306 proceedings: anthropological society 



explain the activities and the products of activity thruout the ages. 

 All that archeology gathers from this wide field of research is contributed 

 to the volume of written history. It is thus not only the retriever of 

 that which was treasured and lost, but also the savior and conservator of 

 vast resources of history of which no man had previously taken heed. 



In the great work of assembling the scattered pages and completing 

 the volume of the history of man, archeology may well claim first place 

 among the contributing sciences. 



This paper was discussed by Messrs Casonowicz, Carroll, Swanton, 

 Stetson, Hewitt, and others. 



The 467th regular meeting was held on March 18, 1913, at the 

 National Museum, the President, Mr. Stetson, in the chair, 



Dr, John R, Swanton read a paper on The Creek confederacy. After 

 explaining the geographical and linguistic positions of the tribes of the 

 Creek confederacy with the assistance of a map, Dr, Swanton traced the 

 evolution of the confederation from a small nucleus of tribes speaking 

 the Muskogee language to a large association, comprising a number of 

 Hitchiti speaking people, the Alabama, Koasati, some of the Apalachee 

 and Yamasi part of the Natchez, the Yuchi, and, for a time, some of the 

 Shawnee. He showed that this association was facilitated thru the insti- 

 tution of a dual division of towns into white or peace towns and red or 

 war towns, the towns of each division, or "fire," considering each other 

 friends or allies and having opposing but not warlike relations with the 

 towns of the other "fire," It thus happened that when an outside town 

 or tribe came to be accepted as a "friend" of one of the white or red 

 towns in the confederacy its position with reference to all of the other 

 white and red towns was thus established and it entered into the confed- 

 erate scheme. The communication of other common features to the 

 new towns also took place, altho more slowly. Such features were the 

 "green corn dance" or busk, or perhaps rather the Muskogee form of it, 

 participation in common altho irregular councils, and the adoption of 

 Muskogee as the standard language of intercommunication. The actual 

 discontinuance of the proper languages of the various members of the 

 confederacy was, fortunately for the ethnologist, much slower, several 

 of them having persisted down to the present day. Thru the progressive 

 adoption of smaller tribes and the practical destruction of some in war- 

 fare, a process accelerated by white contact, the Creek confederacy 

 came to be almost the sole representative of eastern Muskhogean culture, 

 andjeven influenced the culture of the Chickasaw to a marked degree. 

 The great Choctaw body, on the other hand, maintained its cultural 

 independence and was never dominated by the Creeks, In sharp con- 

 trast to the Creeks, whose national structure was built up by fitting 

 numerous distantly related tribes into an artificial fraternal scheme, the 

 Choctaw seem to have owed their sense of unity to an actual homo- 

 geneity in the Choctaw population, the occupancy of a common area, 

 and the necessity to resist common enemies. They preserved perhaps 

 the simplicity of culture existing among all Muskhogean Indians in 



