98 BUREAU OF AMEEICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 00 



These areas in all cases are based on the more clearh' manifested 

 phases of their culture content. In some areas evidence has been 

 reported of early cultures radically distinct from the type adopted 

 as characteristic of the areas, and ancestral forms grading into the 

 later and into the historic forms are thought to have been recognized. 

 In these particular branches of the research, however, haste must be 

 made slowly as the utmost acumen of the student is called for in 

 making areal and chronological discriminations. It is anticipated, 

 since the period of occupancy of the continent must have been of 

 long duration, that not only early but more elementary' cultures may 

 in good time be identified within areas characterized by advanced 

 cultures. Certainly the historic period furnishes many illustrations 

 of the superposition of inferior over greatly superior advancement. 



Within the region north of JSIexico the culture of the most ad- 

 vanced communities rises high in the scale of bar- 

 Range of cuitm-e barian achievement — a status characterized by an 

 artificial basis of subsistence, sedentary life, success- 

 ful agriculture, and extensive town building, yet still far below the 

 cukure level of glj^phic writing reached by the more advanced tribes 

 of Middle America. Pictographic records carved on stone, engraved 

 or painted on bark, and painted on surfaces of many kinds, were 

 almost entirel}^ pictorial or graphic, slight advance having been 

 made in the use of purely conventional characters, except as separate 

 symbols or as ornamental designs. The lowest stage ranges well 

 down in savager}', where art in stone in its rudimentary forms had 

 barely obtained a sure foothold, as with the Seri and other Lower 

 Californians. 



In Middle and especially in South America the culture contrasts 

 are even greater, and nations standing upon the very threshold of 

 civilization, with arts, industries, and institutions highly developed, 

 are in close juxtaposition with utterly savage tribes to which even 

 clothing and stable dwellings are practically unknown. With the 

 exception of a limited group at the mouth of the Amazon, the more 

 advanced cultures were confined to the west coast and the Andean 

 plateaus, where forests are rare and deserts common, while the 

 2)rimitive status was and is yet found in places throughout the vast 

 forest regions of the eastern slope of the Andes and the Orinoco- 

 Amazon region, in the broad pampas of Brazil, Paraguay, and 

 Argentina, and on the entire Atlantic coastal border from Panama 

 to Tierra del Fuego, excepting always the limited areas about the 

 delta of the Amazon. 



These differences in culture status appear to be due to a complex 

 of causes not readily analyzed. Whatsoever the nature of the molding 

 agencies, they have acted to diversify, differentiate, and individualize 

 cultures in a most pronounced manner throughout the two Americas, 



