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.

It is a splendid thing for man of the present to take time to stabilize his mind to contemplating the achievements of tribes inhabiting our continent as a prologue to the affairs of the present. Where is the brash critic to persist in the claim that the natives of America have no original elements of “civilization” either from the early or late past, or in the present? The Cherokee have provided an answer. Contemporary literature has amassed the evidence nor alone in the series of volumes from the University of Oklahoma Press, but in prose and poetry known throughout the nation. It offers a compendious chapter in the epic of America. Each additional study adds a paragraph of importance to the whole.

The study to follow contributes a detail of existing knowledge of the art-crafts of the Cherokee. As such it will prove to be another source reference to the Cherokee way of life in art and its expression in concrete form. The utilities have been and still are to Indians a means of finding outlet for their aesthetic urges. Art and crafts are merged in the output. Other fields lie open for further attempts to perform its functions in national life by issuing successive publications dealing with its cultural material, thus laying foundations for that basic teaching we fondly call Americanism.

FRANK G. SPECK Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1952