MCGEEl SURVIVAL OF VESTIGIAL CUSTOMS 221* 



in which men lived alongshore and adjusted themselves to maritime 

 couditious rather than to terrestrial environments; a stage evidently 

 but barely passed by the Seri, since they still subsist mainly on sea 

 food, still retain their suggestive navigation, and still view their stormy 

 straits and bays as the nucleus and noblest portion of their province. 



HABITATIONS 



Among the Seri, as among primitive folk generally, the habitation 

 retlects local conditions, especially climate and building materials. 

 Now, Seriland is a subtropical yet arid tract, where rain rarely falls, 

 frost seldom forms, and snow is known only as a fleeting mantle on 

 generally distant mountains, so that there is little need for protection 

 from cold and wet; at the same time the district is too desert to yield 

 serviceable building material other than rock, which the lowly folk 

 have not learned to manipulate. Moreover, the tribesmen and their 

 families are perpetual fugitives (their movements being too erratic and 

 aimless to put them in the class of nomads) ; they are tno accustomed to 

 wandering and too unaccustomed to long resting at particular spots to 

 have a home-sense, save for their motherland as a whole; and, just as 

 they rely on their own physical hardihood for preservation against the 

 elements, so they depend on their combined fleetness and prowess for 

 preservation against enemies. Accordingly, the Seri habitation is not 

 a permanent abode, still less a domicile for weaklings or a shrine for 

 houseliold lares and penates, not at all a castle of proprietary sanctity, 

 and least of all a home; it is rather a time-serving lair than a house in 

 ordinary meaning. 



Despite the poverty of the material and the squalor of the structure, 

 certain features of the Seri jacal are notably uniform and conventional. 

 In size and form it recalls the passing "prairie schooner", or covered 

 wagon ; it is some 10 or 12 feet long, half as wide measured on the 

 ground, and about 4.J feet high, with one end (the front) open to the 

 full width and height, and the other nearly or quite closed. The con- 

 ventional structural features comprise the upright bows and horizontal 

 tie-sticks forming the framework. The bows are made of okatilla 

 stems {Foi«[i(iera splendcns) roughly denuded of their thorns; each is 

 formed by thrusting the butts of two such stems (or more if they are 

 slender) into the ground at the requisite distance apart, bending the 

 tops together into an overlap of a yard or two, and securing them 

 partly by intertwisting, partly by any convenient lashing; and about 

 Ave or six such bows suttice for a jacal (tlie appearance of the bows is 

 fairly represented by the ruin shown in plate vii). Next come the tie- 

 sticks, which consist of any convenient material (okatilla stems, cane- 

 stalks, paloblanco branches, mesquite roots, saguaro ribs, etc.), and 

 are lashed to the butts by meiins of withes, splints, or fiber wisps, at a 

 height of some 4 feet above the ground, or about where the walls merge 

 into the roof. With the placing of these sticks the conventional part 



