PREHISTORIC CULTURE WAVES — JENNESS 387 



western slopes of the Rockies until they reached Colorado, Arizona, 

 and New Mesico. It was they, perhaps, who introduced bows and 

 arrows and the Mongoloid strain in Pueblo I remains, shortly before 

 the end of the first millennium A. D. ; they, too, who introduced the 

 snowshoe and other important elements into America, as Birket- 

 Smith cogently argues — though I find it difiicult to ascribe to an 

 Athapaskan invasion all the elements he includes in the snowshoe 

 complex, particularly hunting territories, which I suspect are post- 

 European, and moccasins, cradleboards, bark vessels, and the use of 

 fatty substances for tanning skins, since these elements occur also 

 in the extreme south of South America. 



Inseparably linked with the Athapaskan invasion are the Eskimo, 

 whom they partly dislodged, and the Indians of the northwest 

 Pacific coast, the "totem pole" Indians whose origin and culture still 

 remain a profound mystery. 



Let us consider the latter first. Smith's excavations in the shell 

 heaps along this Pacific coast have yielded rather negative results, 

 although the forest growth proves that some of the heaps were aban- 

 doned at least 500 years ago and that their lowest levels must be 

 several hundred years older. They revealed that there was a long- 

 headed strain in the population that is absent in the modern Indians 

 of the region ; also that a few implements had a somewhat restricted 

 range, being absent either in the more northern heaps, or in the more 

 southern. By and large, however, there was little or no indication of 

 any earlier culture than that which was still flourishing along this 

 coast in the nineteenth century, although it was originally somewhat 

 simpler, and more nearly related, apparently, to that found inland up 

 the Eraser River. Even in the first millennium A. D., then, it was 

 apparently well rooted in its present home. 



As far as their physical type is concerned, the modern Indians of 

 this area are indistinguishable, Hrdlicka states, from the Gilyak and 

 other tribes on the Amur River in Siberia; but the affinities of the 

 earlier, long-headed strain are uncertain. 



Linguistic studies indicate that Haida and Tlinkit are greatly 

 modified forms of Athapaskan or Dene, that Tsimshian is a Penutian 

 tongue related to some languages in California, while the three south- 

 ern languages, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Salish, may ultimately prove 

 to belong to the Algonquian linguistic stock. This helps our present 

 inquiry very little, except that it suggests a pressure of Athapaskan 

 tribes in the north strong enough to impose the language but not to 

 alter the physical type ; and since the Haida and Tlinkit languages are 

 so unlike each other, and so unlike other Dene tongues, it suggests 

 also that they originate from the earliest Athapaskan wave and have 

 undergone considerable changes since, partly owing to their isolation 

 and partly to the influence of neighboring tongues. 



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