THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA IN THE 

 LIGHT OF ARCHEOLOGY ' 



By N. C. Nelson 

 American Museum of Natural History 



INTRODUCTORY 



The American aborigines have been the special object of interest 

 to students of early man now for more than 400 years. During 

 this interval, paradoxically enough, not only have the inherent prob- 

 lems increased in number rather than diminished, but the point of 

 view or angle of attack has shifted from time to time. On the whole, 

 however, these shiftings have conformed to the developmental course 

 of science in general ; that is, they have tended from the more obvious 

 to the less, from the abstract to the concrete — in short, from the 

 essentially speculative to the distinctly empirical approach. 



At first, and for a long time, the question of origin held exclusive 

 attention. Who was the Indian or whence did he come? The 

 answers, contributed largely and of necessity by armchair students, 

 have been many and amusingly varied, but the final reply still 

 awaits the recovery of substantial archeological facts and need not, 

 therefore, concern us much in this essay. By the middle of last 

 century the more specific question of antiquity took precedence. 

 How long had the Indian been in America? A wide range of con- 

 tradictory and more or less startling replies have been furnished, 

 for the most part by paleontological discoveries, and these it is 

 proposed to sum up and to contrast in character and reliability with 

 the available archeological data. Finally, some three or four decades 

 ago, there came to the front the still more specific question of 

 cultural development. What has been the Indian's history since 

 he came here? This is a distinctly archeological problem, one that 

 can be settled only by painstaking search for the fragmentary relics 

 scattered over the entire New World and by a rigid comparison of 



* Reprinted by permission from The American Aborigines, Their Origin and Antiquity, 

 a collection of papers by 10 authors, assembled and edited by Diamond Jenness and pub- 

 lished as a Presentation Volume, on the occasion of the Fifth Pacific Congress, University 

 of Toronto Press, Victoria, Canada, 1933. 



471 



