Physical anthropology of the Lenape or Delawares, and of the eastern Indians in general

General Observations

In connection with the study of the Munsee and in order to clarify, if possible, the physical affiliations of this important group of the Lenape, the writer undertook an examination of all crania of the Eastern Indians that now exist in the collections of the United States National Museum, the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology at Cambridge, Phillips Academy at Andover, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Valentine Museum at Richmond, in addition to a number of specimens sent to him from other institutions.[114] The total number of crania studied in the course of this investigation aggregated 253, of which 121 were of males and 132 of females.

Former records on American crania from Eastern Indians are scarce, and in most instances so imperfect or antiquated as to be of little value. The earliest data are those of Morton and Meigs,[115] based on the collections now in The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. In 1862 Sir Daniel Wilson, of Toronto, published his Prehistoric Man, in two volumes, in the second volume of which he gives measurements of 39 male and 18 female Huron (Iroquois) skulls. Unfortunately these measurements are few in number, are recorded in inches, and were determined with instruments of whose character there is no record, although presumably they were such as had been used by Morton and Meigs. Later brief references to eastern Canadian crania by Dr. David Boyle will be found in the Annual Archæological Reports of Ontario. In 1867 measurements of five Algonquian and Iroquois skulls were included by Dr. J. Barnard Davis in his Thesaurus Craniorum (pp. 224-5), and in 1879 a few measurements of four Huron skulls were given by Quatrefages and Hamy in their Crania Ethnica (parts 10-11, p. 472).

In 1880 there appeared, in the Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History, a paper of 10 pages, with 2 plates, by Lucien Carr, at that time assistant curator of the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, on the crania of New England Indians, in which measurements of 67 skulls are given; but, as the present writer found subsequently by examination and remeasurement of some of the same specimens, the sexual identification, as well as the measurements, were too faulty to warrant their use in this report. During the same year there appeared A List of the Specimens in the Anatomical Collections of the United States Army Medical Museum, by Dr. George A. Otis, which gave measurements of hundreds of American crania, including a number from the Eastern states; but these measurements also in many instances were made imperfectly, so that the records can not be profitably utilized. Flower’s Catalogue gives the measurements of one Mohawk skull. Virchow, in his Crania Ethnica Americana, includes no specimen from the central or northern states bordering on the Atlantic. In 1899 Dr. Frank Russell[116] published some observations and measurements on Indian crania, among which were included a number from the New England states, more particularly from Massachusetts; and finally, in 1902, the writer published his Crania of Trenton,[117] which gave measurements of all the Lenape skulls, as well as those of some other Eastern Indians, then known.[118]

All the specimens described by the American authors above mentioned and that could still be located (which was possible in a large majority of the cases), were reexamined, consequently the following records are based solely on the measurements and observations by the present writer. Important additional Huron material, which it was found impracticable to include in these studies, exists in the museum of Laval University at Quebec and in the Provincial Museum at Toronto.

The 283 crania here included are not distributed evenly over the Atlantic states. There are fairly representative series from eastern Canada, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, but only a few specimens from Connecticut, and very few from Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The climatic conditions and the soil of the more southerly of these states are not favorable to the preservation of skeletal remains, which, moreover, were probably never very abundant. Furthermore, many of the specimens available for examination were found more or less damaged, so that not all the important measurements could be obtained. Owing to these conditions the present study must necessarily leave many points for future corroboration or correction; however, the results obtained shed much light on the physical characteristics and relations of the Eastern Indians.

As above noted, the collections included cover the territory from southeastern Canada to Virginia, and, roughly speaking, from the easternmost lakes and the Appalachian mountains to the Atlantic. From northward and northwestward of this region skeletal material is scarce, and the same is true of the Southern states until we reach Florida; while to the westward the conditions are more complex and will best form part of a separate discussion.

The entire region covered by the collections, with a single exception, is characterized by a complete absence of both intentional and cradle-board deformation of the skull; the exception applies to the Munsee, among whom prevailed to a moderate extent the practice of frontal (fronto-occipital) compression. As this practice was very general to the southward and southwestward of the section here involved and was completely absent elsewhere beyond its boundaries, its occurrence among the Munsee, even to a limited extent, indicates that this tribe had some close connection in those directions, in which respect it differs from the rest of the Lenape. The well-known accession to the tribe, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, of some Shawnee, whose home was to the southwestward as far as Kentucky and Tennessee, may, as already suggested, explain this occurrence.

A consequential result of the study of the Eastern crania here included is that they all belong to one and the same fundamental type, which we now know in the northeast as that of the Algonquian and Iroquois, in the west as the Shoshonean, farther south as the Piman-Aztec, and in South America as the Andean, “Lagoa Santa,” or Pampas type. However, in the territory under consideration, as elsewhere, this type is far from being homogeneous, differing sometimes in an important way almost from tribe to tribe. The differences are evidently due partly to intermixture with the other or brachycephalic American type and partly to locally developed or perpetuated variations.

In the several series of skulls here dealt with there is plain evidence of admixture in the majority of the groups, which, though mostly slight, increased from the north to the south. This admixture consists uniformly of brachycephalic elements, in some localities males, in others females, which doubtless were derived from farther west, southwest, and south. There are only four groups from which such admixture is absent, namely, those from Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Long Island. The conditions in this respect are presented in the following table:

XCI. PRESENCE OF BRACHYCEPHALIC INDIVIDUALS
AMONG EASTERN TRIBES

In all these cases the brachycephaly, and frequently other features of the skulls, were such that they could not possibly be attributable to a mere fluctuation of the prevalent type.

The individuals whom such specimens represent were probably recent accretions by the tribes through marriage or adoption. Other increments of similar nature doubtless occurred in the past, and, blending more or less thoroughly with the tribes, modified the physical types of these to a greater or less extent. It is evidently due to this influence that, as will be shown later, the more southerly tribes of the region under consideration—those which were nearest the more westerly, southwesterly, and southerly brachycephals—show a higher cranial index than the more northerly and purer tribes.

The principal numerical results of the measurements derived from the Eastern Indian crania are given at the end of this section. These may be summarized briefly: The type is characterized by marked to moderate dolichocephaly in the males, and by moderate dolichocephaly to mesocephaly in the females; by medium to high vault, with occasionally a low forehead; by good size of the skull as a whole, and lack of unusual thickness of its bones; by moderately high to high face, the latter especially frequent in the males; by moderate, seldom great, breadth of face; by considerably varying orbital dimensions and index, with a predominance of mesoseme forms, but reaching, even in the averages, from microseme to megaseme; by the frequency of moderate size in the nasal aperture; by variable nasal index, with a large predominance, however, of the mesorhinic form; by a rather short palate in many instances; and by a moderate degree of facial as well as of alveolar prognathism.

Cranial Index

The distribution of the most important characteristic of the skulls, the cranial index, will be more clearly apparent from the next table. Owing to the paucity of crania in some of the series, there are irregularities between the males and females of the same group, and the position of the different groups in the line is probably not in every case correct. Nevertheless, certain conditions are clearly brought out. It is seen on the whole that the dolichocephaly decreases in a slight ratio from the north to the south; but its lower extreme is found on Long Island, Staten Island, and Manhattan Island, New York. The crania from these three localities show striking resemblances, and though there are also certain differences, the conclusion seems to be justified that they belong to one group. It has been suggested[121] that the Indians of Staten Island were a branch of the Lenape, but the evidence offered by the skeletal remains gives no corroboration of this. There may have been Lenape women, or even some Lenape admixture, in the Staten Island tribe, but the crania of the men show almost uniformly distinct features which identify them clearly with the Indians of Manhattan Island and Long Island.

XCII. EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA:
CRANIAL INDEX

There is remarkable similarity in the average index of the crania of all the more northerly states as far as New Jersey. The Indians of both sexes from Maine and Massachusetts are particularly close in this respect, and, as will be seen later, these two groups, while not entirely homogeneous, show many other close similarities.

The most important result is that shown by the crania from southeastern Canada, which are almost entirely Huron or Iroquois; and by the specimens from New York State, which also are largely of Iroquois derivation. The Iroquois, as is well known, are regarded as a linguistic stock distinct from the Algonquian, though there are some lexical resemblances in the two languages. But the measurements of the skulls of representatives of the two stocks show no such distinction. In fact, the Iroquois occupy, with reference to nearly all important cranial features, more or less of a median position among the Algonquian groups, and there is no basis on which they can legitimately be segregated as belonging to any different physical group of Indians. It is quite possible that some of the Iroquois tribes may have been derived, in smaller or larger part, from other peoples of the westward or the southwestward, or that in course of time they became mixed with such; but the greater proportion of the Iroquois can henceforth be no more separated in physical anthropology from the Algonquians than can any of the subgroups of the latter.

Another important result of these studies relates to the Lenape. The Munsee and other Delaware Indian skulls, while nearing (and in the case of females slightly surpassing) the upper limits of dolichocephaly, are nevertheless sufficiently closely related to the crania from the neighboring states to show that the Munsee, and the Lenape as a whole, were in all probability only subdivisions of the eastern Algonquians. Resemblances in other important features of the skull, as well as of the skeleton, make this conclusion quite definite, thus eliminating the theory of the migration of the Lenape from beyond the Mississippi, for if such were the case, they could scarcely fit so precisely into the anthropological position they occupy between the neighboring tribes. Yet, as previously mentioned, there is some evidence, especially that afforded by the Munsee, that the Lenape had some connection, probably earlier as well as recent, with tribes living southwestward from the Appalachian mountains.

From the limited Pennsylvania material it appears that the eastern lowlands were occupied by Indians of the Algonquian or Lenape type, while in the more westerly parts brachycephaly was frequent if not common.

As to the Virginia Algonquians, they show the highest cranial indexes of all the groups here considered, and had doubtless considerable foreign blood, derived from the west or the south. It would be interesting to compare the Virginia Indians with the Siouan tribes, to which they seem to bear close affinity.

Height of Skull

Next to the cranial index, the most important feature of the vault of the skull is its height, and the Eastern crania, as already stated, are characterized by good to pronounced development in this direction. The averages of the measurements, and those of the ordinary height-length and height-breadth indexes, will be found in the final tables, but none of these are very satisfactory for showing the true value of this dimension, which on the one hand is proportionate to the size of the skull, and on the other stands in a more or less compensatory relation with both the length and breadth of the vault. It has long been felt by the writer that some expression of the real relative value of the height measurement was required, and this need led him ultimately to compare it not with the very variable length or breadth of the skull, but with the mean of these two measurements. The resultant index, which may be called simply the height index of the vault, gives us a new means of comparison and classification of the skull and promises to prove much more satisfactory than the two older indexes. In the Eastern crania here described, it ranges from 83 to almost 90, and the arrangement of the various tribes on its basis is harmonious and of considerable interest. The main points brought out by the index are as follow:

In the northernmost tribes the height of the skull is on the whole relatively lower than in those farther south. The Munsee and other Lenape crania agree with those of the more northerly groups, but differ somewhat from each other, the skulls in the Heye collection being in both sexes perceptibly lower than those of the other Lenape. The Staten Island, Manhattan Island, and Long Island skulls are again grouped, so far as the more important male skulls are concerned, and are all high. Of the Virginia collections, the first series, from various eastern localities, shows a medium height or slightly above; but the Valentine collection, from a more westerly part of the state,[122] gives in both sexes the highest index of all the groups, showing the greatest relative height and indicating that this group had been subjected to influences which did not affect equally the Indian population of other parts of the state.

XCIII. EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA:
HEIGHT INDEX[123]

Size of Skull

The size of the skull of the Eastern Indian, as expressed by the cranial module, shows again a grouping of much interest, though here more than in other series, owing to the small number of specimens, the position of some of the tribes can not be regarded as definitely fixed. The Munsee, as well as other Lenape skulls, stand with those of Rhode Island at the lower end of the scale, showing the smallest heads, although the Indians of these localities were not tribes of smaller stature than most of the other Eastern Indians. The more northerly Algonquians (with the exception of those of Rhode Island) and the Iroquois, occupy a median position. In the Virginia tribes the size of the skull ranges from medium to slightly above in the more easterly, but slightly below medium in the more westerly tribes. The crania from Manhattan, Long Island, and Staten Island are again grouped and occupy the highest position in the series, showing the largest heads; but they were also among the tallest, if not the tallest, of the Eastern Indians.

XCIV. EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA:
CRANIAL MODULE

XCV. EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA:
VAULT[124]

• LEGEND:
• A = Number of specimens (pairs)
• B = Length
• C = Breadth
• D = Height
• E = Cranial module
• F = Cranial index
• G = Height-length index
• H = Height-breadth index
• J = Cranial capacity
• K = Thickness, left partietal

Facial Measurements

HEIGHT OF THE FACE

The height of the face stands largely, though not absolutely, in correlation with the length of the head, a feature which becomes apparent also in our series. The collections from more westerly Virginia and the Lenape groups, all of which show rather short crania, give also the shortest faces. Maine and Massachusetts follow, with Rhode Island and New York. The Indians of Staten Island, Long Island, and Manhattan Island, so far as the males are concerned, all find a place in the upper half of the series, with long faces, and the same is true of the few more easterly Virginia specimens in which the face could be measured, and of the males of southeastern Canada. The latter, with those of Manhattan Island, occupy the upper limit of the scale. The females throughout show more uniformity than the males in their measurements.

BREADTH OF THE FACE

The breadth of the face, as measured by the diameter bizygomatic maximum, stands in a measure in correlation with the breadth of the head, but as it depends very largely on the degree of development of the temporal muscles and as a pronounced development of these muscles, while broadening the zygomatic arches, tends at the same time to restrict the development of the skull in breadth, there are many irregularities in this correlation. In our series, Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut occupy the lowest positions in the scale, showing faces that for Indians are decidedly narrow. Among the Lenape the faces are about medium, and the same is true of the more westerly Virginians. On Manhattan Island and Staten Island the face was well above the medium in breadth, but not so on Long Island, although the somewhat exceptional position of the Long Island Indians in this respect may be accidental. The Indians of southeastern Canada and New York State, as well as some of the Virginia Indians, had faces decidedly broader than the averages of those of the northeastern states bordering on the Atlantic.

Comparing the average facial breadth with facial height, it is seen that in most of the tribes noted the two measurements occupy a similar position in the scale, the narrow faces being also short, and vice versa; but there are several exceptions.

XCVI. EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA: FACE

Orbits

While describing, in 1902, the skulls of the more easterly Lenape, the writer was impressed by the occasional appearance of very low orbits, and considered at the time the possibility of this feature being characteristic of the tribe. The present examination shows, however, that remarkably low orbits were frequent among some of the tribes of the eastern Algonquians, and that the Munsee and Lenape skulls occupy, with respect to the average orbital index, only a median position. The lowest orbits in the mean were found among the males of Long Island and of the North Atlantic states. Maine and Massachusetts again stand exceedingly close together, with fairly low indexes, while Manhattan Island and Staten Island are about medium. The females of Staten Island show in this, as in other respects, a lack of harmony with the males, with lower index. The highest orbits are found in the skulls from southeastern Canada and Rhode Island, and in both of the series from Virginia. On the whole, the extensive variation of the absolute and relative dimensions of the orbits among the eastern Algonquians (and Iroquois) is very remarkable. Its chief cause in the males is the unequal development of the supraorbital ridges; in the females, excepting in two or three groups, the proportions and indexes are more nearly alike.

XCVII. EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA:
FACE

Nasal Index

Among the Eastern Indians, the nose, as already mentioned, is in general relatively small, and the aperture presents often fairly sharp borders, an exceptional feature among Indians of most other parts of the continent. The nasal aperture, or more properly the relation of the breadth to the height of the nose, expressed by the nasal index, differs considerably in the different tribes. The index is low in the northeastern states, on Manhattan Island and Long Island, and in southeastern Canada; medium among the Munsee and other Lenape, among the more easterly Virginia tribes and in New York State; and elevated on Staten Island and in the more westerly Virginians. It was also elevated in both sexes in Rhode Island, which is of interest in that the specimens from that state show a somewhat exceptional position in other respects. On Staten Island, the crania of which stand in regard to nasal index apart from those of Manhattan Island and Long Island, with which they are otherwise so closely related, the character may have been influenced by admixture through the accession of females.

Palate

The relative proportions of the dental arch, as expressed by the “palatine” index, show shortest palates in the northeastern states and longest among the Lenape; but the differences are not very marked.

XCIII. EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA:
FACE

Prognathism

Facial prognathism did not differ very greatly in the different groups, yet there is a perceptible tendency toward a greater orthognathy among Indians of the northeastern states and Canada, and to somewhat greater protrusion among those of Long Island and Staten Island, the Munsee, and the Virginians of the Valentine collection. Alveolar prognathism (see table for details) was most pronounced on Manhattan Island, Long Island, and Staten Island; east among the New York Indians and among those of southeastern Canada, Maine, and Massachusetts.

It is evident from the data presented above, that the eastern Algonquian (and Iroquois) Indians, while essentially of one type, approached purity of type much more in the northeastern Atlantic states and in southeastern Canada than farther south. It is further plain that the stock presented numerous and occasionally marked localized or tribal as well as individual variations, and that in several of the states, and possibly even in Rhode Island, it was modified more or less by admixture with individuals of both sexes from across the Appalachians or the south. A locally differentiated group which in many respects already stood more or less apart from the neighboring tribes and was also characterized especially by more than average development, is the cluster of tribes of Manhattan Island, Long Island, and Staten Island. The Munsee and other Lenape stand in close relation in many important respects, though they exhibit also some differences; and both of them, as already shown, agree with the rest of the eastern Algonquians, more especially with their immediate neighbors to the north and south.

The tables of detail measurements of the Eastern Indian crania follow.

XCIX. EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA:
FACE (DETAILS)

(A) = Number of Specimens

C.  EASTERN INDIAN CRANIA:
FACE (DETAILS)