189G.] 4U1 [Cushins. 



among themselves. It is chiefly due to this tendency that we have kept 

 inviolate for us everywhere in the primitive world, signs on the relics we 

 find, of what have been termed cultural areas or areas of art character- 

 ization. And so, while the extensive and long-continued intercourse in 

 the barter of the far-southern peoples of Florida and the keys, with 

 more northern peoples (which is so positively indicated by the occur- 

 rence in the northern mounds, of gorgets, etc. — not only derived from 

 species, found nowhere else than in these Gulf regions, but also treated 

 in precisely the same conventional manner), will account for much in 

 this spread of identical art forms, nevertheless it does not, I am inclined 

 to think, explain the whole. To say for the moment nothing further of 

 the great variety of art forms which almost certainly took their origin 

 in the region of the keys or in some other Gulf region where a life of 

 similar kind was naturally or necessarilj' followed, and which are also 

 found throughout the mound area, I maj^ call attention to a single 

 point among many — the evidence afl:brded by the tempering-material of 

 pottery. Almost always, the pottery of sea-dwelling peoples, in regions 

 where clays of such kind as require tempering occur, is tempered with 

 calcined and crushed shell. In an article on "The Germ of Shoreland 

 Pottery" (printed in the Memoirs of the International Congress of 

 Anthropology, pp. 217-234, Chicago, The Schulte Publishing Com- 

 pany, 1894), I have endeavored to show why this is so, and was at first 

 naturally, if not inevitably so. Now, wherever the art forms I am dis- 

 cussing are found in the mounds, even at far inland points, the potteries 

 of these same mounds are commonly tempered with shell, notwithstand- 

 ing the fact that in the more inland and northerly regions of the mounds 

 such kind of tempering had to be supplied, at great labor, from fresh- 

 water species of mollusks. 



There are, however, various additional reasons, it seems to me, for sup- 

 posing that this art spread northwardlj- from a southern sea-environment 

 — not so much by barter, as by actual movement landwardly and north- 

 wardly, of the culture and to some extent of the peoples themselves of 

 these southern sea-land regions. One of these reasons rests in the very 

 broad distinction that we may make between the sea-shell art of the 

 mounds and the sea-shell art of other and more northerly regions, equallj' 

 as far inland from the sea. There, objects made from sea shells are abun- 

 dant, it is true, but thej^ are in general, obviouslj- of a more purely decora- 

 tive or valuative, than of a symbolic character. This was the case, for 

 example, with the famous wampum of New England and the Middle 

 Atlantic States, prized for the high value of the far-derived material of 

 which it was made, more than for its supposed sacred or ancestral quali- 

 ties ; whereas, the greater number of the shell cups, gorgets, and other 

 shell articles found in the mound region proper, retained the identical 

 pristine symbolic character and association they naturally had on the 

 .seashore. Now it is not easy to see how this could have been the case 

 had the peoples of the mounds originated, or rather had their culture, 



