Material Culture of the Numa. The John Wesley Powell Collection, 1867-1880: Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, Number 26

摘要

Between 1867 and 1880 John Wesley Powell made collections of material culture items from several Numic-speaking Indian groups in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau regions of the western United States. The collections were made in conjunction with Powell's ethnographic studies of those groups (Fowler and Fowler, eds., 1971). The USNM (United States National Museum) collections, on deposit in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, were studied by the authors in 1967-1968. The items described herein represent approximately one-half of the total collections. The remainder were deposited, on an exchange basis, in other major museums in the United States and abroad in the latter portion of the 19th century. Several individual items, or classes of items, from the USNM collections, were described by various authors of comparative studies of American Indian material culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, the full range of items in the collections has not been described previously.