420 THE ORIGIN OF THE SLAVS. 



and ideas secretly survived, though the Catholic religion became 

 dominant. As late as the thirteenth century the funeral fetes of the 

 Gentiles, as the Polish chronicler Kadlubek testifies, still continued 

 unimpaired. Still more must this have been the case with such cus- 

 toms and manners as did not concern religion. Great revolutions 

 may take place among a people without greatly affecting the habits 

 of life. The most simple usages are the most lasting, because of 

 their simplicit}^ This is the more so with agricultural peoples, whose 

 wants vary little, the most primitive objects and customs persisting 

 through all external changes. It is a mere general ethnographical 

 observation to assert that the objects found in the urn fields of 

 Bohemia, the Oder, and the Vistula, after the introduction of iron 

 implements and arms, are of the same material civilization as sur- 

 vives in these regions to the present time. 



ETHNOGRAPHIC PARALLELS BETWEEN BRETONS AND INHABITANTS OF THE CAR- 

 PATHIANS THEIR HALLSTAUTIAN AND GALLIC ORIGIN. 



Metal ware manufactured by the Slavs, and dresses, especially in 

 the Carpathians, are decorated in the same manner and with the 

 same motifs as the objects of Hallstadt. The dress embroideries in 

 Moravia and Galicia as far as the Ukrain thus recall a decorative 

 system which was already spread with the Hallstadtian civilization. 

 If the same costumes, the same embroideries, are met with, for 

 instance, among the Houzouls of the Carpathians, the descendants of 

 the Bastarni, and among the Ruthens of Galicia, on the one hand, 

 and among the Bretons on the other, it is apparent that it is not 

 merely a question of accidental analogy. And if these analogies can 

 be explained in no other way than that these peoples must have pre- 

 served common models through the ages, it must also be admitted that 

 these common models must have had the same origin, and that conse- 

 quently there was a contact between the ancestors of these joeoples. 

 Now, such a contact had really taken place. The Gauls, whose center 

 of expansion was the upper Danube and the upper Rhine, became 

 masters of modern France during the iron age, at the Tene period, 

 immediately after the Hallstadtian period. At that very period they 

 mingled with the Slavs in Bohemia and the Danube, and expanded as 

 far as the Dniester. Thus these ethnographic similarities have their 

 source in the Hallstadtian civilization of central Europe, and for their 

 origin the double movement of the Gauls at the beginning of the Tene 

 period, westward on the one hand^ and toward the center and the 

 east on the other. The existence of the same ornaments, dresses, and 

 customs in regions so widely separated as Bretagne and the Car- 

 pathians constitutes in itself a proof of their antiquity, going back 

 to the Hallstadtian period, when alone these diverse peoples came in 

 contact. 



