THE ORIGIN OF MATERIAL CULTURE AND THE DIS- 

 TRIBUTION OF THE VARIOUS RACES OF MAN 



1 THE IMPORTANCE OF ARCHEOLOGICAL RESEARCH 



Since the remote days when man appeared upon earth, he has 

 been writing his own history. This writing has been, as it were, a 

 tattooing of the brown skin of the earth mother, and the ages have 

 covered the tracings with layers and obscured them. It is the 

 archeologist who locates the precise spots where this buried history 

 is hidden and lifts the accumulated debris of the centuries and then 

 translates the record into the language that men of today under- 

 stand. This story of ancient man and his activities is of much 

 importance to us of today, for what man has been helps man of 

 today understand whence he came and why he is as he is ; and 

 what man is has a most important bearing on what man may be. 

 \^^ithout this knowledge history is without a basis, and many impor- 

 tant branches of science are incomplete. 



Primitive peoples everywhere have passed through a succession 

 of similar cultural stages. Thus, the earthen pottery, the chipped 

 arrow points and bone awls of the British Isles are so similar to 

 those found in America that one can scarcely tell them from 

 the same objects found on the sites of the Indian villages of New 

 York State. This means that the ancient inhabitants of York, 

 England, 2500 years ago were living in about the same way and 

 making the same things that the ancient inhabitants of New York, 

 made at the same time and even two thousand years later, 

 though one race was white and the other red, and though the 

 Atlantic intervened and the two peoples had never seen or heard of 

 each other. This fact is so well recognized by anthropologists and 

 historians that the study of American archeology and the study of 

 the methods of life and organization of the American Indians — 

 the study of American ethnology — are accorded close attention 

 by students of human evolution and cultural history everywhere. 



A study of the condition of the American aborigines led to the 

 solution of many questions that had previously puzzled students of 

 the natural sciences. But while much has been learned, the new 

 world yet presents several important problems in cultural history. 

 Among these may be mentioned the problem of the origin of man 



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