CONTRIBUTIONS OF AMERICAN ARCHEOLOGY TO 

 HUMAN HISTORY." 



By W. H. rioLMES. 



The importance of archeology to the student of history is now fully 

 recognized. The science is establishing its claims to consideration 

 more fully year by year, especially since it has become allied with 

 geology, which furnishes the necessary time scale, and with paleon- 

 tology, which supplies the scale of life. The Ijranch of inquiry 

 which only a few years ago dealt with isolated fragments of knowl- 

 edge, with disjointed portions of the framework of human his- 

 tory, now essays to aid in l)uilding up the entire skeleton of that 

 liistory, and, with the aid of the allied sciences of ethnology and psy- 

 chology, in clothing it with the integuments of a living reality. 



America is taking a noteworthy part in this rehabilitation of the 

 race and, fortunately, is most helpful just where the Old World is 

 weakest. In America the past of man, for the most part at least, 

 connects directly with the present and with the living. Ench step 

 backward along the course of culture development proceeds from a 

 well-established and fully understood base, and there is thus no 

 l)affling gap between history and prehistory, as in the Old \A'()rld. 



In America all the steps of culture from the highest to the lowest 

 within the native range are to be observed among the living peoples, 

 and we are thus able to avoid many of the snares of speculation with 

 respect to what men have thought and men have done under the 

 greatly diversified conditions of primitive existence. 



In America the conditions are simple. The antiquities of a region 

 represent in a large measure the early history of the known peoi)les 

 of that region. There haA^e not been the successive occupations, the 

 racial interminglings, the obscuring and obliteration of phenomena 

 that so seriously embarrass the student of the ancient nations of the 



o Paper rend before the Congress of Americanists, Stuttgart, Gerinniiy, August 

 21, 1904. 



551 



