ETHNOGRAPHIC COMPARISONS
Below we shall summarize the life habits of two ethnographically known groups who lived near the Plains-Great Basin fringe. This is done in an effort to present a brief outline of the type of life people in the Morrison area could have lived. It is designed to serve as a guide for interpretation of the archaeological remains, and should provide insight into areas of social and religious action. The first group, the Ute, are known to have lived for a time in the region; the second, the Pawnee, were never in the area proper, but do represent the sort of pottery-using, corn-growing Indians that had occupied it in the past.
This use of comparative ethnology and the reconstruction which follows are in the nature of a theory, a theory of methodology. Too often, as J. O. Brew (1946) has pointed out, archaeological fact gathering has run riot ahead of the interpretation of these facts. Brew quoted C. C. Kluckhohn in this respect: “In any case the alternative is not between theory and no theory or a minimum of theory, but between adequate and inadequate theories.... For I am afraid that many of our anthropologists who are most distrustful of theory are like Molière’s character who spoke prose without knowing it, for a complex theoretical viewpoint is usually implicit in some of the most apparently innocent statements of facts.” (Brew, 1946, p. 45; but for full context see Kluckhohn 1939). We have striven, however, to remain aware of the assumptions involved.