because they possess more traits in their culture and the flow has prevailingly been out from them. Thus they make uncolored, two-colored, and three-colored pottery; the tribes on the margin of the Southwest, uncolored pottery only; those beyond the range of immediate Southwestern influence, no pottery at all. Unless therefore there should be special reasons suggestive of a degenerative loss of the art among the marginal tribes—and no such reasons are known—the conclusion is forced that Southwestern pottery was first made by the ancestors of the Pueblos or their predecessors in the central part of the area, presumably as plain ware, and that thence knowledge of the art was gradually carried outward. However while simple pottery making was thus being taken up by the tribes nearest to the Pueblo district, the Pueblos were going ahead and learning to ornament vessels with painted designs. In time this added art also spread to the neighbors, but meanwhile these had passed knowledge of the first stage on to the tribes still farther out than themselves; and meanwhile also the Pueblos had perhaps gone on to a third stage, that of combining colors in their decoration.
In this way, if nothing interrupted the even regularity of the process, the focal people, with their lead in creating or inventing or improving, might pass through half a dozen successive stages of the art, or of many arts, while the outermost peoples were just beginning to receive the rudiments. The intermediate tribes would show attainment of a less or greater number of stages in proportion to their distance from the center. In this event the main facts concerning the pottery art of the Southwest could be represented by a diagram of a step pyramid, each level or step picturing a new increment to the basic art. The Pueblos would be at the peak of the pyramid, five or six steps high, the near-by tribes a step or two lower; and so on to the outermost, who remain at, or have only recently attained to, the first or lowest level; while beyond these would be the non-pottery-making tribes wholly outside the Pueblo sphere of influence.
Of course on the actual map the distribution of the various forms or stages of pottery made does not work out with the perfect regularity of our schematic diagram. Here and there a tribe has migrated from its habitat and disturbed the symmetry of arrangement; or the population of a district has been so thin that it could live on wild products without resorting to agriculture, so that it remained more or less nomadic and had no use for fragile pottery; or a third group of tribes developed basket making to a pitch which yielded excellent vessels, with the result that they were satisfied and failed to take up pottery, or took it up half-heartedly, so that the art remained stunted among them—a stage or two more backward than their position would lead one to expect. But on the whole pottery distribution in the Southwest does follow the schematic arrangement with sufficient closeness to warrant the assumption that the history of its development has been, at least in outline, as just reconstructed.
The facts conform still more closely to the step pyramid arrangement when consideration is given not to pottery alone but to the whole culture—agriculture, other arts, social forms, ritual, religious organization, and the like. In that case Pueblo culture is seen to comprise easily the greatest number of traits or component parts, and these to grow fewer and fewer towards the edges of the Southwest.[13]