THE ORIGIN OF EUROPEAN CULTURE. 25 



people from a study of the remains in their necropoli? All the 

 crania to be found in the graves with the precious objects of bronze 

 would in no wise represent the people who brought that bronze. 

 They burned their bridges behind them at death, and disappeared 

 for good and all. And the remains left to the archaeologist would 

 represent precisely that class in the population which had nothing 

 to do with the main characteristics of its civilization. And then, 

 again, we must bear in mind that the interments in these necropoli 

 as a whole, both with burned or buried dead, constitute a selected 

 type. Neither Hallstatt, Watsch, nor any of the burial places of 

 their type were open to the great mass of the common people. They 

 were sacred spots, far removed among the mountains from any centers 

 of population. Only the rich or powerful presumably had access 

 to them. They are no more typical of the Hallstatt people, therefore, 

 than interments in Westminster Abbey are representative of the Eng- 

 lish masses. All our data are necessarily drawn from a class within 

 a class. Inductions from them must be very gingerly handled. 



The situation above described seems to prevail almost everywhere 

 in the Hallstatt cultural area. Two distinct burial customs denote 

 possibly two separate peoples, the inhumers being certainly the older. 

 In the Hallstatt necropolis, for example, about one third of the graves 

 once contained human remains, all the others containing mere ashes. 

 So ancient are these graves that only eight crania from the hundreds 

 of interments of the first class are available for study. These are of 

 a pronounced long-headed type.* The modern populations of this 

 part of Europe are, as we have seen, among the broadest-headed 

 people in the world, as are also all the modern Illyrians. Yet from 

 the great necropolis at Glasinac in Bosnia, with its twenty thousand 

 tumuli, the meager Hallstatt returns are amply corroborated. f The 

 ancient inhabitants were as long-headed as they are pronouncedly of 

 the opposite type to-day. Up in Bohemia and Moravia also, according 

 to Niederle, the first bronze-age people, such as we know them, were 

 still dolichocephalic quite like their predecessors in the pure stone 

 age. And here also is incineration just about frequent enough to 

 make it uncertain whether the human remains are typical or not. 



Under these circumstances, three suppositions are open to us. We 

 may hold that these long-headed crania of the Hallstatt people are 

 worthless for any anthropological purposes whatever. This one 

 would certainly be tempted to do were the testimony, such as it is, 

 not so unanimous. Or, secondly, we may assume that these long- 

 headed Hallstatt people belonged to a period subsequent to the appear- 

 ance of the brachycephalic type in western Europe. If we do so, we 

 place them in the same class with the Teutonic race which so cer- 



* Zuckerkandl, 1883, p. 96. f Weisbach, 1897 b. 



