one limited and limiting. As long time rolls on, synthesis may dawn
from the vast volume of data gathered under the many and incomplete
hypotheses; or synthesis may not dawn, even after long years. Not in
this manner do other sciences and arts reach their useful goals--indus-
trial engineering, for example, and medicine. Numerous are the spe-
cialties of medicine, but they do not await on some far future intellectual
event for their synthesis. Instead, they move here and now, incessantly,
into coöperative, clinical application.

This book results from the coöperative and integrative use of the
many specialities of social science, including psychological science and
ecology, by specialists who collaborated in the search for the whole-
ness of a complex social fact or event. The specialities functioned as
they function in the medical clinic. There emerged discoveries not con-
tained within or predictable from any of the specialized hypotheses or
all of them together. The discoveries threw a flood of genuinely new
light upon an entire human society--its past, its present, and its pos-
sible future. Immediate practical understandings were attained, and
some very moving, universal significances appeared. Synthesis and
pragmatic yield did not have to wait on the intellectual construction
of some indefinite future year; they emerged at once, right out of the
human and social data as examined through the method of converging
specialized disciplines within a coöperative research.

One of the desperate needs of the clouded world situation now is
the speeding-up of social discovery, the quick achievement of generaliza-
tions which can be used by statesmen. When the specialities of social
science move into cooperative, integrative research, a corner in the his-
tory of social science is turned, and a critical acceleration takes place.
The corner is turned, the critical acceleration is demonstrated, in this
book.

The pueblos of the Southwestern United States are the most repre-
sentative survivors of pre-Columbian Indian civilization. They are
such through the complexity of their life, its many-sidedness and its
extraordinary balance, its religious profundity, its man-nature world

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