222 TRIBES AND DIALECTS OV CONNECTICUT Ieth. ann. 43 



tipi-like wigwams, for canoes, baskets, and utensils. The area is also 

 characterized by a particular phase of northern art. Certain peculiar 

 properties in archeology, such as the limitation of types of utensils to 

 the gouges, celts, slate bayonet-like spears, keel-based stone pipes of 

 the "Micmac" type, and the so-called "plummet stone" stand out 

 preeminently, while small arrowheads, grooved axes, and pottery are 

 comparatively scarce. The latter, where found, is crude and archaic. 

 Contrasting with the above features, the southern New England 

 peoples were more sedentary, assiduous agriculturists, more closely 

 organized under what appears to have been a maternal clan system. 

 Chiefs were powerful and autocratic, the resemblance bearing more 

 to government of the Powhatan Algonkian type. Ceremonial life, 

 too, seems to have been richer. Industrial life shows developments 

 in ceramics, splint basketry, wooden mortars, bowls, and utensils, 

 decorative art resembling more that of the Iroquois, dugout canoes, 

 and especially rectangular-based oval-topped wigwams covered with 

 mats. The archeology of the southern region shows a greater pro- 

 fusion in forms with bearings toward the central regions, in the 

 abundance of small missile points, grooved axes, clay pipes, stone 

 pipes of the so-called "monitor" type, and supposedly ceremonial 

 objects. Pottery is finer and shows strong Iroquoian influence." 



Making the most of the matter which we have in hand, it seems as 

 though it might be permitted to offer several fairly definite conclu- 

 sions at this stage in the solution of the New England ethnological 

 puzzle. One is the clearance of the linguistic identity of the Mohegan- 

 Pequot with the Massachusetts-Narragansett, which has been called 

 the southern New England group, previously hinted at by Professor 

 Prince and myself ^ and later by Doctor Michelson.* Secondly, 

 investigation seems to lend a corroborative aspect to the Mohegan 

 tradition as well as to the ethnological and historical conjecture that 

 the Mohegan-Pequot, and probably their affiliates south of the 

 Merrimac, were an early offshoot of the Mahican confederates 

 located on the Hudson. It seems to say that they were, as Doctor 

 Michelson shows, in respect to dialect less closely related to the 

 Wabanaki than to the Delaware and Mahican-Wappinger group. 

 On the whole, we may not be far amiss in assigning for the southern 

 New England group a migration almost due eastward from the 

 Hudson, the drift working eastward, in broad terms along the south- 

 ern border of the habitat of the more primitive and nomadic Wabanaki 

 tribes. The ancestry of the latter, we may note in passing, points to 

 an earlier residence northward and westward nearer the St. Lawrence 

 Kiver and the habitat of the Algonquin-Ojibwa group. The affirma- 



2 Doctor Dixon in his independent argument (op. cit., pp. 4-8) lists other comparative features. 



3 Prince and Speck, I (1909), p. 184, footnote 2. 



< Michelson, op. cit., p. 57, "Mohegan-Pequot belongs with the N.atick division of Central Algonquian 

 languages, and Mohegan-Pequot is ay dialect, thus agreeing with Narragansett." 



