SWANTON: CATAWBA NOTES 623 



ANTHROPOLOGY.— Catow;6a noies.^ John R. Swanton, Bu- 

 reau of American Ethnology. 



The wTiter spent the greater part of the month of May, 1918, 

 on the Catawba reservation, South CaroUna, collecting linguistic 

 material from some of the few Indians still able to use the old 

 Catawba language. These Indians have been surrounded by 

 whites and negroes for such a long period and their economic 

 condition has altered so completely that one feels uncertain 

 whether the scraps of information regarding the old life and 

 beliefs now to be obtained had a purely Indian origin, and how 

 far they may have been colored by external influences. Never- 

 theless these scraps may have some value for future investigators 

 who may be in a better position to separate the various elements 

 entering into them. At any rate such scraps are all that we now 

 have, outside of the very limited material from earlier writers 

 such as Lawson, and I give them for what they may be worth. 

 They were collected merely incidentally in the course of the lin- 

 guistic investigation, and are principally from an old woman 

 named Margaret Brown and her son John Brown. An account 

 of the only important native industry which has come down to 

 modern times, pottery making, has been omitted, since this has 

 been treated very fully by Mr. M. R. Harrington^ in a special 

 paper containing also a few notes on other features of Catawba 

 ethnology. 



Margaret Brown says that when she was a girl the Catawba 

 Uved, not in frame houses as they do today, but in brush dwell- 

 ings. According to her description these had a single ridgepole 

 supported at either end by a forked stick, a roof of pine bark^ 

 and walls of brush. The house was round or oblong, the door 

 in the latter case being midway of one of the longer sides, and 

 along the wall opposite to the door was a bed of the usual south- 

 ern Indian style, a bench of wattle or matting supported by 

 short poles. The fire was in the middle of the house, and there 

 was no vent for the smoke except the door. 



' Published with the permission of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Insti-r 

 tution. 



^ Harrington, M. R., Amer. Anthrop. n. ser. 10: 399-407. 



