As one passes from this region to the mountainous plateau which constitutes the present New Mexico and Arizona—the Southwest of the United States—one encounters a series of tribes often inhabiting stone houses, subsisting by agriculture, cooking in earthenware pots, little given to fighting, according authority to priests rather than warriors, erecting altars, and performing masked dances representing divinities. This Southwestern culture, its internal relations, and the tribes participating in it, have already been discussed in another connection (§ [87]).
If, however, on leaving the Plains one turns northwest to the shores of British Columbia and southern Alaska, a third distinctive type of native civilization appears. Among these Northwestern or North Pacific Coast tribes, such as the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nutka, and Salish, the priest as well as the warrior bowed before the rich man, an elaborate set of rules and honors separating the wealthy high-born from the poor and lowly. Aristocracy, commoners, and slaves made up distinct strata of society in this region. Public rituals were occasions for the ostentation of wealth. Houses were carpentered of wood. Cooking was done in boxes. The prevalent food was fish.
The significant thing is that these are not three tribes, but three groups each consisting of a number of politically independent tribes spread over a considerable territory and evincing a fairly fundamental similarity of customs and institutions. We are confronting three kinds of culture, each super-tribal in range and attached to a certain area. These areas have sometimes been called “ethnographic provinces”; they are generally known as “culture-areas.” Of such areas ten are generally recognized on the North American continent. These are the Plains, Southwest, North Pacific Coast, Mackenzie-Yukon, Arctic, Plateau, California, Northeast, Southeast, and Mexico.[23]
Obviously we have here a classification comparable to that which the naturalist makes of animals. As the zoölogist divides the vertebrate animals into mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, so the anthropologist divides the generic North American Indian culture into the cultures of these ten areas. The naturalist however cannot stop with a group as inclusive as the mammals, and goes on to subdivide them into orders, such as the rodents, carnivores, ungulates, and the like. Each of these again he goes on splitting into families, genera, and finally species. The species correspond to the smallest groups in human society, namely the tribes or nations. Parallel to the family or order which the naturalist finds between a particular species and the great class of mammals, one may therefore expect to discover groups intermediate between particular tribes and the large culture-areas. Such intermediate groups would consist of clusters of tribes constituting fractions of a culture-area: clearly pertaining to this area, but yet somewhat set off from other clusters within the same area—like the Pueblos and Navaho within the Southwest, as already described (§ [87]). We may call such clusters or fractions sub-culture-areas, and must concern ourselves with them if we desire to deepen our understanding of aboriginal American civilization.
For the sake of simplicity, it will be well to select a limited portion of North America, instead of wrestling with the intricacies of the continent as a whole, in an endeavor to see how its culture-areas and sub-culture-areas reveal themselves in detail and help to throw light on native history. California will serve as a type example.
152. California and Its Sub-areas
Modern state boundaries frequently do not coincide with either ethnic lines of division or with natural physiographic areas, especially when political units are created by legislative enactment, as has been the case with most of the United States. This partial discrepancy holds for California. The native culture most distinctive of California covered only the middle two-thirds of the present state, but took in Nevada and much of the Great Basin ([Fig. 31]).
Northernmost California, especially along the ocean, was inhabited by Indians that affiliated with the tribes of the North Pacific coast. One after another their customs and arts prove on examination to be related to the customs and arts of the coast of British Columbia, and to differ more or less from the corresponding practices of the Central California Indians. Here then we have a second cultural type, that of Northwestern California, which constitutes a subdivision of the North Pacific Coast culture-area.
The southern California Indians link with the Indians of the adjoining states of Arizona and New Mexico. In short, this part of California forms part of the Southwest culture-area. The southern California tribes are however not wholly uniform among themselves, but constitute two groups: those of the islands, coast, and mountains, and those of the Colorado river. These are distinguished primarily by the fact that only the river tribes practised agriculture. We may designate these two divisions as “Southern California” proper and “Lower Colorado River.”