Ruins of an ancient Communal Village, Rito de los Frijoles, New Mexico 
r M HOUSE-BUILDERS OF THE DESERT 
J. P. Harrington 
L ET us suppose that an enthusiastic 
anthropologist had been born in 
J the time of the cave-man of Eu¬ 
rope, that he had been rich as Croesus 
and endowed with a hundred times the 
longevity of Methusaleh. What more 
interesting experiment could this man 
have made than to place on a great, 
uninhabited continent a few individuals 
of primitive stock and then watch them 
multiply and diversify through the cen¬ 
turies? 
They spread through mountain, plain, 
and desert, from arctic coast to tropic 
forest. Their manner of life and back¬ 
ground of thought become, in every 
locality, different, yet always vary in 
direct relation to their surroundings. 
Their language changes until its multi¬ 
plicity of forms becomes as great a mira¬ 
cle as Babel of old. Social systems, cere¬ 
monies, and myths become intricate. 
Yet the people still have all their thought 
centered on their relation to wild na¬ 
ture, they still live close to the earth, 
they remain primitively human. The 
whole region becomes divided into more 
or less definitely marked areas of cul¬ 
ture, each peculiar even as regards the 
minute customs and habits of every¬ 
day life and thought. 
Would such an experiment not have 
been interesting both to the ancient 
anthropologist and to everyone today? 
But while our anthropologist is a fig¬ 
ment of the imagination, the experi¬ 
ment has actually been performed by 
nature in the great anthropological 
laboratory of America, and just at the 
present time it is our peculiar privilege 
to study and record what has taken 
place. 
All the way from Alaska to Pata¬ 
gonia are hundreds of tribes of Indians 
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