Excerpt from The American Anthropologist, Vol. 6: Published Under the Auspices of the Anthropological Society of Washington The tide-water portions of Maryland and Virginia have an area nearly equal to that of the State of Maryland. About one-fourth of the area is occupied by broad arms of the sea, chiefly Chesapeake bay and its tributaries, and the land is a low but handsome plain broken by erosion into hills, valleys, and terraces. It extends inland from the Atlantic seaboard to the base of the highland or Piedmont plateau, which rises on the west to the Allegheny mountains. The curved line separating the two topographic divisions - the lowland and the highland - is marked by falls in all the rivers and by the location of towns and cities through which pass the great highways of travel connecting the north with the south. Upon this line are located Philadelphia, Havre de Grace, Baltimore, Laurel, Washington, Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg (see Pl. I). This was the shore-line of the Atlantic when the formations constituting the lowlands were laid down. The separation of the lowland from the highland is not a topographic separation only, there are pronounced biologic and geologic distinctions, and these combined in archaic times to produce marked anthropologic distinctions. The tide-water region furnished a plentiful supply of game and fish, and in the brackish and salt water areas an abundance of oysters. The natives lived much upon the water and were perhaps more nearly a maritime people than any other group of tribes in the east. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.