Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/36

26 appears to overlie this one in the later iron age in Switzerland and throughout southern Germany; for the Helvetians and the Reihengräber conquerors from the north surely imposed a novel culture, albeit a militant one, upon the long-settled Alpine people, racially speaking. The Hallstatt civilization is immeasurably too early to permit of this hypothesis. At this time the long-headed Teutonic peoples about Scandinavia were certainly vastly inferior in culture, as we shall attempt to prove shortly. Thus we are forced to the third conclusion if we admit the competency of our cranial evidence—namely, that the Hallstatt people in this early bloom of civilization in Europe were allied to the Mediterranean type of the south. No other source for such a dolichocephalic population is possible. Our stock of types of this kind is exhausted.

It does not require a great credulity to admit of this hypothesis, that the Hallstatt people were of Mediterranean type. Were not the Greeks, the Phœnicians, and the Egyptians all members of this same race? One single difficulty presents itself. Over in Italy, throughout the valley of the Po, an entirely analogous civilization to that of the eastern Alps occurs. Hallstatt and Villanova, Watsch and Bologna, are almost identical culturally. And yet over here in Italy the new culture of bronze and of incineration seems to be borne by a broad-headed people of the same type as the modern one. Thus, for example, at Novilara so long as the bodies were all inhumed, the people were of the long-headed Mediterranean type once indigenous to the whole of Italy, now surviving, as we have seen, only in the southern half. On the other hand, when incineration begins to appear in this place, the human remains still left to us are of a mixed and far more broad-headed type. It would seem admissible to assume that when the modern brachycephalic Alpine race submerged the native one it brought new elements of civilization with it. Many Italian authorities, at all events, agree in ascribing the new culture—call it Umbrian with Sergi, or proto-Etruscan with Helbig—to a new race of Veneto-Illyrian or Alpine physical proclivities. What they have not definitely proved, however, is that any necessary connection between race and culture exists. There is much to show that the broad-headed race came in some time before the introduction of the new arts. Even in the later Terramare period, preceding the Italian Hallstatt culture, when stone and copper only are in evidence, a change of physical type in the people apparently begins, just as also in France in the neolithic period.

The most indubitable testimony that tho Alpine race did not appear in western Europe, armed cap-à-pie with bronze and other attributes of culture, is afforded by the lake dwellings of Switzerland. Here in the pile-built villages of the Swiss lakes we can trace an