ANTHROPOLOGY IN AVESTERN HEMISPHERE AND PACIFIC ISLANDS. d7 



mound-builders has in this way been settled. They were the ancestors of the 

 present-day American Indians, and some aspects of their culture have been 

 continued until to-day. 



The fables about the cliff-dwellers have been corrected. Many dwelling- 

 places have been studied, and often surprisingly minute details of cliff-culture 

 have been revealed. Those people were the kin of the pueblo inhabitants 

 of to-day. The geographical range of the ancient pueblo culture has been 

 outlined and its sedentary agricultural life by irrigation has been in part 

 revealed. In attempting to disclose the connection between this ancient 

 and modern pueblo culture, one may say that the ancient culture is rather 

 like the worn and broken end of a tapestry; a part of the fabric is service- 

 able and in hand, while the ancient end only now and again reveals the 

 connecting threads. 



Still farther south, in central Mexico, the romantic Mexican culture 

 which set all Europe ablaze with stories of its untold hordes of precious metals 

 and its marvelous heights of culture, is popularly and superficially known, 

 largely through the Aztec people. 



For more than twenty years exploratory work has been carried on in 

 the area of the ancient Maya of southern Mexico and Central America. 

 Many facts have been gathered about the migrations, architecture, sculpture, 

 painting and writing, food and clothing, religion and social life of this people, 

 probably the most advanced ethno-cultural group of aborigines in the West- 

 ern Hemisphere. Reconnaissance work among them has progressed so far 

 that the larger anthropological problems may now be confidently undertaken. 



Work somewhat similar to that among the Maya, though less extensive, 

 has been done among the ancient Inca of the South American Andes area. 

 That culture was marvelous in many ways. In governmental system, zoo- 

 culture, and geographic extent, covering as it did well the length of Peru and 

 Chili, the Inca culture was unrivaled in the Western Hemisphere in pre- 

 Columbian times. 



One of the most satisfactory pieces of prehistoric anthropological work 

 ever carried on in the Americas is that completed in 1912, when the ancient 

 Peruvian capital "Machu Picchu," called the "cradle of the Inca empire," 

 was so successfully rescued from the destruction of nature. The large prob- 

 lems of the Inca, like those of the Maya, are unsolved. 



Enough work has been done on shell-heaps, gravels, caves, rock-shelters, 

 etc., in the Western Hemisphere to interest all anthropologists in the problem 

 of man in America at a period earlier than any commonly agreed upon. In 

 Argentine problems have been raised in the beginnings of mankind which 

 are to-day the center of world-wide scholarly controversy. 



