246 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920
northern representation of a broad general culture which formerly extended southward to Chili. The important common elements may be named as the raising of maize, grinding it on a metate, the raising of cotton and weaving it and other vegetable fibers on a simple frame loom, the wearing of sandals, and the use of the spear thrower. The culture of maize originated far south of Utah. It is probable agriculture as well as the other arts mentioned above reached Utah by transmission from one people to another.
We have recently learned that the building of many-roomed houses of stone and adobe, and the manufacture of corrugated and paint-decorated pottery are arts which arose in the Southwest itself. While we have no conclusive evidence, it seems probable that the more highly developed forms of present day Pueblo religion, the dramas and processions, were also developed in the Southwest. Some of the simple foundation elements of the religion however extend beyond the Pueblo region. Of these may be mentioned feathered offerings, color symbolism, the use of cornmeal for sprink- ling, etc.
Powell, actuated by a commendable scientific caution, separated the languages of the southern plateaus, the Shoshonean, from the Piman of southern Arizona and northern Mexico, and from the Nahuatl of the valley of Mexico. Kroeber 1 in 1907 reunited these groups under the name of Uto-Aztekan. We have then a large linguistic group stretching from southern Mexico nearly to the Canadian boundary.
While these Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples cannot be said tp have occupied a valley similar to the hypothetical one mentioned at the beginning of this article, they did occupy a series of such valleys, extending from north to south. The Rocky mountains and the high Sierra of Mexico formed a barrier on the east. The Sierra Nevada and the Mohave desert were a partial barrier on the west. Unlike our hypothetical valley, the Uto-Aztecan range was so great that instead of linguistic uniformity we find three great linguistic subdivisions. The Shoshonean proper may be imagined
��l " Shoshonean Dialects of California," University of California Publications in. Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. iv, pp. 66-156. Berkeley, 1907.
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