North American Indians of the plains / by Clark Wissler.

  • Clark Wissler
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: North American Indians of the plains / by Clark Wissler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in more or less complete association is taken as indicating the geographi¬ cal extent of a type of culture. The fact that these boundaries almost coincide with the limits of the treeless prairies and plains and that this culture is most intensified among the tribes living in the Great Plains, has given rise to the term Plains Area. In the same way other parts of the continent appear as the homes of peculiar culture types. Anthropologists generally recognize at least eleven such areas whose approximate extents we have indicated in the accompanying map. The types for each of these are illustrated as space permits in the four halls on the first floor of the Museum. As will be exemplified in the text, the lines separating these areas are somewhat arbitrary. A more correct method would be to color the areas and divide them by broad bands in ever changing mixtures of the two colors, but only in a few instances have we sufficient data to do even this accurately. Hence, the approximate line seems the best designation of culture boundaries. Reference to a linguistic map of North America will show that there is little correspondence between linguistic stock and culture type, for while in some cases the two lines on the map coincide, in others, they show no approach whatsoever. Again, while the physical types of the Indians show some tendencies to agree in distribution with cultural traits, they also show marked disagreements. Hence, it is not far wrong to say that if, according to the data now available, we superim¬ posed cultural, linguistical, and physical type maps, we should find them with few boundaries in common.
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