540 ARCHEOLOGY 



and when the objects discovered displayed a relatively high state 

 of development, they have been ready, without more ado, to assert 

 positively a connection with the known tribes of advanced civiliza- 

 tion. In this way they have found traces of the Aztecs in the Casas 

 Grandes of Arizona, in the cliff-dwellings, and in the mounds; and 

 they have conducted the Toltecs, the legendary representatives of 

 a high civilization in Mexico, from the valley of the Mississippi into 

 that country, and thence along the line of the Andes into Peru. 

 Luckily we have now got beyond that sort of thing. What, however, 

 we have not yet reached, and what we should earnestly strive for, 

 is to establish empirically what the earlier students attempted to 

 develop on the basis of theories which they took to be well-founded, 

 not only the existence on the continent of various civilizations, 

 but their order of succession, and the influences to which they were 

 progressively subjected. This has not yet been achieved, even for 

 the two regions which have been most thoroughly investigated, the 

 Mexican and the Central American. The great question, which of 

 the two leading civilized races, the Maya and the Mexican, is re- 

 sponsible for the beginning of this civilization, or whether they 

 both raised themselves on the shoulders of a third, is as yet un- 

 settled. But the mutual influence of Maya and Mexicans is beyond 

 question, and assumes a greater importance the further we pene- 

 trate into the essential nature of these civilizations, and the more 

 we learn of their different sides and their points of divergence. 



The question remains to be discussed how the archeological 

 picture which the American continent offers has shown itself or 

 can be made of service to the general science of all mankind, which 

 we Germans usually call ethnology, while its followers here prefer 

 the name anthropology. Archeology as such is only a branch of 

 descriptive ethnography. I have tried in this brief sketch to show 

 how our knowledge of the continent has been augmented in recent 

 years through the labors of the archeologist. To give even a 

 summary account of how at the same time American ethnography 

 has gained both in extension and in depth would take hours, and 

 is not my business. It is sufficient for me, in order to show what 

 significant impulses have proceeded from both the archeology and 

 the ethnography of America, to recall to you that the whole modern 

 development of primitive sociology took its real beginning from 

 the investigations of Lewis H. Morgan into the tribal constitution 

 of the Iroquois, and that in the most recent researches into the 

 philosophy of religion the old Mexican belief is beginning to play 

 an increasingly important part. American archeology and ethno- 

 graphy are also of the greatest importance to general ethnology. 

 So far as it has been possible to study the old remains and the old 

 traditions, so far as philology gives us material for definite conclu- 



