422 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1919. 
had accumulated? His intelligence would be less than that of the 
lower animals if he had not. For ages he may have been satisfied with 
the shelter nature thus afforded, but that complacency could not con- 
tinue, for ambition always urged him to improve his condition; 
otherwise there would have been no subsequent civilization. He in- 
vented a better home; he early devised a walled-in structure, at first 
crude, afterwards more elaborate (pl. 2), even beautifying it to 
please his esthetic sense. He constructed buildings in the open, as 
necessity dictated, for caves are localized, and in its migrations the 
human race spread over grassland and plain as well as mountainous 
regions; but it may be said that the history of a savage race where 
caves exist naturally opens with the utilization of these sites by man 
for his comfort and for a place in which to keep his possessions. 
When the American Indian first came into the cave country of our 
Southwest he was, however, no savage; he had long dwelt in houses 
of some kind and had brought with him a gift of his gods, the food 
plant, maize, the cornerstone of his future development. This key to 
his civilization led him to avail himself of caves for his domicile, and 
there is objective material left by him at all stages of his evolution 
from which to trace the progress of the building from simple begin- 
nings to the most elaborate construction to which he attained. 
I have spoken above of maize, the supposed gift of the gods, which 
he brought to the cave country. The foundation of all culture is the 
maintenance of a food supply, and the first steps in the advancement 
of the human race were the discovery of an artificial means for in- 
crease and regulation of that supply. So long as man was dependent 
on the daily results of fishing or hunting he had scanty time to devote 
to advancement, but a domestication of animals or a discovery of food 
plants capable of being cultivated and preserved for future use, when 
necessary, started him upon an upward course to a higher culture. 
The bulky food supply of various products of a vegetable nature 
requires storage after harvesting and the agriculturist is driven to 
seek out places to contain it or to construct bins for that purpose. 
Primitive man in a country where caves exist naturally utilized these 
shelters for that purpose. Here we have one of the most important 
reasons why the agricultural Indians ‘of the mountains originally 
adopted caves for preservation of their food supply. The improve- 
ment of this shelter by the erection of bins naturally followed; con- 
sequently in studying the relations of cliff dwellings to man’s develop- 
ment of our Southwest we should always have clearly in mind the 
storage of corn, which was so important under early conditions and 
the necessity for which survives to the present time. 
The production of the food supply of an agricultural people is 
limited to a part of the year. From harvesting to planting the earth 
