[Illustration: 18d MORTUARY _Pomo_ California Size: 5″ × 9½″] Plate No. 19 [Illustration: 19a CEREMONIAL (Wedding) _Hopi_ Arizona Size: 2½″ × 15″] [Illustration: 19b CEREMONIAL (Wedding) _Navajo_ Arizona Size: 4″ × 13″] [Illustration: 19c CEREMONIAL (Medicine Tray) _Paiute_ Arizona Size: 3″ × 14½″] [Illustration: 19d RINSING (Clothes) _Niantic_ Connecticut Size: 6″ × 11″ × 11″] Plate No. 20 [Illustration: SOYAL INITIATION CEREMONY (Prayer Offering Ceremony) _Hopi_ Arizona] Plate No. 21 [Illustration: BLOW GUN, QUIVER and DART _Cherokee_ North Carolina] ROOT RUNNER BASKETRY _Reprint from Philbrook Brochure, 1952 by Clark Field_ INTRODUCTION The purpose that a foreword serves to the reading public is ostensibly to express its writer’s endorsement of the material presented and of the mode of treatment. In this instance the purpose is heartily avowed. The monograph in hand forms a contribution to the series of studies being pursued widely among scholars whose aim is to piece together portions of the picture of culture of the Indians of the Southeast. Our knowledge of the culture properties of native tribes in any area where their development has been going on for centuries in their original seats comes necessarily by gradual steps. These may seem disconnected in the minds of laymen who are in haste to see the whole story completed. Perhaps only the pioneer investigator knows how long and intimately a people must be studied by dwelling in their midst before their ways of life become clear enough to be understood and discussed. Collections of data, historical, descriptive and functional, have to be made and preserved in the form of notes and actual specimens. When these ends are accomplished, the picture of tribal life takes definite shape, and another gap in the history of a people is closed. These are the requirements for carrying on in a somewhat new undertaking in the line of history, namely ethno-history. Studies of a people’s physical structure, their psychology, language, religion and government contribute their share. On the material side their crafts developed to supply economic needs and the art involved in the crafts themselves must be illustrated with accumulations of specimens. These requirements the author of the following study has had well in mind for a considerable space of time, and he has treated them with conservative judgment and a regard for their implications with botany and ecology. Such remarks applied to the paper constitute the ethnologist’s endorsement.