Archaeology of Mammoth Cave and Vicinity

Abstract

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 likelythat 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 almost totally deficient in this respect. Our museums abound in choice collections from this and that type locality but we possess little knowledge 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 essentially 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,