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]
88. Historical Induction
The sort of conclusion here outlined is really a historical induction drawn from the facts of culture distribution among living but historyless tribes. Where documents are available, the development, the growth of the pyramid itself, as it were, can often be seen as it happened. Thus, about the year 100 A.D., Rome, Italy, France, England, Scotland, stood on successive descending culture levels related to one another much like Pueblo, Navaho, Pima, Mohave, Gabrielino; and also in the same placement of ever more outward geographic situation.
Where written records fail, archæological remains sometimes take their place. This is true of the Southwest, whose ancient pottery, stone edifices and implements, and evidences of agriculture remain as records of the past, telling a story only a little less complete and direct than that of the Roman historians. One of the archæologists of the Southwest has drawn up a pair of diagrams to outline the culture history of the area as he has reconstructed it from comparison of the prehistoric remains ([Fig. 26]).
Fig. 26. Diagrammatic representation by Nelson of the geography and history of the culture of the Indians of the southwestern United States: above, in space; below, in time, on A-B diameter of circle.