CONTRIBUTIONS OF AMERICAN ARCHEOLOGY TO 

 HUMAN HISTORY." 



By W. II. Holmes. 



The importance of aroheoloo-y 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 branch of incpiiry 

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

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

 tory, now essays to aid in building up the entire skeleton of that 

 history, 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 rehal)ilitation of the 

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

 weakest. In America the past of man, for the most j^art at leai5t, 

 connects directly with the present and with the living. Each stej) 

 l^ackward along the course of culture development proceeds from a 

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

 baffling gap between history and prehistory, as in the Old World. 



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 Ave are thus able to aA^oid many of the snares of speculation with 

 respect to what men have thought and men haA^e done under the 

 greatly diA^ersified 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 peoples 

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

 racial interminglings, the obscuring and obliteration of ])henomena 

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



a Paper read before the Congress of Americanists, Stuttgart, Germany. August 

 21, 1904. 



551 



