Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/259

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GODDARD] UTO-AZTECAN 247

as having been originally north of the Colorado river. 1 From the Gila southward, west of the Sierra Madre are the Piman peoples; south and east of these mountains are the Nahuatl of Mexico valley. These linguistic groups were evidently in existence in the sixteenth century, and the changes in the languages since they were first known have been slight. For the development of such linguistic groups milleniums should be allowed.

As oil follows up a wick, so the culture of the south may be imagined to have passed northward among this people of a common speech. It went north along this particular line as far as cotton and maize can be grown. Had the culture followed the Pacific coast it might have reached Oregon at least.

We seem then to have a fairly definite correlation between lan- guage and a culture which has no necessary relation to language. Have we a further correlation with a definite physical type? The longheadedness of the Basket-makers, the Pima, and Papago, and certain Mexican tribes has indicated such a special type. The paper by Mr. Sullivan on the "Fossa Pharyngea" establishes a definite physical group having a common line of inheritance. The very insignificance of this fossa precludes any argument for its occurrence as a result of environment. The backbone of south- western physical, linguistic, and cultural early distribution seems to have been established. It remains to trace similar relations and connections for the groups east and west of this Uto-Aztecan speak- ing, maize and cotton raising, longheaded people who in uncommon numbers, have a fossa pharyngea. With a physical type definitely correlated with Shoshonean speech it ought to be possible to deter- mine whether any considerable number of such a physical strain were incorporated in the Shoshonean-speaking Hopi villages. If a definite physical type can be established for the stone house building peoples of the San Juan drainage it should be possible to trace the movement of the people themselves as well as their culture. This is especially promising since types of pottery of definite geographical and temporal sequence have been established.

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, NEW YORK CITY

1 The Comanche in Texas and the Paiute in southern California have been assumed to have left the plateaus in fairly recent times.

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