Shapefile for traditional culture areas of the Americas

Question

I am searching for a shapefile showing the traditional indigenous culture areas of the Americas.

Here's an example of pretty much exactly what I want (without the plotted tribal names)

http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-153006

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

This isn't really an answer, but too long for a comment. Thoughts:

• You could use the map itself (pixel-by-pixel analysis) to generate a shapefile.

• Googling several tribe names in quotes (eg, https://www.google.com/search?q=%22mojave%22+%22kaska%22+%22huastec%22+%22blackfeet%22+%22yurok%22+%22chickasaw%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) yields several interesting results, including 2 books and the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas which has a higher resolution map, but covers a smaller region and does not necessarily agree with your map.

• Doing the above as an image search may also yield potential resources.

• https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2010/cph-t/t-6tables/TABLE%20%2863%29.csv is probably unhelpful, but poking around on the census.gov site might be useful.

• For a less automated approach, you may want to contact http://www.nmai.si.edu/ -- they have similar maps published online (eg, http://www.nmai.si.edu/education/codetalkers/html/chapter2.html), but I couldn't find any that exactly matched what you wanted (google search: https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&biw=992&bih=495&tbm=isch&sa=1&btnG=Search&q=site%3Awww.nmai.si.edu+map)

• A reverse tineye.com search of your image doesn't yield much, but might still be helpful: https://www.tineye.com/search/89cf2f0dca0781afe0dcee5c91e3368a15bf098d/ (alamy.com in particular appears as though they MAY have a vector map of what you need).