HARMONIC TYPES AMONG WESTERN EUROPEAN CRANIA 



RUTH SAWTELL WALLIS 



Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota 



There is a great human desire for purity, when purity can be obtained 

 painlessly through a mental remolding of ancestral contours. Pure race, 

 pure type, harmony symmetry; blue eyes, yellow hair, pink cheeks, tall 

 stature, long head, long narrow face, high narrow nose; thus a yearning for 

 simple, clear-cut human origins, a sense of the aesthetic and a sense of 

 superiority have clustered around the Nordic, parent of the people one asks 

 to dinner. And did there exist a harmonic race meeting these qualifica- 

 tions? And how close to our own day? For the Nordic concept implies a 

 cultural as well as a physical heritage. Therefore, it would be unfair — 

 as well as impossible — to check these traits against the crude barbarians 

 described by Tacitus in 98 A.D. But five and six centuries later, when the 

 Baltic peoples of the Volkerwanderung had settled into the Merovingian 

 sepulchres of France and the Reihengraber of Germany, we can attempt to 

 ascertain the number of pure types, as defined by our methods, that 

 were present among these first civilized Nordics. 



The material available does not permit knowledge of the distribution of 

 all seven traits of Nordicity. The pigment of eyes, hair and skin are long 

 gone; the skeletal series to be presented here consisted of skulls without 

 limb bones for the reconstruction of stature; therefore, the study was 

 limited to the proportions of head, face and nose. 



The crania measured are divided into two main groups, from Reihen- 

 graber sites in Bavaria, and sites designated as Gaulois, Gallo-Romain and 

 Merovingien from the departments of France encircling Paris. Of 495 

 skulls measured by the writer in the Anthropologisches Institut of the 

 University of Munich and in two Paris museums, the Musee Broca of the 

 Ecole d'Anthropologie and the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, 238 were in a 

 state of preservation sufficient to permit the six measurements necessary 

 to the study of head, face, and nose form. Permission to use this material 

 was graciously granted by the late Professors Rudolf Martin and Leonce 

 Manouvrier and by Professor Rene Verneau. The study was made pos- 

 sible by a travelling fellowship from Radcliffe College and a grant-in-aid 

 from the National Research Council. The statistical calculations were 

 carried out by W. Allen Wallis. 



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