Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/35

Rh people from a study of the remains in their necropoli? All the crania to be found in the graves with the precious objects of bronze would in no wise represent the people who brought that bronze. They burned their bridges behind them at death, and disappeared for good and all. And the remains left to the archæologist would represent precisely that class in the population which had nothing to do with the main characteristics of its civilization. And then, again, we must bear in mind that the interments in these necropoli as a whole, both with burned or buried dead, constitute a selected type. Neither Hallstatt, Watsch, nor any of the burial places of their type were open to the great mass of the common people. They were sacred spots, far removed among the mountains from any centers of population. Only the rich or powerful presumably had access to them. They are no more typical of the Hallstatt people, therefore, than interments in Westminster Abbey are representative of the English masses. All our data are necessarily drawn from a class within a class. Inductions from them must be very gingerly handled.

The situation above described seems to prevail almost everywhere in the Hallstatt cultural area. Two distinct burial customs denote possibly two separate peoples, the inhumers being certainly the older. In the Hallstatt necropolis, for example, about one third of the graves once contained human remains, all the others containing mere ashes. So ancient are these graves that only eight crania from the hundreds of interments of the first class are available for study. These are of a pronounced long-headed type. The modern populations of this part of Europe are, as we have seen, among the broadest-headed people in the world, as are also all the modern Illyrians. Yet from the great necropolis at Glasinac in Bosnia, with its twenty thousand tumuli, the meager Hallstatt returns are amply corroborated. The ancient inhabitants were as long-headed as they are pronouncedly of the opposite type to-day. Up in Bohemia and Moravia also, according to Niederle, the first bronze-age people, such as we know them, were still dolichocephalic quite like their predecessors in the pure stone age. And here also is incineration just about frequent enough to make it uncertain whether the human remains are typical or not.

Under these circumstances, three suppositions are open to us. We may hold that these long-headed crania of the Hallstatt people are worthless for any anthropological purposes whatever. This one would certainly be tempted to do were the testimony, such as it is, not so unanimous. Or, secondly, we may assume that these long-headed Hallstatt people belonged to a period subsequent to the appearance of the brachycephalic type in western Europe. If we do so, we place them in the same class with the Teutonic race which so