154 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



been offered by recent primitive peoples have largely been neglected, and 

 the scientific value of close research into their material culture has usually 

 not been recognised until it was already too late to reap the full benefit 

 of the harvest. Civilisation has been more concerned with the extermina- 

 tion or rapid metamorphosis of primitive peoples and their industries than 

 with their scientific investigation ; and it is one of the tragedies of pre- 

 history that so much of the invaluable and once accessible material should 

 have been allowed to die away unstudied. 



Such a people as the native Tasmanians might have thrown a flood of 

 light upon some of the problems of the Middle- and Late-Palaeolithic culture 

 phases, had their stone-working technique and their uses of particular 

 types of implements been investigated, as they might have been, while 

 still being practised under conditions which had persisted throughout many 

 millennia. 



The opportunity was missed. Seventy years from the date of the 

 first European settlement in Tasmania the indigenous race had been com- 

 pletely wiped out, not one survivor remaining ! The very scanty inquiries 

 into the habits and industries of this most interesting primitive people, 

 conducted before their extermination, must now be supplemented by 

 researches following the methods of prehistoric archaeology. The chance 

 of studying a living palaeolithic people has passed unutilised, and both 

 the ethnologist and the archaeologist are left wondering, with the philan- 

 thropist, why such things are allowed to happen. 



This brief reference to the Tasmanian aborigines may seem to be a 

 digression from my subject. But, in the history of South African colonisa- 

 tion, there may be noted a somewhat similar failure to seize an opportunity 

 of investigating fully a living primitive culture which might have thrown 

 much light upon culture-details of long- vanished peoples elsewhere. 



The Bushmen and their kindred, although culturally less primitive 

 than the Tasmanians, none the less afforded an example of persistence of 

 palaeolithic conditions into recent times. Their culture was a purely 

 Stone-age culture, and they made and used stone implements of types 

 many of which recall forms of implements which prevailed during the 

 earlier section of the Late-Paleolithic culture-phase of Western Europe 

 and North Africa. The functions of the implements of the ancient series 

 have been diagnosed as far as possible, and terms have been assigned to 

 them, indicative of their presumed uses ; but this is largely guesswork. 

 Some degree of certainty, however, might have been reached had the 

 living users of identical types of tools been closely studied, while the 

 opportunity lasted, and had the details of manufacture and use of the 

 various tool-types been placed on record. 



Again, it is too late for that record ever to be made complete and, 

 from an archaeological point of view, enlightening. Dispossessed of their 

 old hunting-grounds, the miserable remnant of the once virile and widely 

 dispersed Bushman race is rapidly passing away imder environmental 

 conditions so altered from those formerly enjoyed, that but little light 

 can be thrown by the struggling survivors upon the true characteristics 

 of Bushman culture. The old camp-sites, now deserted, must be investi- 

 gated archaeologically ; and, in diagnosing the relics discovered, inference 

 must take the place of direct observation. 



