192 
ANTHROPOLOGY: N. C. NELSON 
ARCHAEOLOGY OF MAMMOTH CAVE AND VICINITY: 
A PRELIMINARY REPORT 
By N. C. Nelson 
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. NEW YORK 
Communicated by H. F. Osborn, February 2, 1917 
American anthropology appears to have arrived at something like 
a turning point in its history. The continent has now been covered 
more or less intensively and on the basis of the collected data both 
the ethnologists and the archaeologists are beginning to publish maps 
outlining in a tentative way the boundaries respectively of the historic 
and the prehistoric culture centers. (See W. H. Holmes, also Clark 
Wissler, Amer. Anthrop., New York, 16, No. 3, 1914; and Wissler in 
the Holmes Anniversary Volume, 1916.) These two maps, as would 
be expected, while not identical show a noteworthy correspondence. 
The question at once arises: how came these centers of cultural 
intensification to be? Thus far we have no scientific answer. We may 
say either that they were originated and developed in place or that they 
were transmitted from without, or finally — and what is most likely — 
that they are the products partly of transmission and partly of local 
origination. In any event the given culture complex did not drop out 
of the heavens in its perfected form: it has a history and what that 
history has been is for the archaeologist to determine. 
That the archaeologist can do this service need not be questioned. 
He has done it — or at least so it appears — in Europe. To some of us 
his performance is not entirely satisfactory as yet and when he insists 
that by searching in the New World we shall find the identical state of 
things which he himself has found in the Old World we openly rebel. 
But having said this we must still allow the European to point with 
pride to his chronological series and at the same time admit the justice 
of his criticism to the effect, viz., that our own investigations are al- 
most totally deficient in this respect. Our museums abound in choice 
collections from this and that type locality but we possess little knowl- 
edge of how the diversified cultural traits of which these collections 
bear testimony came about or what are their antecedent relationships. 
In so far as we mentally arrange these cultures in order of their complexity 
beginning, let us say, with the shellmound peoples and ending with 
the Mayas or the Incas it is a purely selective procedure, perhaps es- 
sentially true but nevertheless devoid of real scientific merit. 
It is true that some sporadic efforts at chronological determinations 
of different sorts have been made, as, for example, by Dr. Uhle in Peru, 
