SWANTON— TIMUCUA RELATIONSHIP 



been employed to localize an individual roughly and that several 

 terms might have been used for the same person on different occa- 

 sions or for different purposes. 



Certain important facts also come to light regarding the institu- 

 tion of exogamy. We know from what Pareja tells us that a man 

 could not marry into his own clan, in some cases, indeed, not into an 

 entire group of clans. We know also that in tribes having several 

 exogamous groups there was usually a strong repugnance, if not an 

 absolute prohibition, against marriage into the clan of the father. 

 Such a repugnance existed among the Creeks, and may very well have 

 been present with the Timucua, although of this we have no definite 

 statement. Finally, I know of no case where a man was permitted to 

 marry a woman he called "sister", and with the Timucua, as we have 

 seen, this term was applied to a woman of any clan whose father hap- 

 pened to belong to the clan of the speaker's father. It would seem 

 from the information given us by Pareja that there were six exoga- 

 mous divisions among the Timucua. Now, if we suppose that there 

 were a hundred marriageable women in each division, six hundred in 

 all, any man old enough to marry would not be permitted to marry 

 a hundred of these because they belonged to his own clan, a hundred 

 more because they belonged to his father's clan, and an indefinite 

 number besides varying from a possible zero to ninety-nine whose 

 fathers were of the same clan as his father. Thus almost half of the 

 marriageable women in the tribe would be taboo to him. From this 

 it appears that the assumed disadvantage under which tribes with 

 but two exogamous divisions are sometimes supposed to labor in 

 having their choice of a wife restricted to half of the women, may be 

 no greater than that existing in tribes with several such exogamous 

 divisions. 



Bureau of American Ethnology 

 Washington, D.C. 



[463] 



