i62 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



archaeological study. In it are involved all questions of the migration 

 and movements of peoples, their commerce and intercourse of all kinds, 

 and the degree and extent of their reciprocal influence upon one another. 

 It is really the cardinal problem of archaeology, irresistibly attractive, 

 and for that very reason offering peculiar temptations to hasty and 

 premature generalisation . 



Now the foundations of this particular study, in so far as they have been 

 well and truly laid at all, have been laid not by archaeology but by other 

 sciences, those in fact which deal not with man himself but with the 

 conditions necessary to his very existence. Geology, climatology, 

 palaeontology, palzeo-botany have been the instruments of that great 

 progress in synthetic theory which I have pointed out as the special 

 achievement of the last thirty or forty years. Those who have worked 

 out the details and the stages of the Ice Age and the rainy periods have 

 shown us that various parts of the world were uninhabitable for a long time. 

 It is obvious, for instance, that man cannot exist under a snow- field, so 

 that it is useless to look for him north of 50 degrees of latitude until the 

 Ice Age is well past. That already reduces our problem to much smaller 

 dimensions, and teaches us to exclude large parts of the world from the 

 possible area of man's earliest evolution. Conversely, large areas which 

 to the modern view seem impossible homes for man are shown to have 

 been eminently suitable for the life of the palaeolithic hunter. The Sahara 

 and the Gobi desert in their present condition cannot maintain the life of 

 man or beast ; but the climatologist shows that there was a not very remote 

 period when they were well- watered regions, covered with grass like the 

 South African veldt, and teeming with large game. Thus he explains 

 what otherwise might have remained an ambiguous problem for the 

 archaeologist, the finding of human implements of very early types in these 

 apparently uninhabitable tracts. 



The botanist next comes forward to tell us that the food plants on which 

 a settled agricultural life depends can only be found in their wild state in 

 certain closely defined areas. And he shows how changes of climate 

 produce various types of afforestation which necessarily limit the move- 

 ments and activities of a man who possesses only primitive tools. This 

 type of reasoning has been exceedingly skilfully used, in particular by 

 writers like Peake and Fleure, to restrict the range of choice and to give 

 proportion, scale and limitation to the study of man's origin and move- 

 ments. I regard this as one of the most solid achievements of recent years. 



But when the archaeologist proceeds by purely archaeological methods 

 to fill in the details on a background of which the outlines are thus im- 

 mutably drawn by the other sciences, he is confronted with innumerable 

 difficulties of method, and the logic of his procedure is not always well 

 studied. In the first place we must necessarily rule out many types of 

 reasoning which are so general and inconclusive that they can never carry 

 any conviction. A little serious reflection must show that we necessarily 

 know so little of the mental equipment of early man that it is often 

 impossible to say what actions and habits are natural to all men as highly 

 developed anthropoids, and what are so peculiar as to be specifically 

 human and characteristic of one or another developed type of man. 



