CHAPTER I

BASIC METHODS AND THEORIES

ANTHROPOLOGY has been called "Pre-History." This is true insofar as Archæology has played a part in pushing back the knowledge of the beginnings of the great movements centering in the Mediterranean. Our acquaintance with the factors working together to bring about the great civilizations of Egypt and of Greece is an intimate one, owing to the remarkable advance made in the study of prehistoric Archæology, which is one of the fields of Anthropology.

The "reel of history," as Giddings expresses it, is complete. The broken bits of film have now been, for the most part, repaired, and we have a continuous story of civilized man and of his immediate antecedents.

Another field of Anthropology is the study of contemporaneous peoples living under primitive conditions, and here we have no reel, but a series of "snap-shots," each giving a static picture of a moment, and but a moment, in the life of a people. There is no continuous series, no uninterrupted succession of views, and there is always a danger in filling in these scenes from such sources as pure imagination, the opinions, often biased, of the missionary, or the distorted account of the cursory traveller in search of the picturesque.

When the question of origins is considered, the view is nebulous to a great extent. Prehistoric Archæology gives us a fairly complete picture of the physical forms

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