Classification and Development of North American Indian Cultures: A Statistical Analysis of the Driver-Massey Sample. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society

This is a print on demand publication. This correlation analysis of the cultural data in the Driver-Massey sample includes both tribe by tribe (Q-type) & trait by trait (R-type) comparisons of 392 culture traits among 245 tribes. The tribes were chosen to match the North American part of Murdock’s (1967) sample. In addition, both groups of tribes & individual traits were correlated with the Voegelins’ (1966) genetic language classification & with Georg Neumann’s classification of physical types. Perhaps the most important finding is that most of the intertrait correlations cannot be explained or interpreted in functional or causal terms, but rather must be attributed to unknown causes, events, accidents, & agents of history. The principal methods used are the matrix ordering & tree diagram computer programs of Jorgensen (1969). The authors have intentionally avoided factor analysis & other matrix reduction techniques because they believe that such methods tend to obscure more than they reveal, by compacting the data into too small a number of factors. Their purpose has been to display all of the intertribal relationships in the largest tree diagram in anthropology to date, & also to exhibit the highest individual intertrait correlations in clusters & macroclusters. Illus.

Harold E. Driver (1907―1992) was a professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. His publications include The Hupa White Deerskin Dance (1940), Comparative Studies of North American Indians (1957), and Classification and Development of North American Indian Cultures: A Statistical Analysis of the Driver-Massey Sample (1975).