518 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
of museum specimens but which were of basic importance to the 
scientific progress of American Indian studies—the classification of 
North American Indian languages, the identification of Indian tribes 
and villages, the history of Indian land cessions, and the estimate 
of early Indian population. 
These classification studies were paralleled in the museum ie 
equally intense efforts to describe and classify American Indian arti- 
facts on the basis of their methods of manufacture, form, and func- 
tion. The emphasis given to comparative technology by both arche- 
ologists and ethnologists during this period reflected their efforts to 
establish anthropology on a sound scientific basis by applying the 
taxonomic principles of the natural sciences. It also reflected the 
biologist’s interests in evolution by extending that principle to a search 
for the origin and early development of man’s inventions. 
During the 1880’s anthropologists in the museum experimented 
with primitive tools to determine how Indians worked stone, bone, 
shell, and copper. They analyzed the techniques Indians employed 
in dressing skin, weaving baskets, and making pottery, as well as in 
making fire. They classified American Indian bows and arrows, 
harpoons, throwing sticks, knives, pipes, cradles, fire-making ap- 
paratus, and other artifacts in the collections. The major publica- 
tions of the museum anthropologists during the 1880’s and 1890’s were 
concerned with problems of comparative technology. 
This technological approach, which absorbed the interests of 
ethnologists in the museum laboratories, was adopted by them in 
planning and arranging the American Indian exhibits for the public. 
Two principal types of exhibits predominated. One of them illus- 
trated the great variety of forms of a single class of objects that ex- 
isted among the Indians—whether the subject was bows and arrows, 
harpoons, throwing sticks, pottery, textiles, sculpture, pipes, or neck- 
laces. Dense concentrations of objects of each class proved an orderly 
method of displaying the greater part of the museum’s vast Indian 
collections. The visitor could not but be impressed with the wealth 
of the museum in American Indian materials. If he tarried to view 
the exhibits in some detail, he learned that the Indians were clever 
workers in a variety of primitive industries and the tribal distribu- 
tion of these traits. In this technological arrangement the handi- 
crafts of each tribe were widely scattered. It was impossible to de- 
termine from these exhibits how any Indian tribe lived. (PI. 3, fig. 1.) 
The second type of exhibit purported to show the evolution of com- 
mon tools, such as those used for cutting, sawing, drilling, etc. These 
exhibits portrayed assumed technological advances, from the simple 
to the complex, without regard for the history of the actual objects 
selected. (PI. 3, fig. 2.) 
