INTRODUCTION. 



It has long been a reproach to American Anthropology that so little available material 

 exists in the way of anthropometric data concerning either the skull or the other bones of 

 our aborigines. This is the more remarkable, too, since Morton, the Father of Physical Anthro- 

 pology in this country, inaugui^ated this branch of study in the New World by careful 

 measurements of hundreds of crania, especially those of American Indians. But "he was 

 a father who left many friends to the science and even followers, but no real progeny" 

 [Hrdlicka, in Amer. Anthropol., 1914, p. 523], and thus it happens that, while many lines 

 of anthropological research have flourished greatly, but little building material has ever been 

 deposited upon the craniometric foundations laid by the great master. To be sure, much 

 has been done along the lines of descriptive craniology, but in the sense in which the Fuegians 

 have been studied by Martin, the Ainus by I<!oganei, and the inhabitants of Cameroon by 

 Drontschilow, to name a few of the best, the skull of the American Indian remains but 

 little known. 



The best model known to me along this line is the paper by Carr, 1880, who presented 

 numerous careful measurements of the crania of New England Indians; but this paper is 

 now thirty-five years old; it was written when there were great differences both in the 

 measurements taken by different individuals and in the manner of taking them, when the 

 instruments used were almost as individual as the measurements, when there was neither 

 a Frankfort Horizontal nor an International Prescription. 



With this need in mind I began some time ago to make a series of measurements upon 

 a few local aboriginal crania collected in and about the town of Hadley, Mass., and shown 

 to be absolutely genuine by the associated objects or the mode of burial. To this I added 

 a few more from local excavations, now in the Gilbert Collection of Amherst College. 

 Since, however, the time and opportunity failed me for continuing this work, I entrusted 

 the entn-e matter to my pupil. Miss Knight, whose paper, compiled in the Anthropological 

 Laboratory of Smith College, is here presented. 



It will be noticed from the list of localities given in Appendix that the skulls studied are 

 confined to the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with the exception of two indi- 

 viduals from Farmington, Connecticut, whose close kinship to the other "river Indians," 

 like the Agawams of Springfield and Longmeadow, is beyond dispute. 



This distribution will include the territories of the Narragansetts, the Eastern Niantics, 

 the Wampanoags, the Nipmucs, the Massachusetts, and the various divisions of the Con- 

 necticut River Indians (Agawam, Nonotuck, Pocumtuck), together with the tribes of the 

 Massachusetts seaboard, north of Boston, chiefly tributaries of the Pennacook; and since 

 the presumable date of the graves from which the skulls were "obtained was at the earliest 

 not many centuries before the colonization by the Whites, it is safe to assume that all the 

 individuals taken were from an homogeneous Algonkin stock. It will thus be noted that 

 there is no inclusion of the Pecjuot-Mohegan intruders, who seem to have come from the 

 middle Hudson region some generations before the advent of the Whites, and which, although 

 definitely Algonkin, may not have been quite so closely related as were the others. Thus 

 it would seem that the material here treated is that of a single aboriginal type, or expanded 

 family, and that the individual difi^erences are only such as would be expected under such 

 conditions. 



Harris Hawthorne Wilder. 



Smith College, January latli, IQIS. 



