H.— ANTHROPOLOGY 183 



periods have as yet been so thoroughly explored and investigated that the 

 facts of themselves mike an intelligible pattern. We have to fill up the 

 gaps with guesses and assumptions. In constructing his synthesis, said 

 Dr. Randall Maclver at York, ' the general writer is often carried far 

 beyond the possibilities of strictly logical proof. But so long as the author 

 keeps his fancies and his facts distinct, he can remain perfectly scientific' 

 Speculations outrunning the ascertained facts are indeed necessary for 

 the strictly scientific purpose of ascertaining fresh facts and guiding 

 research — so long as fact is kept distinct from hypothesis. But in London 

 Prof. Radclifi^e-Browne complained that in ethnology ' generalizations are 

 the postulates with which the subject starts, not the conclusions which it 

 aims to attiin as the result of the investigations undertaken. The pro- 

 cedure is often that of disciples of a cult rather than of students of science.' 

 Can a like complaint be levelled against archjeology ? 



The title of my address is intended to recall an assumption which has 

 exercised a profound formative influence on arch^ological studies, which 

 is indeed held by many as an axiom above discussion. In 1899 Montelius 

 stated this faith in the book, entitled, like my address, ' The Orient and 

 Europe.' ' At a time when the peoples of Europe were so to speak without 

 any civilisation whatsoever, the Orient and particularly the Euphrates 

 region and the Nile valley were already in enjoyment of a flourishing 

 culture. The civilisation which gradually dawned on our Continent was 

 for long only a pale reflection of Oriental culture.' 



In 1899 such a statement was very much more an aflirmation of faith 

 than a deduction from accumulated data. When our spiritual ancestors 

 first turned for light to the East, they gazed on an uncharted plain, its 

 limitless horizon broken only by the Oriental mirage or the dust-clad 

 ruins of pyramids and ziggurats. In 1899 the Palace of Minos was still 

 a mound where olives grew and Sargon of Agade still reigned placidly in 

 the empty firmament of the fourth millennium B.C. To-day the dust 

 stirred up by excavating spades settles to disclose a landscape no longer 

 uncharted. Beneath the ziggurats and behind the pyramids we can 

 descry Tel Halaf villages and Badarian cemeteries. Sargon has been 

 dragged down from his remote pinnacle and set among mortal men 

 a thousand years later. Exploration has left no terrain incognitam wherein 

 to picture the sun recuperating when forest obscured his light on the 

 Dordogne. We can no longer plead ignorance as a pretext for treating 

 a successful working hypothesis as an axiomatic truth. We must instead 

 make the hypothesis explicit and scrutinise it anew in a light that is no 

 longer mythical. 



But even before we begin to apply the touchstone of experiment to it, 

 we find that Montelius' statement is itself a complex of postulates. His 

 hypothesis rests upon other assumptions and has given birth to corollaries, 

 which, treated as facts, have been used to re-enforce it. These too must 

 be first made explicit and tested by experience. 



Montelius tacitly assumes diffusion. Dr. Harrison at Bristol ex- 

 pounded convincingly the logical justification for the general diffusionist 

 assumption implicit in the passages I quoted. But in general terms 

 diffusion must remain a postulate incapable of rigorous proof. That 

 does not justify us in treating it as an axiom applicable to every special 



