The opening of Preface
To the cultural anthropologist, as also to the archeologist, the United States of America offer an unusually rich field in being a region where civilized and primitive races exist side by side, where languages belonging to totally different linguistic stocks are still spoken by isolated tribes differing from each other in their cultural and physical aspects, and where traces of lost civilizations indicating the antiquity of man are being unearthed every day. The Bureau of American Ethnology, since its beginning in 1879, has attempted to preserve these ancient records for posterity; and its annual reports are a veritable storehouse of information on languages and customs of tribes, many of whom have already disappeared and others are fast disappearing. In fact, it would be safe to assert that there is no one series of books containing so much material about the North American aborigines as these annual reports.