NATURAL PEBBLE CONSIDERABLY USED AS HAMMER, GRINDER, AND ANVIL (BOTTOM AND EDGE)
It is to be realized that the successive stages represent characteristic phases of normal and continuous growth, and hence that their relations are intimate and complex. The fundamental factor of the growth is intellectual advancement, and hence in actual life each stage is at once the germ and the foundation for the next higher; each stage is characterized by a type or a cognate series of types, yet each commonly contains a few forms prophetic of the next stage and many forms vestigial of the earlier stages; so that the stages are to be likened unto successive generations of organisms, or (still more appropriately) to the successive phases of ovum, larva, pupa, and imago in the ontogeny of the insect rather than to the arbitrary classes of pigeonhole arrangements. The complex relations conceived to exist among the stages can be indicated more clearly by diagraphic representation than by typographic arrangement, and such a representation is introduced as figure 38. The successive curves in the diagram express the rhythmic character of progress and the cumulative value of its interrelated factors, as well as the dominance of successive types until gradually sapped and absorbed (though not immediately or completely annihilated) by higher types reflecting a strengthened mentality.
Fig. 38—Diagrammatic outline of industrial development.
The place of the normal pacific industries of the Seri in this genetic classification of human technic is definite. The Seri craft combines the features of the zoomimic and protolithic stages more completely than that of any other known folk, and in such wise as to reveal the relations between these stages and that next higher in the series with unparalleled clearness; their craft also displays an aberrant (and hence presumptively accultural) feature pertaining to the technolithic stage; and in so far as their craftsmen use the material typical of the age of metal they degrade it to the transitional substage between dominant zoomimicry and designless stone-using.
Viewed in the general light of their pacific industries, the Seri are, accordingly, among the most primitive of known tribes; their technic is in harmony with their esthetic, and also with their somatic and tribal characteristics, in attesting a lowly plane of development; while their industries, like their other demotic features, are essentially autochthonous.
WARFARE
Something is known of Seri warfare through the history of the centuries since 1540, and especially through the bloody episodes of the Encinas régime and the occasional outbreaks of the last decade or two. The available data clearly indicate that the warfare of the tribe complements their pacific industries in every essential respect.
As befits their primitive character, warfare has played an important role in the history of the folk, forming, indeed, one of the chief factors in determining the course of tribal development. There is no means of estimating the losses suffered and occasioned in warfare with the neighboring tribes during either prehistoric or historic times; but the indications are that they were much greater than the losses connected with Caucasian contact. Neither is it practicable to estimate reliably the fatalities attending the interminable conflicts with the Spanish invaders and their descendants, though it is safe to say that the Seri losses in strife against Spaniards and Mexicans aggregate many hundred, and that the correlative loss on the part of their enemies reaches several score, if not some hundred, lives. Few if any other aboriginal tribes of America have had so sanguinary a history as the Seri, and none other has at once so long and so bloody a record.