ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT. 5 
tion of the prehistoric population may be reached, and the 
location and significance of trade routes established. A 
clearer idea is also sought of the shifts in population un- 
doubtedly brought about by the introduction of corn. 
Without some study of the kind no proper estimate of the 
social and religious institutions of the people of prehistoric 
America is possible. 
His work on the languages of the Indians of the lower 
Mississippi Valley has been continued, and at the end of the 
year it was directed particularly to the preparation of a 
grammatical sketch of the Natchez language from materials 
collected by him during the last 10 years from one of the 
three surviving speakers of that tongue. 
In April Doctor Swanton visited Oklahoma in order to 
collect additional information regarding the little understood 
and now almost forgotten social systems of the Choctaw 
and Chickasaw Indians. Although small in bulk, the mate- 
rial obtained in the course of the investigation is valuable. 
It has already been incorporated into a manuscript paper on ~ 
the social organization and social customs of the Indians of 
the Muskhogean stock. During the trip he also secured the 
services of an educated Chickasaw in writing texts in his 
native tongue, and one of these has already been received. 
Before his return to Washington, Doctor Swanton visited 
Anadarko, where he learned that the language of the Kichai 
Indians is on the point of extinction, and began the collec- 
tion of a vocabulary. He has made arrangements for more 
extended work upon this language in the fall. 
He has submitted two papers for publication during the 
year, first a philological paper entitled “A Structural and 
Lexical Comparison of the Tunica, Chitimacha, and Atakapa 
Languages,” which is being published as Bulletin 68, in which 
he believes he has shown the relationship of what had hitherto 
been classed as three independent stocks; and, second, an 
extended historical study of the Creek Indians and their 
neighbors. 
Mr. J. N. B. Hewitt, ethnologist, on his return from field 
work, July 5, 1918, took up the final reading of the proofs of 
his report in the Thirty-second Annual Report of the Bureau 
