PREHISTORIC ART. B59 



for want of a better name, are called alignments. He acquired the art 

 of and became an adept in chipping, grinding, polishing, and drilling- 

 stone, especially the hard flint and tough jade, of which he left some 

 magnificently wrought specimens. A few whistles have been found 

 belonging to the Paleolithic period, but the greater proportion of them 

 belong to the Neolithic period and Bronze age. The American Indian 

 and his congeners, those on the West Indian Islands or Antilles, were 

 in the Neolithic stage of culture and their decorative art was practi- 

 cally the same as of that age iu Europe. They excelled their European 

 brethren, however, in making rude drawings and pictures, principally 

 petroglyphs, many of them, doubtless, ideographs, telling a story by 

 their description. They often reproduce the human figure, which the 

 European rarely did. Tlie aborigines of Mexico, Central, and the north- 

 western part of South America, although still in the Stone age, reached 

 a higher civilization, mainly manifested by their fine sculpturing of 

 stone, the erection of extensive and magnificent temples, and their 

 ideographic language. 



No theory will be propounded in this paper, the only intention being 

 to present facts on which arguments can be made and theories built. 

 The sociology of the prehistoric man will not be essayed, and no Si> priori 

 arguments will be introduced to explain the i)sychology of prehistoric 

 man, nor will any philosophic treatise be attempted, giving pretended 

 explanations of the causes which impelled aboriginal man to indulge iu 

 essays at testhetic art other than the requirements of his condition or 

 the suggestion of his fancy. To do this would be to substitute theory 

 for fact. 



The present paper will be devoted to Prehistoric art, and will not 

 deal with Prehistoric anthroi^ology. That subject is left to other works, 

 a list of the principal of which is given iu the author's Handbook,^ 

 imblished in the Eeport of the United States National Museum of 

 1887-88, 



The Paleolithic jjeriod, the earliest epoch of the Stone age, obtained 

 its highest known developnuMit in western Europe, possibly because it 

 has been more profoundly studied there than elsewhere. By common 

 consent it has there been subdivided into epochs according to the 

 degrees of art manifested. Different names have been given to these 

 epochs, and while there has been some dispute about details, the main 

 proposition of a Paleolithic period earlier than the Neolithic has been 

 accepted by all. 



The peculiar characteristic of the implements of the Paleolithic period 

 is that man's cutting implements, usually of stone, ])referably flint, 

 were always made by chipping. In the later epochs of the Paleolithic 

 period certain implements were made of bone and horn, which were 

 ground or smoothed, while those of stone were not. It is not, however, 

 to be supposed that every chipped stone implement belonged to the 



'A Study of Prehistoric Anthropology, p. 597. 



