402 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 4 



Most of the tribes of the tropical rain forests, savannas, and coastal 

 plains practice a troj^ical agriculture based on cassava, but are at the 

 same time seminomadic hunters and fishermen. Milpa agriculture, 

 or the planting of root crops in a forest clearing which is abandoned 

 after a few seasons, would alone suffice to account for extensive tribal 

 wanderings in the course of a century. 



The distribution of Indian tribal stocks in northeastern South 

 America is not well known. The field is a large one, larger than the 

 entire area of the United States including Alaska, and the native 

 population is widely disseminated. The accounts of early explorers, 

 often the only source material available, remain uncorrected as to 

 details but are authoritative within a broad outline. The researches 

 of noted scholars in the area, such as Koch-Gruenberg, Lehmann- 

 Nitsche, Chamberlain, Nordenskiold, Von den Steinen, Farabee, 

 Fewkes, Stirling, Karsten, Krause, Rivet, Von Rosen, Schmidt, 

 Steere, Jahn, Joyce, DeBooy, Im Thurn, Roth, Brett, Lange, Linne, 

 Netto, Hartt, Pinot, Ernst, Church, Von Ihering, Ehrenreich, Goldi, 

 Petrullo, and Brinton, have determined within broad outlines the 

 linguistic, cultural, and geographical boundaries of the more compre- 

 hensive groups. 



ETHNIC MAPS 



An excellent map of the " Country and Environs of the Guiana 

 Indians ", appearing in the 38th Annual Report of the Bureau of 

 American Ethnology, was compiled by Dr. W. E. Roth from the maps 

 of Crevaux, Condreau, Schomburgk, Koch-Gruenberg, the Venezue- 

 lan War Department, and the Mission Bresilienne d'Expansion 

 Economique. There is also a tribal map covering all of South 

 America in " The American Indian ", by Clark Wissler. This map 

 is based on original sources and brings out the relation of the tribes 

 to the larger linguistic groups perhaps more clearly than in the origi- 

 nal sources. Chamberlain's " Linguistic Stocks of South American 

 Indians ", published in the American Anthropologist (n. s., vol. 15, 

 no. 2, April-June 1913), has a distribution map extensively used as 

 a source reference. The excellent tribal distribution map appearing 

 in Buschan's " Voelkerkunde ", Stuttgart, 1922, was carefully com- 

 piled by Dr. Krickeberg, and is based on the work of Chamberlain, 

 Koch-Gruenberg, Lehmann, Rivet, Outes, and Joyce. The map ac- 

 companying this paper is an adaptation of the Roth and Buschan 

 maps. In it an attempt is made to outline tribal as well as linguistic 

 areas. 



The topography of northeastern South America is simple, con- 

 sisting of highlands in the southern and eastern portions of Brazil 

 and surrounding low plains. To the northwest the low-lying country 

 drained by the Orinoco and by the Amazon and its tributaries is 



