A Wolf in Duke's Clothing Susanna

Allen
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/a-wolf-in-dukes-clothing-susanna-allen-3/
Thank you for downloading this Sourcebooks

eBook!

You are just one click away from…

• Being the first to hear about author happenings

• VIP deals and steals

• Exclusive giveaways

• Free bonus content

• Early access to interactive activities

• Sneak peeks at our newest titles

Happy reading!

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Books. Change. Lives.

Copyright © 2021 by Susan Conley

Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

Cover art by Sophia Sidoti

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of

Sourcebooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

form or by any electronic or

mechanical means including information storage and retrieval

systems—except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without
permission in writing from its publisher,

Sourcebooks.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are
used fictitiously. Any similarity

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not

intended by the author.

All brand names and product names used in this book are
trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade

names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated

with any product or vendor in this

book.

Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

(630) 961-3900

sourcebooks.com

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two
Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two
Twenty-three

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover

One

February: the Season, London

It was a veritable crush.

In the year 1817, with the Napoleonic Wars well and truly won and
the American Colonies well

and truly lost, nothing less than an utter squeeze would do, not
when the hostess was the Countess of

Livingston and well able to put the wealth of her husband’s earldom
on display. The ballroom was

spacious, framed by its gilded and frescoed ceiling; impressive with

its shining wall of mirrors;

fragrant from the banks of hothouse flowers set about the vast
space; and yet… Nothing about it was

unlike any other ballroom in London, where hopes and dreams were
realized or dashed upon the

rocks of ignominy. Packed to the walls with the great and good of
the English haute ton, the society
ball was as lively and bright as any before it and any that would
follow.

Despite having traversed a well-trod path of lineage and reputation

all their lives, the guests gave

themselves to the event with an abandon that appeared newly

coined. They came to the dance, and to

the gossip, and to the planning of alliances and assignations with the
energy of girls fresh out of the

schoolroom and young lords newly decanted from Eton and Harrow.
Those undertaking the lively reel

threw themselves into it as though it were the first opportunity they

had to perform it; the watchers

congregated at the sides of the dance floor observed it as though

they’d never seen such a display in

all their lives. Though the room was lit by more than two thousand
candles in crystal chandeliers,

shadows lurked in the farthest corners; the gloom was not equal,
however, to the beauty of the silks

and satins of the ladies’ gowns or to the richness of their

adornments. As the multitude of jewels and

those eddying skirts caught the light, the setting looked like a
dream.

Unless it had all the hallmarks of a personal nightmare. Alfred

Blakesley, Seventh Duke of Lowell,

Earl of Ulrich, Viscount Randolf, Baron Conrí, and a handful of lesser

titles not worth their salt,
found the Livingstons’ ball to be an unrelenting assault of bodies,
sounds, and most of all, scents. This

last was a civilized term covering a broad range of aromas that

encompassed the pleasant—perfumes,

unguents, and those hothouse arrangements—to the less so, among

them the unlaundered linen of the

less fussy young bucks and the outdated sachets used to freshen the
gowns of the chaperones. If he

wouldn’t look an utter macaroni, he’d carry a scented handkerchief

or, in a nod to the Elizabethans, an

orange studded with cloves. Whilst either would save his sensitive
snout from the onslaught of odors,

it would defeat the purpose of his presence this evening.

As usual, said presence, after an absence of five years, was causing

a flurry of gossip and

conjecture. With jaded amusement, the only amusement he was

able to muster these days, and without

appearing to do so, he eavesdropped on the far-ranging theories

regarding his person that were

swirling around the ballroom, much as the dancers spun around the
floor itself. If the gossips only

knew how acute his hearing was, they might hesitate to tittle-tattle…

“My Lord, he is divine,” last year’s premiere diamond of the first

water sighed.
“That chiseled face, that muscular form.” Her friend, at best a ruby,
fanned herself vigorously.

“If only my dear Herbert would grow his hair until it touched his
collar,” Diamond said.

“If only my Charles would pad his jacket. And his thighs. And his
bum!” Ruby laughed wickedly.

“I doubt very much that there is any padding on the duke’s person,”
Diamond said.

Ruby peeked at him over her fan. “If only he would stand up with
one of us so we could get a hand

on those shoulders.”

Two bucks of vintages separated by at least twenty years waited out

the current set. “He may be

among us, but he will not stay as much as an hour. My valet would
thrash me did I not pass at least

three hours allowing the entire ton to remark upon his prowess,” the
aging young buck opined.

“And yet, he is dressed to a turn, his linen pristine, his coat of the
latest cut,” the actual young buck

replied.

“His linen may be,” scoffed his elder, “but there is something queer
in the lineage.”

“Lineage!” One old gent bleated to another as they made their way
to the card room. “Hodgepodge
more like. A ragbag of dependents of no known origin, a mishmash
of retainers, a mélange of—”

“Yes, yes.” His companion flourished his cane. “My own family claims
quite a healthy acreage near

to Lowell’s shire, and ne’er the twain shall meet, I can tell you.”

“I do not take your meaning,” Gent the First said.

Gent the Second put his hand on his friend’s arm and leaned in. “My
nephew’s housekeeper’s

brother’s wife’s granddaughter is from the neighboring village and

says there is never a house party,

never a ball, and never a need for outside help. And we all know
what that means.”

“Penury.”

“Not a groat to his name.”

Along the mirrored wall, an older matron rustled her organza. “He is
rich as Croesus, although the

origins of the fortune are suspect.”

Her bosom friend gasped. “Surely it does not come from trade?”

“He keeps no sheep, he tends no crops—well, he has no people to

do such things. Even he is not so

far gone to propriety to engage in animal husbandry firsthand.”

“Some say the entirety of his holding is a gold mine, a literal gold
mine.” Bosom Friend looked
ecstatic at the notion.

“Hardly,” Matron replied. “There’s not a nugget of gold on this island;

the Scots mined it eons ago.”

A merry widow and her ardent admirer lingered near the drinks
table. “No one I know has had him,

and I know everyone who has had anyone of import,” Merry

grumbled.

Ardent moved closer. “Is he…?” He gestured to a group of very good

male friends clustered in the

corner.

“Quelle tragedie, if so,” said Merry. “It is true that he is seen

nowhere without his steward, Bates,

by his side.”

“He, too, is a favorite amongst the ladies.”

“No one’s had him, either.”

And so the ton sups from the same old scandal broth, thought
Alfred. He’d heard every word

without having moved so much as an inch from his place near the
entrance to the ballroom. No

creature with hearing such as his would need to do so. The rumors
and speculation built in strength

the longer he did not take a wife, but it was not merely a wife for
whom he searched.
Searched he had, far and wide, all across Europe, as far as the Far
East, a duke of the realm

wandering the earth like a common journeyman—but it had to be

done, for no one could find his lady

for him, identify her for him, take the place of her. He found himself
back in England after five years

of endless travel, thwarted yet somehow not disheartened despite

being here again. Here, almost to

the man and woman, were the same faces he’d seen upon entering
society after coming up from

Oxford, faces that were beginning to resemble one another; he

feared they’d all been intermarrying

rather too closely for comfort.

His own family line was a different breed, and to explain his clan’s
uniqueness to most in this room

would result in panic, fear, and an atavistic desire to obliterate any

trace of him and those like him,

for all time. To expose their distinction would put all under his care
in the most perilous danger—a

paradox, as that difference made him more powerful than any

human being.

Yet, here he was among them, bracing himself for the possibility that
the one sought by him and his

inner creature, his essential self was of their number. His wolf stirred
within him, impatient, vexed by
the delay in finding their mate, held in check when all it wanted to
do was hunt and hunt until they

found the one whose heart and soul called to them, belonged to
them, whose presence would set

things right at Lowell Hall.

“Your Grace.” His steward, Matthias Bates, appeared at his shoulder.

“Animal husbandry…” Alfred murmured, and Matthias gave a low

laugh. Alfred regarded his

closest friend and right-hand man—the perfect second-in-command,

aligned with him in thought, yet

with enough independence of spirit to challenge Alfred as needed.

Bates stood as tall as he, at several

inches over six feet, although the steward was blond where he was
dark, lean where he was

excessively muscular. None of the gossips had gotten around to that

criticism this evening: What well-

bred male of his status sought to gain such brawny proportions?

“I believe the haute ton needs to stop marrying itself.” Alfred began
to wander, Bates at his side.

“Indeed,” Bates replied. “And it is, of course, a discussion relevant to

your own situation.”

A sigh soughed through Alfred’s entire being. “It is enough to make

one wish to take a ship and sail

far, far away—had I not already done so and visited every corner of
the globe.”
“There are always the Colonies.”

“The United States of America,” Alfred corrected. “I am not well

acquainted with any of our sort

from out that way, despite their being one branch from whence we
all came. My sister has not written

to me of discovering such, in any case.”

“One imagines such outliers to be as poor a choice as one of these

women.”

The air around the two men became oppressive, as though all the
heat of the room had coalesced to

envelop Bates. He struggled for his next breath, and his body
trembled as he fought an outside force

for control of it. It did not affect Alfred, as this elemental energy
generated from him; known as the

dominatum, it was the ultimate expression of his power as Alpha of

the Shifters of Lowell Hall. This

power was his and his alone, the essence of his authority, the
manner in which he held sway over the

beasts within his people, the way in which he protected them from
outside aggressors, and if need be,

from one another. To him, it was akin to the dynamism of the

Change: held entirely within and called

upon with a thought. Its use was judicious, never mindless, but in
this instance, it was excessive; he
blamed his wolf, who was surging under his skin, seeking release.
Even the slightest insult to his

future mate was enough to incense them both, and at this precise
moment in time, when the search

looked to be a failure, he did not need the reminder that his true
mate was no longer likely to be one

of his kind.

Bates was not the only one to experience the potency of the
emanation. Though invisible to the

naked eye, it had an intensity akin to a lightning strike; the ladies

who had ventured closer, hoping to

catch the eye of the duke, came over rather faint and repaired to the
retiring room. Nor were the men

unaffected: the more delicate youths swayed as though they had

visited the punch bowl several times

too many. Alfred’s face showed no effect or exertion but for the
tightening of his jaw and an increased

ferocity in his gaze.

“Your Grace.” Bates managed a stiff bow and turned his head, baring
the side of his neck. “I

misspoke. We will welcome any female you bring to us as your bride,

regardless of her provenance.”

He held his posture until the pressure receded but still did not meet
Alfred’s gaze.
“What must be done, must be done,” Alfred said, and they continued
their perambulations. “The

issues that arise when lines too closely related produce offspring is,
in the case of the ton, a

weakness that expresses itself in illnesses of the body and of the

mind. This is happening far too often

amongst our own branches of society, and it must be addressed. The

bloodlines of our…family must

be strengthened, and our only hope may be found by my marrying

one of ‘these.’”

“Which will endow permission to do so for those among us who also

wish to marry and to be, er,

fruitful,” Bates replied.

“Permission must be endowed sooner rather than later. Enough time

has been wasted in my jaunts

across the Continent. The continents, in fact. My wish to marry one

of our own is not to be. I despair I

have wasted time and endangered our people in trying to do so. I

wanted my ma—my wife to be of

our lineage.”

“Alpha—” Bates dropped into another bow. “Alfred, that is to say,

Duke, Your Gr—”

“Matthias.” Alfred reached out and touched his steward on the arm,
bringing him back up to full
height. “If a secure future for our people is achieved through
marriage to a society lady, then any

sacrifice will be worth the cost.” He swept his glance around the
room and met a domino-effect of

lowering glances. How difficult this undertaking will be, he thought,

if she won’t look me in the

eye… But surely the one meant for me is as strong as I, no matter

her genus? “My entire existence

walks this fine line between our ways and the ways of society. The
paradox is that in choosing my

bride from the ton, I will have to hide my true self from her,
regardless of our customs.”

“Impossible,” said Bates. “You will no more be able to hide your true
self from your wife than the

moon could fail to draw the tide.”

“That sounds almost romantic, my friend,” Alfred teased.

“Certainly not.” Bates’s offended expression inspired Alfred to indulge

in a short bark of laughter.

“It does not fall to me, thank all the Gods, to subscribe to this fated-
mate nonsense.” He coughed and

lowered his voice. “But the notion you could spend a lifetime
pretending to be something you are not?

The expense of energy this would require?”

“I have neither the time nor the energy for romance.”

Which he would feign, like it or not. His interactions with the ladies
of the ton had always been

marked by a social duplicity that was anathema to him: the little

white lies, the sham emotions, the

manners that in fact betrayed a lack of gentility and integrity. But

there were far too many in his care,

and they had gone too long without a strong sense of cohesion and
community for him to indulge in

stubbornness. He must lead the way, though it seemed unlikely he

was to find happiness on his path.

Happiness! Had he ever thought happiness was in his future or was

his birthright? In every clan he

met, of every breed, he saw what a world of difference it made

when they honored the ways of their

kind. When a pack or a clowder or a flock were led by an Alpha pair

who were vera amorum, they

thrived, and it pierced his heart with regret, even as it strengthened

his resolve. His mother and father

had lied about their status, claiming one another as true mates, and
the reverberations of that

falsehood were still serving to hurt his people and endanger their
future.

“I will do what is needed, whatever that may be.” He took the glass
of champagne that Bates

offered, and both pretended to drink. “I will find a lady before the
Feast of Lupercalia, and we shall
go forward from there.”

“Your Grace, I must remind you of what O’Mara made plain upon our
return to England. Nothing

less than a love match will satisfy your people.” He sounded dubious;
since puphood, Matthias had

scorned the tendency of their breed to mate for life. “As well, you
will have to proceed as a male of

the ton and observe the customary formalities.”

Alfred half listened to Bates prose on as regarded the necessity of

billets-doux and floral tributes

and wooing and instead assessed the women who came close, but
not too close, to him. They treated

him as though he were unapproachable when all he wanted was to

be approached; unlike the majority

of the young aristocratic males in the room, he yearned to marry. A

failed pairing could destroy the

morale and robustness of a pack—he had only to look at his parents:

the disaster that was their reign

had all to do with disrespecting Fate and allowing their ambitions

precedence. And yet, he dreaded

the notion that he might not find her by the Feast day and would
thus be consigned to searching one

ballroom, one garden party, one Venetian breakfast after another, for
another year, all in the hopes of

discovering—
He thrust his glass into Bates’s hand and froze, nostrils flaring.
There. Where? He let his instinctual

self scan the ballroom, his vision heightening to an almost painful

degree even in the soft candlelight,

his focus sharp as a blade. He fought to turn without the

preternatural speed with which he was

endowed and struggled to align the rest of his senses. His ears
pricked, such as they could in this

form: he heard laughter, a note of feminine gaiety that made his skin
come out all over in gooseflesh, a

sound that landed into the center of his heart as would Cupid’s dart.
His inner self rolled through his

consciousness, eager to explode into life, and he held it at bay.

The set concluded; the next was to be a waltz, and the usual flutter
of partnering unfolded around

him. That laugh rang out again, and he turned once more in a circle,
uncaring if anyone noted the

oddness of his behavior. It was as if every one of his nerve endings

had been plucked at once, as if a

bolt of lightning were gathering its power to explode down his spine.
He scented the air again, and

between the candle wax and the overbearing scent of lilacs, he

divined a hint of vanilla, an

unexpected hint of rosemary, a waft of sweet william…

“We are very near the wallflower conservatory,” joked Bates as he
set their untouched glasses

aside. “Shall you pluck a bloom from there?”

Alfred held up a hand and focused on the wall of palms screening

the corner in which the

undesirables mingled and hid, homing in on a bouquet of fragrance

he’d despaired of scenting, a

combination of familiar elements he may have experienced singly

but never before as one, not with

such rapturous force. He turned to face the greenery; Bates moved

to protect his back. He inhaled, and

yes, there it was, a collection of mundane notes that combined to

create a glorious symphony of

attraction, desire, lust, yearning, and possibility; a concoction of lush

skin, that hint of sweet william,

fresh air, horses—and an excessive amount of lemon? His heart beat

like thunder, and as the violins

tuned for the upcoming dance and the crowd’s murmur built into a
roar, he swept, heedless, through

them to reach the source.

Two

It looked to be a veritable crush, at least from the view behind the

palms. It had taken the Honorable

Felicity Templeton far longer than usual to claim her place away from
the superior gaze of society. As
she had resolutely edged around the dance floor, she nodded and
distributed faint smiles to those who

exerted themselves to obstruct her path. Did the Incomparables and

Corinthians and rakes force her to

arduously achieve the anonymity of the fronds out of spite? They

certainly cut her, if not directly, then

with just enough acknowledgment of her person to imply that her

person required very little

acknowledgment at all.

She had held her head high as she maneuvered past the simpering
maidens and their vigilant mamas;

past the knowing widows and their fluttering fans; past the tabbies
and the tartars and the dragons

clustered in strategic positions around the dance floor so no one and

nothing would escape their

notice; past the leering elderly gents keen on finding their

umpteenth wife; and past the young bucks

who insinuated their bodies against her softer parts without fail or
shame. She was no one, after all;

there was no one to give redress.

And yet, they gossiped about her. The ton would gossip about a fly
on a wall, never mind an oddity

that debuted at the grand old age of twenty and after five seasons
had failed to secure an offer, much
less a husband, a young woman with only an uncle and two cousins
to her name—and were they first

cousins? She’d best marry one of them, should they be further

removed along the bloodline, as

beggars could not be choosers, even if they were Cits. She had, of
course, tragically lost her parents

one after the other, but that didn’t excuse her sad lack of style. Her
uncle, Ezra Purcell, must have the

funds to hire his niece a decent companion. It was a scandal she

went about with no companion at all!

What would they say if they knew that every misstep she took was
made with purpose? That she

was on a mission to remain unwed? They would collapse in a heap

of disbelief.

Once installed in the area meant to screen the less fortunate ladies
from the gaze of their betters,

Felicity let down her guard, safe for the moment from the talk and
the laughter and the whispers; from

the overwhelming colors and scents; from the vertiginous sensation

of the dancers swirling near to her

and then away; and from the sensation of being surrounded, about
to be drowned in humanity. She was

also secure in the company of her friendship with Lady Jemima

Coleman, who had run her own

gauntlet to escape the protracted notice of the ton.

Both ladies had collected as many cups of lemonade as they could
carry so that they might be

refreshed throughout the interminable evening without needing to

leave their camouflage. Felicity

sipped from her second serving, cautiously. “This tastes rather

unusual.”

“I believe it has been concocted from actual lemons,” Jemima

replied. “As well as with a touch of

honey, as my grandmother used to make it.” Her robust

Northumberland cadence, earthy and rough

around the edges, came as something of a surprise from as petite

and delicate a lady as she appeared

—a surprise the year’s swains did not find enchanting.

Nor did they find Felicity’s strapping, sun-kissed person to be in any

way intoxicating. Standing eye

to eye with most of the men of her class, Felicity was not suited to
the high-waisted, wispy fashions

of the day, which did not show her bosomy figure to its best
advantage. The short-capped sleeves

made her arms look positively muscular, and the roundness of her
face was exacerbated by the

severity of her topknot. Such fashionable deficits would send many a

maid weeping into her pillow at

night, but not she. If anything, she ensured that her dress and
toilette were done to her disadvantage as
rigorously as possible.

For Felicity had a plan, a plan that would turn into a dream come
true.

“Do you yearn for your homeplace?” She rearranged a few fronds to
shield them further from the

gaze of the ballroom’s denizens.

“I do not.” Jemima delicately sipped from her cup. “Most especially

not since having made your

acquaintance.”

“We are friends, Jem, for the love of—galoshes.”

“We are, we are,” Jemima replied. “And it’s grateful I am for it. I
have received the welcome to be

expected for a nobody from near enough to Scotland to be vulgar

and uncouth, and yet it has

transcended even the worst of my imaginings.”

“The slightest intimation of difference sets this lot off like hounds on
a hunt.” Yet, Jemima was

everything Felicity herself was not, far closer to the ton’s ideal of
femininity, and she couldn’t

imagine why her friend had not “taken.” Fine-featured and slim yet
with an ample bosom, pale-

skinned, with smooth, dark-brown hair, Jemima’s appeal was

perhaps undone by her gray eyes: too
perceptive, too observant, and thus disturbing, as there was oh, so
much that was required to remain

unseen in high society.

“I can only imagine the things they’re saying about me.” Felicity
waved her cup airily toward the

crowd. “‘Why, she’s as sturdy as those columns she prefers to hide

behind—I wouldn’t give even the

tweeny one of her gowns—that hair of hers is positively red—I do

believe she has been out in the sun

without her bonnet!’” She sighed. That hadn’t been as amusing as

she had intended.

“If they knew the truth about you, their tongues would fall out of
their heads from wagging.” Jemima

reached out to touch Felicity’s elbow. She was demonstrative and a

frequent giver of soothing pats

and bolstering squeezes.

It had the desired effect. Felicity smiled and could feel the vitality of
her vision surge through her

like it was a living thing, a thing that was strong of spine and stance,
beautiful and glorious and fierce.

The mere thought of her passion filled her entire being with life and
hope and joy.

“Bedamned with them,” she said, with conviction.

“Your language becomes dangerously coarse these days, friend.”

“Due to frequenting the stables and the sales.” Felicity smiled into
her cup, hoarding the dregs of

her treat.

If the ton only knew how conversant Felicity was in matters

regarding the stables and the horseflesh

sales. What would her parents have thought, were they alive? But
were they alive, she would not be

on this path. She would have been brought out at the proper age of
seventeen, when she was still

dewy and naive; perhaps dewiness and naivety would have garnered
her a decent match, but as time

went on, Felicity doubted she had ever been as fetching and
credulous as any of the debutantes she’d

come across.

Her parents’ marriage hadn’t been in the usual run of things: they
had fallen in love at first sight and

damned the consequences—one of which was Felicity, born rather

hale and hardy for a child

delivered at seven months. Had they truly known each other before
they’d let their fascination for one

another sweep them away from family and friends? Upon their
elopement, her mother had been cut

dead by her family for a time, which had amused her father, as it
was the aristos who indulged in that
sort of nonsense. For Felicity’s mother was the daughter of a
merchant, and her father a baron, and the

twain had met, heedless of all societal strictures, for better and for
worse.

She’d also been aware of her father’s dislike of her mother’s horse
madness, of her mother’s

laughing disdain of his fears, but when she’d died due to that
passion, the grief proved too much for

her remaining parent, and he soon followed his love to the grave.

Two bereavements hard upon the heels of each other had forestalled
any chance of a debut, and as

the years passed and her heart healed, Felicity was certain she had
missed her chance. It had been a

dream she had shared with her mum in happier times, just before it
was time for her to lengthen her

skirts and put up her hair: of standing at the top of a sweeping

staircase, clothed in a diaphanous,

white gown, waiting to be announced, all the while turning heads

and smiling down upon the beaux

who swarmed to meet her as she descended.

That dream was long gone. Notions of a match made locally were
scotched thanks to her father’s

dramatic decline into debauchery following her mother’s death, and

she lost face with the neighboring
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Possibly the environmental feature of greatest value to cultural
progress in Middle America was its diversity. Mountain and coast,
temperate highland and hot lowland, humid and arid tracts, tropical
jungle and open country, were only a few hours apart. In each
locality the population worked out its necessary adaptations, and yet
it was near enough others of a different adaptation for them to trade,
to depend on one another, to learn. Custom therefore came in
contact with custom, invention with invention. The discrepancies, the
very competitions, would lead to reconciliations, readaptations, new
combinations. Cultural movement and stimulus would normally be
greater than in a culturally uniform area.
Be that as it may, Middle America took the lead. It is in the region
of southern Mexico that a wild maize grows—teocentli, “divine
maize,”[25] the Aztecs called it. From this, in a remote archaic period,
the cultivated plant was derived. At least, such seems to be the
probability in a somewhat tangled mass of botanical evidence. Here
then the dominant plant of American agriculture was evolved: with it,
very likely, the cultivated beans and squashes that are generally
associated in native farming even in parts remote from Mexico.
Pottery has so nearly the same distribution as maize agriculture,
as to suggest a substantially contemporaneous origin, probably at
the same center. This is the more likely because the art is of chief
value to a sessile people, and farming operates more strongly than
any other mode of life to bring about a sedentary condition.
Agriculture almost certainly increased the population. The food
supply was greater and more regular; people got used to living near
each other where before they had unconsciously drifted apart
through distrust; and the proximity in turn, as well as the new
stability, would lessen many of the local famines, hostilities, and
other hardships to which the smaller and less settled communities
had been exposed. As the death rate went down and numbers
mounted, specialization of labor would be first made possible, and
then almost forced. A self-contained community of a hundred cannot
permit much specialization of accomplishment and none of
occupation. Every man must be first of all an immediate food getter.
On the other hand a community of a million inevitably segregates
somewhat into classes, trades, guilds, or castes. The individual with
decided tastes and gifts in a particular direction finds his products in
enough demand to devote himself largely or wholly to their
manufacture. The very size of the community as it were forces him to
specialization, and thus diversity, with its train of effects leading to
further stimulation, is attained independently of environment.

184. Tobacco
For some culture elements, the evidence of early origin in Middle
America is less direct. The use of tobacco, for instance, is as widely
spread as agriculture, but is not necessarily as ancient. Its diffusion
in the eastern hemisphere has been so rapid (§ 98) as to make
necessary the admission that it might have spread rapidly in the New
World also—faster, at any rate, than maize. Moreover, a distinction
must be made between the smoking or chewing or snuffing of
tobacco and its cultivation. There are some modern tribes—mostly
near the margins of the tobacco area—that gather the plant as it
grows wild. It is extremely probable that wild tobacco was used for
some time before cultivation was attempted. Nevertheless tobacco
growing, whenever it may have originated, evidently had its
beginning in the northern part of Middle America, either in Mexico or
the adjacent Antillean province. It is here that Nicotiana tabacum
was raised. The tribes to the north contented themselves with allied
species, mostly so inferior from the consumer’s point of view that
they have not been taken up by western civilization. These varieties
look like peripheral substitutes for the central and original Nicotiana
tabacum.
The Colombian and Andean culture-areas used little or no
tobacco, but chewed the stimulating coca leaf. This is a case of one
of two competing culture traits preventing or perhaps superseding
the other, not of tobacco never having reached the Andes. Most of
the remainder of South America used tobacco.

185. The Sequence of Social Institutions

 The most peripheral and backward peoples of both North and
South America even to-day remain without clans, moieties,
hereditary totems, or exogamic groupings (§ 110). Some of these,
like the Eskimo and Fuegians, live at the extreme ends of the
continents, under conditions of hardships which might be imagined
to have directed all their energies toward the material sides of life
and thus left over little interest for the development of institutions.
But this argument will not apply to the many clanless tribes of the
California, Plains, and Tropical Forest areas. It must accordingly be
concluded that those American nations that show no formal
organization of society on a hereditary basis—or at least the more
primitive ones who possess no equivalent or substitute—do without
this organization because they never acquired it. This negative
condition may then be inferred as the original one of the whole
American race.
Somewhat more advanced culturally, on the whole, and less
definitely marginal, at any rate in North America, are several series
of tribes that do possess exogamic groups—either sibs or moieties—
in which descent goes in the male line and is generally associated
with totemic beliefs or practices. These comprise the tribes of one
segment of the Northwest Coast area; those of one end of the
Southwest with some extension into California; and those of most of
the Northern Woodland, with some extension into the Plains.
Another series of tribes live under the same sort of organization
but with descent reckoned in the female instead of the male line.
These comprise the peoples of one end of the Northwest Coast;
those of one portion of the Southwest; and those of the Southeast,
with some extensions into the Northeast and Plains.
These exogamic-totemic series of tribes average higher in their
general culture than the clanless and totemless ones. On the whole,
too, they are situated nearer the focus of civilization in Middle
America. As between the two exogamic-totemic series the
matrilinear tribes must be accredited with a more complex and better
organized culture than the patrilinear ones. The finest carving in
North America, for instance, is that of the Northwest—totem poles,
masks, and the like. Within the Northwest, the Tlingit, Haida, and
Tsimshian—matrilinear tribes—excel in the quality of this work. They
far surpass the patrilinear Kwakiutl and Salish. So in the Southwest:
the matrilinear Pueblos build stone towns, obey a priestly hierarchy,
and possess an elaborate series of cult societies. The patrilinear
Pimas and southern Californians live in villages of brush or earth-
covered houses, are priestless, and know at most a single religious
society. Again, the matrilineal Southern Woodlanders had made
some approach to a system of town life and political institutions, the
patrilineal Northern Woodlanders did without any serious institutions
in these directions. The one Northeastern group that established a
successful political organization, the Iroquois with their League of the
Five Nations, were matrilinear among patrilinear neighbors and
possessed positive affiliations with the Southeast.
It would be extravagant to maintain that throughout the North
American continent every matrilineal tribe was culturally more
advanced than every patrilineal one. But it is clear that within each
area or type of culture the matrilineal tribes manifest superiority over
the patrilineal tribes in a preponderance of cultural aspects. The
matrilineal clan organization thus represents a higher and
presumably later stage in North America than patrilineal clan
organization, as this in turn ranks and temporally follows the clanless
condition.
With one exception, the distribution of the same tribes with
reference to the South Mexican center agrees with their
advancement. The Northeast is distinctly peripheral, the Southeast a
half-way tract connected with Mexico by way both of the Southwest
and the Antilles. The matrilineal Pueblo portion of the Southwest
occupies part of the plateau backbone near the southern end of
which the Mexican culture developed. It was along this backbone
that civilization flowed up through northern Mexico. The coasts
lagged behind. They were marginal in Mexico, more marginal still in
the Southwest, where the patrilineal tribes lived on or near the
Pacific.
The one exception is in the Northwest Coast, where the more
remote northerly tribes are matrilinear, the nearer southerly ones
patrilinear. This reversed distribution raises the suspicion that the
Northwestern social organization may have had nothing to do with
Mexico, but may be a purely local product. This suspicion is
hardened by the fact that the Northwest shows a number of other
culture traits—some peculiar to itself, others recurring in well
separated areas—which it seems impossible to connect with Mexico.
Several of these traits will be discussed farther on. For the present it
is enough to note their existence as an indication favorable to the
interpretation of the Northwest social organization as unrelated to
Mexico. Thus the abnormal matrilineal-patrilineal distribution in the
Northwest is no bar to the generic finding for North America that
clanless, patrilinear, and matrilinear organizations of society rank in
this order both as regards developmental sequence and distance
from Middle America.
For South America the data are too scattering to discuss profitably
without rather detailed consideration.
The distributional facts outside Middle America thus point to this
reconstruction of events. The original Americans were non-
exogamous, non-totemic, without sibs or unilateral reckoning of
descent. The first institution of exogamic groups was on the basis of
descent in the male line, occurred in or near Middle America, and
flowed outwards, though not to the very peripheries and remotest
tracts of the continents. Somewhat later, perhaps also in Middle
America, possibly at the same center, the institution was altered:
descent became matrilinear. This new type of organization diffused,
but in its briefer history traveled less far and remained confined to
the tribes that were in most active cultural connection with Middle
America.
Now, however, a seeming difficulty arises. Middle America, which
appears to have evolved patrilinear and then matrilinear clans, was
itself clanless at the time of European discovery.[26] The solution is
that Middle America indeed evolved these institutions and then went
a step beyond by abandoning or transforming them. Obviously this
explanation will be validated in the degree that it can be shown that
probable causes or products of the transformation existed.
 186. Rise of Political Institutions:
Confederacy and Empire
In general, the transformation would seem to have been along the
line of a substitution of political for social organization. Struggling
villages confederated, with a fixed meeting place and established
council; the authority of elected or hereditary chiefs grew, until these
gave the larger part of their time to communal affairs; towns
consolidated. Public works could thus be undertaken. Not only
irrigating ditches and defenses, but pyramid temples were
constructed. In Middle America this condition must have been
attained several thousand years ago. The Mayas had passed
beyond it early in the Christian era. They were then ruled by a
governing class and priesthood, and were erecting dated
monuments that testify to a settled existence of the more successful
of their communities.
In the area of the United States, which may be reckoned as
perhaps two thousand years more belated than southern Mexico,
political organization was still in the incipient stage at the time of
discovery. The Pueblos of the Southwest had achieved town life and
considerable priestly control. They had not taken the further step of
welding groups of towns into larger coherent units. In the Southeast,
however, while the towns were less compact physically, and
probably less populous, political integration on a democratic basis
had made some headway. The institution evolved was essentially a
confederacy of the members of a language group, with civil and
military chiefs, council houses, and representation by “tribes” or
towns and clans. From the Southeast the idea of the confederacy
was carried into the Northeast by the Iroquois, whose famous
league, founded perhaps before Columbus reached America,
attained its culmination after the French and English settlement and
the introduction of firearms. The Iroquois league was an astounding
accomplishment for a culturally backward people. Its success was
due to the high degree of political integration achieved. Yet it did not
destroy the older clan system, in fact made skilful use of it for its own
purposes of political, almost imperialistic, organization.[27]
 Some stage of this sort the Mexican peoples may have passed
through. The Maya form of political organization was evidently
similar to that of the Pueblos, the Aztec development more like that
of the Muskogeans and Iroquois. A thousand years before Columbus
the Maya cities were contending for hegemony like the Greek city-
states a millenium earlier. Then the Nahua peoples forged to the
front; and about two centuries before the invasion of Cortez,
Tenochtitlan, to-day the city of Mexico, began a series of conquests
that ended in some sort of empire. It was a straggling domain of
subjected and reconquered towns and tribes, interspersed with
others that maintained their independence, extending from middle
Mexico to Central America, containing probably several million
inhabitants paying regular tribute, held together by well-directed
military force, and governed by a hereditary line of half-elected or
confirmed rulers of great state and considerable power. The
exogamic clan organization as such had disappeared. Groups called
calpulli were important in Aztec society, but they were local, or based
on true kinship, and non-totemic. They may have been the made-
over survivals of clans; they were not clans like those of the
Southwest, Southeast, or Northwest.
Five successive stages, then, were probably gone through in the
evolution of south Mexican society. First there was the pre-clan
condition, without notable organization either social or political; next,
a patrilinear clan system; third, a matrilinear clan system, with more
important functions attaching to the clans, especially on the side of
ceremonial; fourth, the beginnings of the state, as embodied in the
confederacy, the clans continuing but being made use of chiefly as
instruments of political machinery; fifth, the empire, loose and simple
indeed, judged by Old World standards, but nevertheless an
organized political achievement, in which the clans had disappeared
or had been transformed into units of a different nature.

187. Developments in Weaving

In the textile arts, since the successive stages rank one another
rather obviously, and the distributions coincide well with them, the
course of development is indicated plainly.
The first phase was that of hand-woven basketry, which has
already been accredited to the period of immigration, and is beyond
doubt ancient. All Americans made baskets at one time or another.
The few tribes that were not making them at the time of discovery
had evidently shelved the art because their environment provided
them with birch bark, or their food habits with buffalo rawhide, with
exceptional ease, and because their wants of receptacles and
cooking utensils were of the simplest. That basket making goes back
to a rudimentary as well as early stage of civilization is further
suggested by the fact that perhaps the finest ware is made in the
distinctly backward areas, such as the Plateau and California.
A second and a third phase, which are sometimes difficult to
distinguish, are those of loose suspended warps and of a simple
frame or incomplete loom. Pliable cords of some sort, or coarse bast
threads, are employed. The objects manufactured are chiefly wallets
or bags, blankets of strips of fur or feathers, hammocks, and the like.
These two processes are widely spread, but not quite as far as
basketry; the northern and southern extremes of the double
continent do not know them. Occasionally, very fine work is done by
one or the other of these two methods. The most striking example is
the so-called Chilkat blanket of the Northwest Coast, a cloth-like
cape, woven, without a complete loom, of mountain goat wool on
cedar bark warps to a complicated pattern—a high development of a
low type process.
The fourth stage is that of the true or complete loom. In America
the loom is intimately associated with the cultivation of cotton. The
two have the same distribution, except for some use of the plant for
the twining of hammocks on a half-loom in portions of the Tropical
Forest area. Disregarding this case as a probable part adaptation of
a higher culture trait to a lower culture, we may define the distribution
of both loom and cotton as restricted to the Middle American areas,
the adjacent Southwest, and perhaps the adjacent Antilles. This is
certainly central.
 The fifth stage is the loom with a handle or mechanical shedding
device, obviating tedious hand picking of the weft in and out of the
warps. The heddle is proved only for Peru. It was probably used in
Mexico. It may therefore be tentatively assumed to have been known
also in the intervening Chibcha area. It is used to-day in the
Southwest, but may have been introduced there by the Spaniards.
This stage accordingly is limited even more strictly to the vicinity of
Middle America.
The sixth stage, that of the loom whose heddles are operated by
treadles, and what may be considered a seventh, the use of multiple
heddles to work patterns mechanically, were never attained by any
American people.
The best and finest fabrics were made in Peru, in part probably as
consequence of the addition of wool to the previous repertory of
cotton. This addition in turn probably followed the domestication of
the llama by the Peruvians. The Mexicans had no corresponding
animal to tame, and their textiles lagged behind in quality.

188. Progress in Spinning: Cotton

Spinning and weaving are interdependent. Baskets are made of
woody rods, cane splints, root fibers, or straws, all untwisted, but it is
probable that the ability to twist cordage is about equally old as
basketry. At any rate there is no American people ignorant of cord
making. The materials are occasionally sinews, more frequently bast
—that is, bark fibers. These are rolled together, almost invariably two
at a time, between the palm and the naked thigh. Cordage is used
for the second and third stages of weaving. The cotton employed in
loom weaving does not spin well by this rolling method. It was
therefore spun by being twisted between the fingers, the completed
thread being wound on a spindle. This spindle served primarily as a
spool or bobbin. In the Old World the distaff has been used for
thousands of years. This is a spindle with a whorl or flywheel. It is
dropped with a twirl, giving both twist and tension to the loose roving
of linen or wool and thus converting it into yarn by a mechanical
means. The New World never fully utilized this device. The
Southwest to-day uses the wheeled spindle, but evidently as the
result of European introduction. Old Mexican pictures and modern
Maya photographs show the spindle stood in a bowl, not dropped.
The whorl which it possessed was therefore little more than a button
to keep the thread from slipping off the slender spindle. For Peru this
is established. Thousands of spindles have been found there,
normally with whorls too small and light to serve as an effective
flywheel. It may then be concluded that all American spinning was
essentially by hand; which is in accord with the absence from all
America of any form of the wheel. The Indian spinning methods were
only two: thigh rolling for bast, finger twisting for cotton.
The origin of the higher forms of spinning and weaving in Middle
America is confirmed by the tropical origin of cotton, on which these
developments depend. The cotton of the Southwest, for instance,
was introduced from Mexico as a cultivated plant. It is derived by
some botanists from a Guatemalan wild species. This may well have
been the first variety to be cultivated in the hemisphere.

189. Textile Clothing

Clothing in general is too much an adaptation to climate to render
satisfactory its consideration wholly by the method here followed. But
clothing of textiles shows a distribution that is culturally significant.
The distribution is that of loom-woven cotton; the salient
characteristic is rectangular shape: the blanket shawl, the poncho,
the square shirt and skirt. In the Northwest Coast region hand and
half-loom woven capes and skirts of bast were worn more or less.
But these were flaring—trapezoidal, not rectangular—and thus
evidently represent a separate development.
In all the cloth weaving areas, and in them only, sandals were
worn. The spatial correlation is so close that there must be a
connection. It may be suggested that the sandal originated, or at
least owed its spread, to textile progress. Again the Northwest Coast
corroborates by being unique; it is essentially a barefoot area.
 To summarize. The original textile arts of the race were probably
first advanced to the stages intermediate between basket and cloth
making in Middle America. Thence they spread north and south, but
not quite to the limits of the hemisphere, being retained in special
usage chiefly in the Northwest. With the cultivation of cotton in
Middle America, spinning and the loom came into use, and were
ultimately carried to the Southwest, but not beyond. Cloth garments
and sandals promptly followed. The heddle was evidently devised
last, and did not diffuse beyond Middle America.

190. Cults: Shamanism

In the matter of religious cults, seven entries have been included
in Figure 35: (1h) shamanism, and (1i) crisis ceremonies, especially
for girls at puberty and the whipping of adolescent boys, two more or
less synchronous traits; (6a) initiating societies, and (6b) masks—
also about contemporaneous; (16) priesthood; and (22) human
sacrifice and (23) temples.
The shaman is an individual without official authority but often of
great personal influence. His supposed power comes to him directly
from the spirits as a gift or grant. He himself, as a personality, has
been able to enter into a special relationship, denied to normal
persons, with the supernatural world or some member thereof. The
community recognizes his power after it is his: the community does
not elect him to his special position, nor accept him in it by
inheritance. His communion with spirits enables the shaman to
foretell the future, change the weather, blast the crops or multiply
game, avert catastrophes or precipitate them on foes; above all, to
inflict and cure disease. He is therefore the medicine-man; a word
which in American ethnology is synonymous with shaman. The
terms doctor, wizard, juggler, which have established themselves in
usage in certain regions, are also more or less appropriate: they all
denote shamans. When he wishes to kill his private or public enemy,
the shaman by his preternatural faculties injects some foreign object
or destructive substance into his victim, or abstracts his soul. To cure
his friends or clients, he extracts the disease object, sometimes by
singing, dancing, blowing, stroking, or kneading, most often by
sucking; or he finds, recaptures, and restores the soul. Of the two
concepts, that of the concrete disease object is more widely spread;
that of the soul theft is apparently characteristic of the more
advanced tribes; but the exact distribution remains to be worked out.
The territorial extent of shamanistic ideas and practices is from the
Arctic to Cape Horn. The method of acquiring power from spirits, the
nature of the disease object and its process of extraction, the
conviction that sickness must be caused by malevolent shamanistic
power, there being no such thing as natural death; these and other
specific features of the institution are sometimes surprisingly similar
in North and South America. In fact, they recur in peripheral parts of
the eastern hemisphere—Siberia, Australia, Africa—with such close
resemblance as strongly to suggest their being the remnants of a
once world-wide rudimentary form of religion or religious magic.

191. Crisis Rites and Initiations

Crisis rites are of equally broad diffusion and apparent antiquity.
They concern the critical points of human life: birth, death,
sometimes marriage and childbirth; but most frequently, or at least
most sacredly, they are wont to concern themselves with maturity.
They are thus often puberty ceremonials, made for the welfare both
of the individual and of the community, and fitting him or her for
reproductive functions as well as for a career as a useful and
successful community member. The girls’ adolescence rites have
been described (§ 154) in some detail for California. With but minor
variations, the account there given applies to the customs of many
American and in fact Old World peoples. The boys’ rites come at the
corresponding period of life, but their reference to sex and marriage
is generally less definite. Fortitude, manliness, understanding are the
qualities they are chiefly intended to test and fix. Privations like
fasting, ordeals of pain, admonitions by the elders, are therefore
characteristic elements of these rites. It is thus not as surprising as it
might seem at first acquaintance that identical practices, such as
having the boys stung by vicious ants, are occasionally found in
regions as remote as California and Brazil: even the particular
method may be a local survival of a wide ancient diffusion. Perhaps
most common of all specific ingredients of the rite in America is a
whipping of the boys. Possibly this commended itself as combining a
test of fortitude and an emotional memento of the counsel imparted.
At any rate it evidently became an established part of the puberty
rites thousands of years ago, and thus acquired the added social
momentum of an immemorial custom in many parts of both North
and South America.

192. Secret Societies and Masks

Out of the puberty crisis rite for boys there grew gradually a
society of initiates who recruited their ranks by new initiations. As
emphasis shifted from the individual to the community as
represented by those already initiated, the ceremony came to be
performed less for the benefit of the individual than for the
maintenance of the group, the society as such, with its rites, secrets,
and privileges. Very often, no one was excluded but immature boys
and females; yet, if the act of admittance was to have any psychic
significance, the exclusion of these elements of the community had
to be made much of. Thus secrecy toward women and children was
emphasized, although often the secrets simmered down largely to
the fact that there were secrets.
The girls’ adolescence ceremony does not seem to have taken
this course of growth, because of its more personal and bodily
character, puberty in women being so much more definite a
physiological event. There are women’s societies among some
American tribes. But they seem to be generally a weaker imitation of
the men’s societies after these were fully developed, not a direct
outgrowth of the original girls’ rite.
Shamanism entered as another strain into the formation of the
secret society. Medicine-men often would come to act for the public
good, the occasion would be repeated regularly, and a communal
ceremony with an esoteric nucleus resulted. Also, the shamans at
times helped the novice shamans train and consolidate their spiritual
powers. The extension of this habit perhaps sometimes led, or
contributed, to the establishment of a secret society (§ 158).
Masks are closely associated with secret societies. They disguise
the members to the women and boys, who are told, and often
believe, that the masked personages are not human beings at all. Of
course this adds to the mystery and impressiveness of the initiations,
especially when the masks are fantastic or terrifying. Masks and
societies thus are two related aspects of one thing. But they are by
no means inseparable. There are tribes, like some of the Eskimo,
who use masks but can scarcely be said to possess societies, while
in the Plains and elsewhere there are definite societies that initiate
without masks. Physical and economic conditions in the Arctic
operating against large-scale community life or social elaboration,
the masks of the Eskimo may represent merely that part of a mask-
society “complex” which these people could conveniently take over
when the complex reached them.
In the Southwest, among the Pueblos, there are two types of
societies. There is a communal society, embracing all adult males,
who are initiated at puberty by whipping and who later wear masks
to impersonate spirits and dance thus for the public good. There are
several smaller societies, also with secret rites, which cure sickness,
recruit their membership from the cured, and use masks little or not
at all. It is clear here how the two component strains, namely crisis
rites and shamanistic practices, have flowed into the common mold
of the society idea and become patterned by it without quite
amalgamating.

193. Priesthood
This, then, was the second general stage of American religion.
The third is marked by the development of the priesthood. The priest
is an official recognized by the community. He has duties and
powers. He may inherit, be elected, or succeed by virtue of lineage
subject to confirmation. But he steps into a specific office which
existed before him and continues after his death. His power is the
result of his induction into the office and the knowledge and authority
that go with it. He thus contrasts sharply with the shaman—logically
at least. The shaman makes his position. Any person possessed of
the necessary mediumistic faculty, or able to convince a part of the
community of his ability to operate supernaturally, is thereby a
shaman. His influence is essentially personal. In actuality, the
demarcation cannot always be made so sharply. There are peoples
whose religious leaders are borderline shaman-priests. Yet there are
other tribes that align clearly. The Eskimo have pure shamans and
nothing like priests. The Pueblos have true priests but no real
shamans. Even the heads of their curing societies, the men who do
the doctoring for the community, are officials, and do not go into
trances or converse with spirits.
Obviously a priesthood is possible only in a well constructed
society. Specialization of function is presupposed. People so
unorganized as to remain in a pre-clan condition could hardly be
expected to have developed permanent officials for religion. As a
matter of fact they have not. There are not even clear instances of a
full fledged priesthood among patrilinear sib tribes. The first
indubitable priests are found among the matrilinear Southwesterners
and a few of their neighbors. Thence they extend throughout the
region of more or less accomplished political development in Middle
America. Beyond that, they disappear.
Here once more, then, we encounter a trait substantially confined
to the area of intensive culture and evidently superimposed upon the
preceding stages. This makes it likely that the second stage, that of
societies and masks, originated in the same center, but so long ago
as to have been mostly obliterated by later developments, while
continuing to flourish half way to the peripheries.
Even the priesthood is old in Middle America. This seems
reasonably demonstrable. We do not know its actual beginnings
there. But its surviving conditions at the edge of its area of
occurrence may be taken as roughly indicative of its origin. Among
the Pueblos, each priest, with his assistants, is the curator of a
sacred object or fetish, carefully bundled and preserved. The fetish
serves the public good, but he is its keeper. In fact he might well be
said to be priest in virtue of his custodianship thereof. Associated is
the concept of an altar, a painting which he makes of colored earth
or meal. In the Plains area, some tribes may be somewhat
hesitatingly described as having a priest or group of old men as
priests. Wherever such is the case, these half-priests are the
keepers of fetish-bundles; usually they make something like an altar
of a space of painted earth. Areas as advanced as the Northwest
Coast, where distinctive priests are wanting, lack also the bundles
and altars. It looks, therefore, as if the American priesthood had
originated in association with these two ceremonial traits of the fetish
bundle and painted altar—both of which are conspicuously unknown
in the eastern hemisphere.

194. Temples and Sacrifice

In Middle America the fetish bundle and picture altar do not
appear, apparently through supersedence by elements characteristic
of the next or fourth cult stage, characterized by the temple and the
stone altar used in sacrifice. Temples, however, were already in
luxuriant bloom among the Maya in their Great Period of 400 to 600
A. D. The beginnings of their remarkable architecture and sculpture
must of course lie much farther back; certainly toward the opening of
the Christian era, very likely earlier. Before this came the
presumptive initial stage of priesthood, with bundles and altar
paintings or some local equivalent. If a thousand years be allowed
for this phase, the commencement of the priesthood would fall in
southern Mexico or Guatemala at least three thousand years ago;
possibly much longer. Peru, perhaps, did not lag far behind.
Temples mark the last phase of native American religion, but the
most purely religious characteristic of the period, independent of
mechanical or æsthetic developments, is human sacrifice. This had
long been practised by the Mayas and in Peru, but reached its
culmination in the New World and probably on the planet, at least as
regards frequency and routine-like character, among the Aztecs.
These were a late people, by their own traditions, to rise to culture
and power, attaining to little consequence before the fourteenth
century. It looks therefore as if human sacrifice had been a
comparatively recent practice, perhaps only one or two thousand
years old when America was discovered, and still moving toward its
peak.
Outside Middle America, human sacrifice was virtually
nonexistent. There was considerable cannibalism in the Tropical
Forest and Antilles, but no taking of life as a purely ceremonial act.
For the Pueblos of the Southwest, there are some slight and doubtful
suggestions, but it appears that such deaths as were inflicted were
rather punishments than offerings. The one North American people
admittedly sacrificing human life were the Pawnee, a Plains tribe,
who once a year shot to death a girl captive amid a ritual reminiscent
of that of Mexico. This has always been interpreted as suggestive of
a historical connection with Mexico. In fact, the Pawnee appear to
have moved northward rather recently, and most of their Caddoan
relatives had remained not far from the Gulf of Mexico when
discovered.
The precise origin of sacrifice is obscure, although it is significant
that it was restricted to the area of concentrated population and
towns. In Mexico at least there were no domesticated mammals
available. The ultimate foundation of human sacrifice is no doubt the
widespread and very ancient custom of offerings. It is, however, a
long leap from the offering of a pinch of tobacco, a strew of meal, an
arrowpoint or some feathers, or even a few bits of turquoise, to the
deliberate taking of a life. Possibly the idea of self-inflicted torture
served as a connection. The Plains tribes sometimes hacked off
finger joints as offerings, and in their Sun Dance tore skewers out of
their skins. In the northern part of the Tropical Forest knotted cords
were drawn through the nose and out of the mouth—a sufficiently
painful process—in magico-religious preparation. In Mexico it was
common for worshipers to pierce their own ears or tongues, the idea
of a blood offering combining with that of penance and mortification.
It may seem strange that so shocking a custom as human sacrifice
represented the climax of American religious development. Yet in a
few thousand years more of undisturbed growth, it would probably
have been superseded. This is precisely what happened in the Old
World, which may be reckoned as about four to five thousand years
ahead of the New. In the Old World also the really lowly and
backward peoples did not sacrifice men. The practice is a symptom
of incipient civilization.

195. Architecture, Sculpture, Towns

To construct stone-walled buildings seems a simple
accomplishment, especially in an environment of stratified rocks that
break into natural slabs. Such flat pieces pile up into a stable wall of
room height without mortar, and a few log beams suffice to support a
roof. Yet the greater area of the two continents seems never to have
had such structures. Stone buildings are confined to Middle America
and the Southwest. Outside these regions only the wholly timberless
divisions of the Eskimo make huts of stone, and for their winter
dwellings they are limited to choice of this material or blocks of snow.
The Eskimo hut is tiny, not more than eight or ten feet across, and
the weather is kept out not by any skill in masonry or plastering, but
by the rude device of stuffing all crevices with sod. The Eskimo style
of “building” in stone would be inapplicable in a structure of
pretension. Made larger, the edifice would collapse.
The art of masonry, like agriculture, pottery, and loom weaving,
may therefore be set down as having had its origin in Mexico or
Peru, or possibly in both. It shows, however, this peculiarity of
distribution: at both ends of the area, among the Pueblos of the
Southwest in North America and among the Calchaqui of northwest
Argentina in South America, living houses were stone-walled. In the
intervening regions, most dwellings were of thatch or mud, public
buildings of stone. The Aztec, Maya, and Inca areas have therefore
left stone temples, pyramids, palaces, forts, and the like, but few
towns; the Pueblo and Calchaqui, only towns.[28] How the Middle
Americans were first brought to use stone is not known; but a temple
built as such being a more specialized, decorative, organized edifice
than a dwelling, as well as involving some degree of communal
coöperation, it can safely be regarded as a later type than private
dwellings. The occurrence of the stone living houses at the
peripheries confirms their priority. Evidently masonry was first
employed in Middle America for simple public structures: chiefs’
tombs, water works, platforms for worship. In its diffusion the art
reached peoples like the Pueblos, who lived in small communities,
interred their leaders without great rites, and offered no sacrifices in
sight of multitudes. These marginal nations therefore took over the
new accomplishment but applied it only to their homes. Meanwhile,
however, the central “inventors” of masonry had grown more
ambitious and were rearing ever finer and larger structures, until the
superb architecture of the Mayas and the consummate stone fitting
of the Incas reached their climax.
Stone sculpture grew as an accompaniment. It remained rude in
Peru, and chiefly limited to idols, in keeping with the simple, massive
style of architecture. But the Mayas covered their structurally bolder
and more diversified religious buildings with sculpture in relief and
frescoed stucco, and between them set up great carvings of animal
and mythical divinities, as well as luxuriantly inscribed obelisks. Their
sculpture is æsthetically the finest in America and compares in
quality with that of Egypt, India, and China.
Recent excavations in the Southwest have revealed a succession
of stages as regards buildings. The first houses in this region may
have been thatched or earth-roofed. The earliest in which stone was
used were small, dug out a few feet, the sides of the excavation lined
with, upright rock slabs, and a superstructure of poles or mud-filled
wattling added. Then followed a period of detached one-room
houses, with rectangular walls of masonry; and finally the stage of
drawing these together in clusters and raising them in terraced
stories. This whole development can be traced within the area. Yet it
by no means follows that it originated wholly within the area. The
knowledge of laying stone in courses, the impulse or habit of doing
so, might, theoretically, just as well have come from without; and
evidently did actually come into the Southwest from Mexico.
This is a type of situation frequently encountered in culture history
problems. A group of data seem to point to a spontaneous origin on
the spot so long as they are viewed only locally, whereas a broader
perspective at once reveals them as merely part of a development
whose ultimate source usually lies far away. For instance, the
backward Igorot tribes of the interior Philippines rear imposing
terraces for their rice plots; their more advanced coastal neighbors
do not. It has therefore been debated whether the Igorot invented
this large-scaled terracing or learned it from the Chinese. Yet the
terracing is only an incident to rice culture, which is widespread in
the Orient, ancient, and evidently of mainland origin. The knowledge
of terracing was therefore no doubt long ago imported into the
Philippines along with rice cultivation, and the Igorot only added the
special local development of carrying the terraces to a more
impressive height. There is no question that the increase and better
concatenation of knowledge is gradually leading to more and more
certain instances of wide diffusions and fewer and fewer cases of
independent origin.
Town life possesses a material aspect—that of the type and
arrangement of dwellings—as well as the social and political aspects
already touched on. The largest towns in America were those of
Mexico and Peru, whose capitals may have attained populations of
fifty to a hundred thousand. The Maya towns were smaller, in
keeping with the Maya failure to develop an empire. The largest
towns of the Chibcha of Colombia may have held ten or twenty
thousand souls. The most flourishing pueblos of the Southwest seem
never to have exceeded three thousand inhabitants. The Calchaqui
towns in Andean Argentina were no larger, probably smaller.
Southeastern and Northwest Coast towns ran to hundreds instead of
thousands of population. These figures tell the usual story of thinning
away from center to peripheries.
But local differences were sometimes significant. The
Southeastern town, except for its court and rude public buildings,
was straggling and semi-rural compared with the compact, storied,
and alleyed Southwestern pueblo; often it was less populous. Yet its
political and military development was more advanced, at any rate
as a unit in the larger group of the confederacy.

196. Metallurgy