Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822Mallery, Garrick
History
Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822
Mallery, Garrick
Picture-writing, Indian
The north Atlantic group is in the priscan habitat of the tribes of the
Algonquian linguistic family, and extends from Nova Scotia southward to
Pennsylvania, where the sculpturings are frequent, especially on the
Susquehanna, Monongahela, and Alleghany rivers, and across Ohio from
Lake Erie to the Kanawha river, in West Virginia. Isolated localities
bearing the same type are found westward on the Mississippi river and
a few of its western tributaries, to and including the Wind river
mountains, in Wyoming, the former habitat of the Blackfeet Indians. All
of these petroglyphs present typical characters, sometimes undefined
and complicated. From their presumed authors, they have been termed the
Algonquian type. Upon close study and comparison they show many features
in common which are absent in extra-limital areas.
Immediately south of the Kanawha river, in West Virginia, and extending
southward into Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, the pecked
or sculptured petroglyphs are replaced by painted figures of a style
differing from the Algonquian. These are in the area usually designated
as Cherokee territory, but there is no evidence that they are the work
of that tribe; indeed, there is no indication of their authorship. The
absence of pecked characters in this area is certainly not due to an
absence of convenient material upon which to record them as the country
is as well adapted to the mode of incision as is the northern Atlantic
area.
Upon the Pacific slope a few pecked as well as colored petroglyphs occur
scattered irregularly throughout the extreme northern area west of
the Sierra Nevada, but on the eastern side of that range of mountains
petroglyphs appear in Idaho, which have analogues extending south to
New Mexico and Arizona, with remarkable groups at intervals between
these extremes. All of these show sufficient similarity of form to be
considered as belonging to a type which is here designated “Shoshonean.”
Tribes of that linguistic family still occupy, and for a long time have
occupied, that territory. Most of this Shoshonean group consists of
pecked or incised characters, though in the southern area unsculptured
paintings predominate.
On the western side of the Sierra Nevada, from Visalia southward,
at Tulare agency, and thence westward and southward along the Santa
Barbara coast, are other groups of colored petroglyphs showing typical
features resembling the Shoshonean. This resemblance may be merely
accidental, but it is well known that there was intercourse between the
tribes on the two sides of the Sierra Nevada, and the Shoshonean family
is also represented on the Pacific slope south of the mountain range
extending from San Bernardino west to Point Conception. In this manner
the artistic delineation of the Santa Barbara tribes may have been
influenced by contact with others.
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