FIFTY-NINTH ANNTJAL REPORT 5 



of an "inter-American anthropological and geographic society," for 

 the development of cooperative anthropological and geographic re- 

 search, and for the expansion of the exchange of publications. 

 During this visit, Dr. Steward was made an honorary member of 

 Academia Guarani of Paraguay and Sociedad de Antropologia de 

 Argentina. 



Dr. Steward has also served during the year as a member of the 

 Policy Board of the American Indian Institute, the Advisory Board 

 Strategic Index, and Publications Subcommittee of the Joint Com- 

 mittee on Latin American Studies. 



During the past fiscal year. Dr. Henry B. Collins, Jr., ethnologist, 

 continued with the study of archeological materials from prehistoric 

 Eskimo village sites around Bering Strait. In April he presented 

 a paper at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Society, 

 at Philadelphia, in which he discussed the relationships between pre- 

 historic Eskimo culture and recently described Neolithic remains from 

 the Lake Baikal region, southern Siberia, which have been regarded 

 as the source of the basic American Indian culture. The paper, 

 which is to be published in somewhat expanded form in the Proceed- 

 ings of the Society, points out a number of close resemblances between 

 the oldest Eskimo cultures — which probably date from around the 

 beginning of the Christian era — and the Siberian Neolithic. The 

 older stages of culture elsewhere in America, such as Folsom and 

 Sandia, exhibit no such resemblances; it seems unlikely, therefore, 

 that the Siberian Neolithic was the reservoir from which American 

 culture in general was derived. 



In the latter part of the fiscal year, Dr. Collins devoted considerable 

 time to work in connection with the war effort, including the prepara- 

 tion of illustrated reports on various strategic areas. Preparation 

 was also begun on a general paper on Alaska for the Smithsonian 

 War Background Studies. 



Dr. William N. Fenton, associate anthropologist, devoted the 

 summer mouths of 1941 to tlie preparation of an introduction to his 

 materials on Iroquois medical botany. Since a surprising number of 

 Indian herbs have been taken into our pharmacopoeia, it was decided 

 to publish the section on Contacts between Iroquois Herbalism and 

 Colonial Medicine, a unit of itself, as an article in the appendix to 

 the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1941, reserving 

 the balance of the study for a longer monograph. 



In November, Dr. Fenton went to Brantford, Ontario, to work with 

 Simeon Gibson of Six Nations Reserve at translating Onondaga texts 

 bearing on the Iroquois League which his father. Chief John A. Gibson, 

 had dictated to the late J. N. B. Hewitt. Of these the principal manu- 

 script is a 189-page version in Onondaga of the "Deganawi'dah" legend 

 of the founding of the Iroquois confederacy. Some 13 years later, 



