44o TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



left their earth and bark-covered houses to dwell in tipis. When out 

 after buffalo many of these tribes used a camp and police organization 

 similar to that of the typical Plains group. Other traits, such as the 

 sun dance and sign language, occur but occasionally. The members of 

 the typical group were neither potters nor weavers, but in the eastern 

 group we find some weaving and some pottery, though not so highly 

 developed as in the far east and south. Our eastern Plains group thus 

 stands as an intermediate or transitional culture, between that of the 

 typical buffalo-hunting Indian of the west and the typical sedentary 

 Indian of the Ohio Valley. 



In the same way we could show that the tribes to the immediate west 

 are transitional between Plateau and Plains culture, because they have 

 traits common to both. 



So far, we have considered culture alone. Anthropologists usually 

 classify people in three ways: language, culture and anatomical char- 

 acters. Strictly speaking, language should be included in culture, but 

 because of the peculiar difficulties in linguistic research it is more con- 

 venient to separate the two. The tribes enumerated in the map speak 

 languages belonging to seven distinct families (Sionan, Algonkin, Cad- 

 doan, Kiowan, Shoshonean, Athapascan and Shahaptian) and have 

 more than twenty separate languages. Six of these seven families are 

 found in other culture areas and in some cases widely distributed over 

 the continent. As is well known, there is no apparent correlation be- 

 tween cultures and language, for should we superimpose linguistic and 

 culture area maps there would be no significant correspondence. The 

 same may be said of anatomical type. 



We may now consider some of the important problems raised re- 

 specting the culture of the Plains Indians. Everybody interested wants 

 to know how and when their culture developed, but all problems of this 

 kind have proved particularly difficult, so that no one can yet say even 

 approximately by what means cultures came about. On the other hand, 

 we have sufficient data from some culture areas of the world to form 

 some idea as to what went on therein within a given period of time. 



Several more or less extreme theories have been proposed to account 

 for culture. One is that, in the main, each group of people, independ- 

 ent of every other, worked out and created its own culture. The oppo- 

 site view is that independent invention is extremely rare, so rare that we 

 may assume all like traits as due to inter-tribal borrowing, or historical 

 contact, until we find evidence to the contrary. The present tendency 

 among American anthropologists is to take the middle ground and stand 

 for empirical methods in that both may be true to a degree and that 

 each culture is to be considered upon its own merits without regard to 

 an initial assumption. To them it seems unnecessary to assume any- 

 thing as to origin until there is real evidence lending itself to a particu- 



