Indians of North America -- Southwest, New Search this
Type:
Archival materials
Field notes
Dictionaries
Vocabulary
Manuscripts
Narratives
Date:
1909-circa 1944
Scope and Contents:
This subseries of the Southwest series contains Harrington's Taos research. The materials consist of field notes, grammatical and semantic slipfile, grammar, dictionary, linguistic notes, ethnographic and historical notes, and texts.
Among his field notes are slips prepared for semantic arrangement (former B.A.E. MS 2309 and 2290pt.). Many of the terms were used in the draft of an unpublished grammar, with some orthographic variations. The use of "q" for "kw" suggests an early date, possibly 1909-1910 . An early vocabulary is comprised of Harrington's comparative Taos terms used in his article "Notes on the Piro Language" (1909a).
From former B.A.E. manuscripts 2290pt., 2292pt., and 2296 come several categories of miscellaneous field notes. Included are a vocabulary elicited in 1910, typed and annotated notes which collate much of the information written on slips, and miscellaneous slips some dated 1920, some probably earlier-which contain brief Picuris comparisons. Data encompass placenames, tribenames, ethnogeographic terms, and some grammatical elaborations.
Another group of field notes appears to be Taos with Isleta comparisons. This is a tentative identification still subject to the scrutiny of linguists, who are not presently in complete agreement. The physical condition and type of paper used indicate that these notes may have been recorded during the period 1909 to 1911.
A set of slips, formerly cataloged as B.A.E. MS 2318 and 2295pt., fills four boxes. Field notes and reports suggest that this comprehensive body of material may have been accumulated, annotated, and rearranged over a period of time ranging from 1909 to 1928. The largest section of the file was arranged by Harrington according to grammatical categories and is especially substantial on verb and pronoun usage. Another group of slips is semantically arranged; some phonetic, ethnographic, and historical material is interjected.
The grammar section includes tabulations in English of pronoun prefix material which give an excellent indication of Harrington's methodology for accumulating slipfiles. Taos slips deal with pronoun usage, verb paradigms, and sentence structure. These are early notes, probably dating from 1909 to 1911. Mondragon was the principal source of information. The section also includes three drafts of manuscripts on Taos grammar, only of which one was published. "Ambiguity in the Taos Personal Pronoun" (1916) (former B.A.E. MS 2293pt. and 4682pt.) was condensed from another draft of an unpublished, more comprehensive grammar (former B.A.E. MS 4682pt.). A draft of a paper on numerals is filed with some of the original field notes from which it evolved (former B.A.E. MS 4681). Another major subsection consists of a draft of over 500 typed pages of a comprehensive grammar by Carobeth Laird, Harrington's wife at the time. The manuscript (former B.A.E. MS 2307 and 4680), titled "Grammatical Analysis of the Taos Language," is dated 1920. The fieldwork for the paper was done in Taos during July and August of 1918 with Taos speakers Lujan and Mondragon. A partial and preliminary draft and notes reveal some annotations by Harrington, who also was in Taos at the same time working with the same speakers.
This subseries also contains Harrington's Taos dictionary. The Taos-English section is in alphabetical order according to the first sound of the base. Although the English-Taos section gives the English word first, it follows the alphabetical order of the Taos term according to Harrington's list of initial symbols. Some entries in the dictionary are followed by the notes from which they evolved. There is also a file of Taos bird names, apparently intended for incorporation into the dictionary, as well as a small group of plant names. These also are in Taos-English and English-Taos. Filed with this material is a list of the scientific names for Taos birds; annotations were supplied by Florence Merriam Bailey and Vernon Bailey. (See "Studying the Mission Indians of California and the Taos of New Mexico" [1929].)
Harrington's linguistic notes (former B.A.E. MS 2292pt. and 2295pt.) include grammar, vocabulary, and textual material, apparently accumulated in July and August of 1918 from his work with Lujan and Mondragon. At least a portion of the material was collected with the assistance of his wife Carobeth, and a number of pages are in her hand. The pagination evidently underwent several reorganizations and is therefore somewhat chaotic. His other notes consist of comments on George L. Trager's "The Kinship and Status Terms of the Tiwa Languages" (1943) and on Elsie Clews Parsons' Taos Pueblo (1936). Relationship terms, age and sex nouns, personal names, rank nouns, and tribenames are mentioned.
Among his ethnographic and historical notes is his unfinished manuscript, "The Taos Indians" (former B.A.E. MS 3073). He relied heavily on Matilda Coxe Stevenson's field notes for his manuscript; her contribution is mainly ethnographic while a few pages are the work of her husband, James. Taos speaker Tony Romero is the source for the clan names. Harrington also incorporated his notes from 1908, 1909, 1911, 1918, and 1919. For historical data, Harrington relied on published sources, especially early Spanish documents for which he supplied original translations and throughout which some Picuris history is interwoven. The bibliographic information for the historical sources is interspersed throughout the notes.
There are also notes and excerpts from Blanche C. Grant's publications and miscellaneous notes on dances (former B.A.E. MS 2292pt.). A few random ethnographic notes on slips are written in English.
Contained in a series of texts are stories of Wolf and Deer and two versions of the Lord's Prayer with grammatical notes. Also included is the Tanoan linguistic diagram (former B.A.E. MS 2292 pt.) used in Harrington's "An Introductory Paper on the Tiwa Language, Dialect of Taos, New Mexico" (191 Oc). Jose Lopez and Santiago Mirabel provided the Taos terms used in this publication.
Biographical / Historical:
The first indication of John P. Harrington's work among the Taos Indians comes from his financial records of September 20, 1909, to January 15, 1910, when he was based in Santa Fe and doing fieldwork in various languages of the Southwest. Peak periods of in-depth work on Taos, sometimes in the field and sometimes in Washington, D.C., appear to be 1909-1911, 1918-1922, 1926-1930, and 1944-1945. He worked primarily with Joe Lujan (abbreviated "L.") and Manuel Mondragon ("M."), with Mondragon helping from 1910 to 1927. There are references to a trip which Harrington made with Margaret Tschirgi and F. E. Betts to the ruins east of Taos on September 30, 1928, but there are no further explanatory notes.
Mutual professional respect had arisen between Harrington and Matilda Coxe Stevenson of the Bureau of American Ethnology, at whose ranch he spent six weeks in the autumn of 1908. He was in possession of a large body of her original notes on south western Indians at the time of her death in 1915 and planned to arrange, annotate, and publish them. Her material on Taos appears in an unpublished historical and ethnographic manuscript titled "The Taos Indians."
John Peabody Harrington papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
The preferred citation for the Harrington Papers will reference the actual location within the collection, i.e. Box 172, Alaska/Northwest Coast, Papers of John Peabody Harrington, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
However, as the NAA understands the need to cite phrases or vocabulary on specific pages, a citation referencing the microfilmed papers is acceptable. Please note that the page numbering of the PDF version of the Harrington microfilm does not directly correlate to the analog microfilm frame numbers. If it is necessary to cite the microfilmed papers, please refer to the specific page number of the PDF version, as in: Papers of John Peabody Harrington, Microfilm: MF 7, R34 page 42.
