HOLMES] ABORIGINAL AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES PART I 3 



ties are made to cast a strong light on the history and significance 

 of the material things of the past. Even the body of knowledge 

 gathered from many sources and stored in the memory of the living, 

 though untrustworthy as a record, jnay be made, if wisely employed, 

 to illumine the past; and the physical and psychical man of to-day 

 are in themselves records and may be made to tell the story of their 

 own development, thus explaining the activities and the products of 

 activity throughout the ages. All that Archeology gathers from 

 this wide field of research is contributed to the 

 Archooiogy the volume of Written history. It is thus not only the 



Revealer of His- • <• i • 



tory retriever of that which was treasured and lost, but 



equally the revealer of vast resources of history of 



which no man had previously taken heed. 



In the great work of assembling the scattered pages and com- 

 pleting the volume of the history of man, Arche- 



Prehistory signi- ology may Well claim first ])lace among the con- 



fies Merely Pre- . ' . '- ^ 



written History tributiug scicuces. The range of its activities may 

 be further defined. Since history must be regarded as 

 embracing the entire record of the race, whatsoever form it may take, 

 there can in reality be no such thing as " prehistory," and hence no 

 such thing as a " prehistoric period " or " prehistoric archeology," 

 hence these terms, if used at all, should not be employed without first 

 fully setting forth their pai'ticular application. There can, indeed, be 

 no satisfactory or scientificall}^ useful classification or separation of 

 the history of human culture as a whole or even with a single peo- 

 ple on a basis of time or period. The beginning of 

 Relation of Writ- the Written record is not the end of the unwritten 



ten and Unwritten i -.i <? -i i i <• c 



History locoi'd Cither tor the race as a whole or tor any or 



the groups. We may think of a people as having a 

 period of written history, a period dating from the beginning of writ- 

 ing among that people, or we may think of a people without writing, 

 which by accident of geographical proximity has found a place in 

 the written record of a neighboring, more advanced nation; but the 

 unwritten phase in no case ceases with the beginning of the written 

 phase of the history of any people; a large part of the current his- 

 tory in all cases, being unwritten, passes, unless temporarily con- 

 served by tradition or by some nonpurposeful method, directh^ into 

 the vast body of the subject matter of archeological science or other- 

 w^ise into the great blank of oblivion. 



Referring to the American Continent, and using the term " pre- 

 historic" in the usual sense, we may think of the prehistoric period 

 as ending and the historic as beginning Avith the landing of the 

 N"orsemen in the year 1000 A. D. ; or, disregarding this episode us a 

 mere negligible incident, without practical effect on the prehistoric 



