The Problem

The following data is extracted from Southern Contacts of the Indians North of the Gulf of Mexico.

The relations existing in prehistoric times between the Indians formerly inhabiting, the territory of the present United States and those south of them have been a subject of discussion from the earliest period of ethnologic speculation in America. Dissemination of culture and of blood takes place, of course, where any tribe is in contact with any other tribe, but something more than this has frequently been alleged of the relations between the two areas under consideration.

In parts of Mexico and Central America, not. to mention regions farther south, there existed historically, as is well known, relatively high native cultures, usually spoken of as "civilizations." In the southeastern and southwestern parts of what is now the United States were two groups of tribes exhibiting cultures inferior to those of the peoples just mentioned but distinctly superior to those of the tribes north of them, and in the southeast there wore earthen structures which .suggested to the earlier investigators a culture still higher, one seeming to recall that of the more southern nations. With the Pueblo cultural area of the South-west it is not proposed to deal in this paper except in so far as it affected the cultural area of the Southeast with which we are specifically concerned.

As long as the builders of the mounds ovens supposed to be a varnished race possessed of a civilization superior to that of the Indians found in the same country in later times, it was almost inevitable that students should turn to the existing civilizations elsewhere for an explanation of them. But even after the "mound builder" theory had been given up it was held that the culture represented by the mounds and by the more advanced peoples of the Southeast must owe much of its superiority to Mexico and Central America, either through the migrations of entire tribes or by the transplantation of entire cultures. This is the question which I propose to discuss in the present paper.

Source: Southern Contacts of the Indians North of the Gulf of Mexico

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