Robert Marett - Anthropology
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Robert Marett >> Anthropology
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Coming now to the analysis of the forms of society, the beginner must
first of all face the problem: "What makes a people one?" Neither blood,
nor territory, nor language, but only the fact of being more or less
compactly organized in a political society, will be found to yield
the unifying principle required. Once the primary constitution of the
body politic has been made out, a limit is set up, inside of which
a number of fairly definite forms of grouping offer themselves for
examination; whilst outside of it various social relationships of a
vaguer kind have also to be considered. Thus, amongst institutions
of the internal kind, the family by itself presents a wide field of
research; though in certain cases it is liable to be overshadowed by
some other sort of organization, such as, notably, the clan. Under
the same rubric fall the many forms of more or less voluntary
association, economic, religious, and so forth. On the other hand,
outside the circle of the body politic there are, at all known stages
of society, mutual understandings that regulate war, trade, travel,
the celebration of common rites, the interchange of ideas. Here, then,
is an abundance of types of human association, to be first scrutinized
separately, and afterwards considered in relation to each other.
Closely connected with the previous subject is the history of law.
Every type of association, in a way, has its law, whereby its members
are constrained to fulfil a certain set of obligations. Thus our
student will pass on straight from the forms of society to the most
essential of their functions. The fact that, amongst the less civilized
peoples, the law is uncodified and merely customary, whilst the
machinery for enforcing it is, though generally effective enough, yet
often highly indefinite and occasional, makes the tracing of the growth
of legal institutions from their rudiments no less vitally important,
though it makes it none the easier. The history of authority is a
strictly kindred topic. Legislating and judging on the one hand, and
governing on the other, are different aspects of the same general
function. In accordance, then, with the order already indicated, law
and government as administered by the political society in the person
of its representatives, chiefs, elders, war-lords, priest-kings, and
so forth, must first be examined; then the jurisdiction and discipline
of subordinate bodies, such as the family and the clan, or again the
religious societies, trade guilds, and the rest; then, lastly, the
international conventions, with the available means of ensuring their
observance.
Again, the history of religion is an allied theme of far-reaching
interest. For the understanding of the ruder forms of society it may
even be said to furnish the master-key. At this stage, religion is
the mainstay of law and government. The constraining force of custom
makes itself felt largely through a magnifying haze of mystic
sanctions; whilst, again, the position of a leader of society rests
for the most part on the supernormal powers imputed to him. Religion
and magic, then, must be carefully studied if we would understand how
the various persons and bodies that exercise authority are assisted,
or else hindered, in their efforts to maintain social discipline. Apart
from this fundamental inquiry, there is another, no less important
in its way, to which the study of religion and magic opens up a path.
This is the problem how reflection manages as it were to double human
experience, by setting up beside the outer world of sense an inner
world of thought-relations. Now constructive imagination is the queen
of those mental functions which meet in what we loosely term "thought";
and imagination is ever most active where, on the outer fringe of the
mind's routine work, our inarticulate questionings radiate into the
unknown. When the genius has his vision, almost invariably, among the
ruder peoples, it is accepted by himself and his society as something
supernormal and sacred, whether its fruit be an act of leadership or
an edict, a practical invention or a work of art, a story of the past
or a prophecy, a cure or a devastating curse. Moreover, social
tradition treasures the memory of these revelations, and, blending
them with the contributions of humbler folk--for all of us dream our
dreams--provides in myth and legend and tale, as well as in manifold
other art-forms, a stimulus to the inspiration of future generations.
For most purposes fine art, at any rate during its more rudimentary
stages, may be studied in connection with religion.
So far as law and religion will not account for the varieties of social
behaviour, the novice may most conveniently consider them under the
head of morals. The forms of social intercourse, the fashions, the
festivities, are imposed on us by our fellows from without, and none
the less effectively because as a general rule we fall in with them
as a matter of course. The difference between manners and morals of
the higher order is due simply to the more pressing need, in the case
of our most serious duties, of a reflective sanction, a "moral sense,"
to break us in to the common service. It is no easy task to keep legal
and religious penalties or rewards out of the reckoning, when trying
to frame an estimate of what the notions of right and wrong, prevalent
in a given society, amount to in themselves; nevertheless, it is worth
doing, and valuable collections of material exist to aid the work.
The facts about education, which even amongst rude peoples is often
carried on far into manhood, throw much light on this problem. So do
the moralizings embodied the traditional lore of the folk--the
proverbs, the beast-fables, the stories of heroes.
There remains the individual to be studied in himself. If the
individual be ignored by social science, as would sometimes appear
to be the case, so much the worse for social science, which, to a
corresponding extent, falls short of being truly anthropological.
Throughout the history of man, our beginner should be on the look-out
for the signs, and the effects, of personal initiative. Freedom of
choice, of course, is limited by what there is to choose from; so that
the development of what may be termed social opportunity should be
concurrently reviewed. Again, it is the aim of every moral system so
to educate each man that his directive self may be as far as possible
identified with his social self. Even suicide is not a man's own affair,
according to the voice of society which speaks in the moral code.
Nevertheless, lest the important truth be overlooked that social
control implies a will that must meet the control half-way, it is well
for the student of man to pay separate and special attention to the
individual agent. The last word in anthropology is: Know thyself.
CHAPTER II
ANTIQUITY OF MAN
History, in the narrower sense of the word, depends on written records.
As we follow back history to the point at which our written records
grow hazy, and the immediate ancestors or predecessors of the peoples
who appear in history are disclosed in legend that needs much eking
out by the help of the spade, we pass into proto-history. At the back
of that, again, beyond the point at which written records are of any
avail at all, comes pre-history.
How, then, you may well inquire, does the pre-historian get to work?
What is his method of linking facts together? And what are the sources
of his information?
First, as to his method. Suppose a number of boys are in a field playing
football, whose superfluous garments are lying about everywhere in
heaps; and suppose you want, for some reason, to find out in what order
the boys arrived on the ground. How would you set about the business?
Surely you would go to one of the heaps of discarded clothes, and take
note of the fact that this boy's jacket lay under that boy's waistcoat.
Moving on to other heaps you might discover that in some cases a boy
had thrown down his hat on one heap, his tie on another, and so on.
This would help you all the more to make out the general series of
arrivals. Yes, but what if some of the heaps showed signs of having
been upset? Well, you must make allowances for these disturbances in
your calculations. Of course, if some one had deliberately made hay
with the lot, you would be nonplussed. The chances are, however, that,
given enough heaps of clothes, and bar intentional and systematic
wrecking of them, you would be able to make out pretty well which boy
preceded which; though you could hardly go on to say with any precision
whether Tom preceded Dick by half a minute or half an hour.
Such is the method of pre-history. It is called the stratigraphical
method, because it is based on the description of strata, or layers.
Let me give a simple example of how strata tell their own tale. It
is no very remarkable instance, but happens to be one that I have
examined for myself. They were digging out a place for a gas-holder
in a meadow in the town of St. Helier, Jersey, and carried their borings
down to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides with
the present mean sea-level. The modern meadow-soil went down about
five feet. Then came a bed of moss-peat, one to three feet thick. There
had been a bog here at a time which, to judge by similar finds in other
places, was just before the beginning of the bronze-age. Underneath
the moss-peat came two or three feet of silt with sea-shells in it.
Clearly the island of Jersey underwent in those days some sort of
submergence. Below this stratum came a great peat-bed, five to seven
feet thick, with large tree-trunks in it, the remains of a fine forest
that must have needed more or less elevated land on which to grow.
In the peat was a weapon of polished stone, and at the bottom were
two pieces of pottery, one of them decorated with little pitted marks.
These fragments of evidence are enough to show that the foresters
belonged to the early neolithic period, as it is called. Next occurred
about four feet of silt with sea-shells, marking another advance of
the sea. Below that, again, was a mass, six to eight feet deep, of
the characteristic yellow clay with far-carried fragments of rock in
it that is associated with the great floods of the ice-age. The land
must have been above the reach of the tide for the glacial drift to
settle on it. Finally, three or four feet of blue clay resting
immediately on bed-rock were such as might be produced by the sea,
and thus probably betokened its presence at this level in the still
remoter past.
Here the strata are mostly geological. Man only comes in at one point.
I might have taken a far more striking case--the best I know--from
St. Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in the north of France. Here M. Commont
found human implements of distinct types in about eight out of eleven
or twelve successive geological layers. But the story would take too
long to tell. However, it is well to start with an example that is
primarily geological. For it is the geologist who provides the
pre-historic chronometer. Pre-historians have to reckon in geological
time--that is to say, not in years, but in ages of indefinite extent
corresponding to marked changes in the condition of the earth's surface.
It takes the plain man a long time to find out that it is no use asking
the pre-historian, who is proudly displaying a skull or a stone
implement, "Please, how many years ago exactly did its owner live?"
I remember hearing such a question put to the great savant, M.
Cartailhac, when he was lecturing upon the pre-historic drawings found
in the French and Spanish caves; and he replied, "Perhaps not less
than 6,000 years ago and not more than 250,000." The backbone of our
present system of determining the series of pre-historic epochs is
the geological theory of an ice-age comprising a succession of periods
of extreme glaciation punctuated by milder intervals. It is for the
geologists to settle in their own way, unless, indeed, the astronomers
can help them, why there should have been an ice-age at all; what was
the number, extent, and relative duration of its ups and downs; and
at what time, roughly, it ceased in favour of the temperate conditions
that we now enjoy. The pre-historians, for their part, must be content
to make what traces they discover of early man fit in with this
pre-established scheme, uncertain as it is. Every day, however, more
agreement is being reached both amongst themselves and between them
and the geologists; so that one day, I am confident, if not exactly
to-morrow, we shall know with fair accuracy how the boys, who left
their clothes lying about, followed one another into the field.
Sometimes, however, geology does not, on the face of it, come into
the reckoning. Thus I might have asked the reader to assist at the
digging out of a cave, say, one of the famous caves at Mentone, on
the Italian Riviera, just beyond the south-eastern corner of France.
These caves were inhabited by man during an immense stretch of time,
and, as you dig down, you light upon one layer after another of his
leavings. But note in such a case as this how easily you may be baffled
by some one having upset the heap of clothes, or, in a word, by
rearrangement. Thus the man whose leavings ought to form the layer
half-way up may have seen fit to dig a deep hole in the cave-floor
in order to bury a deceased friend, and with him, let us suppose, to
bury also an assortment of articles likely to be useful in the life
beyond the grave. Consequently an implement of one age will be found
lying cheek by jowl with the implement of a much earlier age, or even,
it may be, some feet below it. Thereupon the pre-historian must fall
back on the general run, or type, in assigning the different implements
each to its own stratum. Luckily, in the old days fashions tended to
be rigid; so that for the pre-historian two flints with slightly
different chipping may stand for separate ages of culture as clearly
as do a Greek vase and a German beer-mug for the student of more recent
times.
* * * * *
Enough concerning the stratigraphical method. A word, in the next place,
about the pre-historian's main sources of information. Apart from
geological facts, there are three main classes of evidence that serve
to distinguish one pre-historic epoch from another. These are animal
bones, human bones, and human handiwork.
Again I illustrate by means of a case of which I happen to have
first-hand knowledge. In Jersey, near the bay of St. Brelade, is a
cave, in which we dug down through some twenty feet of accumulated
clay and rock-rubbish, presumably the effects of the last throes of
the ice-age, and came upon a pre-historic hearth. There were the big
stones that had propped up the fire, and there were the ashes. By the
side were the remains of a heap of food-refuse. The pieces of decayed
bone were not much to look at; yet, submitted to an expert, they did
a tale unfold. He showed them to be the remains of the woolly rhinoceros,
the mammoth's even more unwieldy comrade, of the reindeer, of two kinds
of horse, one of them the pony-like wild horse still to be found in
the Mongolian deserts, of the wild ox, and of the deer. Truly there
was better hunting to be got in Jersey in the days when it formed part
of a frozen continent.
Next, the food-heap yields thirteen of somebody's teeth. Had they eaten
him? It boots not to inquire; though, as the owner was aged between
twenty and thirty, the teeth could hardly have fallen out of their
own accord. Such grinders as they are too! A second expert declares
that the roots beat all records. They are of the kind that goes with
an immensely powerful jaw, needing a massive brow-ridge to counteract
the strain of the bite, and in general involving the type of skull
known as the Neanderthal, big-brained enough in its way, but uncommonly
ape-like all the same.
Finally, the banqueters have left plenty of their knives lying about.
These good folk had their special and regular way of striking off a
broad flat flake from the flint core; the cores are lying about, too,
and with luck you can restore some of the flakes to their original
position. Then, leaving one side of the flake untouched, they trimmed
the surface of the remaining face, and, as the edges grew blunt with
use, kept touching them up with the hammer-stone--there it is also
lying by the hearth--until, perhaps, the flake loses its oval shape
and becomes a pointed triangle. A third expert is called in, and has
no difficulty in recognizing these knives as the characteristic
handiwork of the epoch known as the Mousterian. If one of these worked
flints from Jersey was placed side by side with another from the cave
of Le Moustier, near the right bank of the Vezere in south-central
France, whence the term Mousterian, you could hardly tell which was
which; whilst you would still see the same family likeness if you
compared the Jersey specimens with some from Amiens, or from Northfleet
on the Thames, or from Icklingham in Suffolk.
Putting all these kinds of evidence together, then, we get a notion,
doubtless rather meagre, but as far as it goes well-grounded, of a
hunter of the ice-age, who was able to get the better of a woolly
rhinoceros, could cook a lusty steak off him, had a sharp knife to
carve it, and the teeth to chew it, and generally knew how, under the
very chilly circumstances, both to make himself comfortable and to
keep his race going.
There is one other class of evidence on which the pre-historian may
with due caution draw, though the risks are certain and the profits
uncertain. The ruder peoples of to-day are living a life that in its
broad features cannot be wholly unlike the life of the men of long
ago. Thus the pre-historian should study Spencer and Gillen on the
natives of Central Australia, if only that he may take firm hold of
the fact that people with skulls inclining towards the Neanderthal
type, and using stone knives, may nevertheless have very active minds;
in short, that a rich enough life in its way may leave behind it a
poor rubbish-heap. When it comes, however, to the borrowing of details,
to patch up the holes in the pre-historic record with modern rags and
tatters makes better literature than science. After all, the
Australians, or Tasmanians, or Bushmen, or Eskimo, of whom so much
is beginning to be heard amongst pre-historians, are our
contemporaries--that is to say, have just as long an ancestry as
ourselves; and in the course of the last 100,000 years or so our stock
has seen so many changes, that their stocks may possibly have seen
a few also. Yet the real remedy, I take it, against the misuse of analogy
is that the student should make himself sufficiently at home in both
branches of anthropology to know each of the two things he compares
for what it truly is.
* * * * *
Having glanced at method and sources, I pass on to results. Some
text-book must be consulted for the long list of pre-historic periods
required for western Europe, not to mention the further complications
caused by bringing in the remaining portions of the world. The
stone-age, with its three great divisions, the eolithic (_eos_, Greek
for dawn, and _lithos_, stone) the palaeolithic (_pallaeos_, old),
and the neolithic (_neos_, new), and their numerous subdivisions,
comes first; then the age of copper and bronze; and then the early
iron-age, which is about the limit of proto-history. Here I shall
confine my remarks to Europe. I am not going far afield into such
questions as: Who were the mound-builders of North America? And are
the Calaveras skull and other remains found in the gold-bearing gravels
of California to be reckoned amongst the earliest traces of man in
the globe? Nor, again, must I pause to speculate whether the
dark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfour
at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited there
by the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in the
solid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive and
busy untold thousands of years ago. Also, I shall here confine myself
to the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the long
pedigree of the species from which we are all sprung.
The antiquity of man being my immediate theme, I can hardly avoid saying
something about eoliths; though the subject is one that invariably
sets pre-historians at each other's throats. There are eoliths and
eoliths, however; and some of M. Rutot's Belgian examples are
now-a-days almost reckoned respectable. Let us, nevertheless, inquire
whether eoliths are not to be found nearer home. I can wish the reader
no more delightful experience than to run down to Ightham in Kent,
and pay a call on Mr. Benjamin Harrison. In the room above what used
to be Mr. Harrison's grocery-store, eoliths beyond all count are on
view, which he has managed to amass in his rare moments of leisure.
As he lovingly cons the stones over, and shows off their points, his
enthusiasm is likely to prove catching. But the visitor, we shall
suppose, is sceptical. Very good; it is not far, though a stiffish
pull, to Ash on the top of the North Downs. Hereabouts are Mr.
Harrison's hunting-grounds. Over these stony tracts he has conducted
Sir Joseph Prestwich and Sir John Evans, to convince the one authority,
but not the other. Mark this pebbly drift of rusty-red colour spread
irregularly along the fields, as if the relics of some ancient stream
or flood. On the surface, if you are lucky, you may pick up an
unquestionable palaeolith of early type, with the rusty-red stain of
the gravel over it to show that it has lain there for ages. But both
on and below the surface, the gravel being perhaps from five to seven
feet deep, another type of stone occurs, the so-called eolith. It is
picked out from amongst ordinary stones partly because of its shape,
and partly because of rough and much-worn chippings that suggest the
hand of art or of nature, according to your turn of mind. Take one
by itself, explains Mr. Harrison, and you will be sure to rank it as
ordinary road-metal. But take a series together, and then, he urges,
the sight of the same forms over and over again will persuade you in
the end that human design, not aimless chance, has been at work here.
Well, I must leave Mr. Harrison to convert you into the friend or foe
of his eoliths, and will merely add a word in regard to the probable
age of these eolith-bearing gravels. Sir Joseph Prestwich has tried
to work the problem out. Now-a-days Kent and Sussex run eastwards in
five more or less parallel ridges, not far short of 1,000 feet high,
with deep valleys between. Formerly, however, no such valleys existed,
and a great dome of chalk, some 2,500 feet high at its crown, perhaps,
though others would say less, covered the whole country. That is why
rivers like the Darenth and Medway cut clean through the North Downs
and fall into the Thames, instead of flowing eastwards down the later
valleys. They started to carve their channels in the soft chalk in
the days gone by, when the watershed went north and south down the
slopes of the great dome. And the red gravels with the eoliths in them,
concludes Prestwich, must have come down the north slope whilst the
dome was still intact; for they contain fragments of stone that hail
from right across the present valleys. But, if the eoliths are man-made,
then man presumably killed game and cut it up on top of the Wealden
dome, how many years ago one trembles to think.
* * * * *
Let us next proceed to the subject of palaeoliths. There is, at any
rate, no doubt about them. Yet, rather more than half a century ago,
when the Abbe Boucher de Perthes found palaeoliths in the gravels of
the Somme at Abbeville, and was the first to recognize them for what
they are, there was no small scandal. Now-a-days, however, the world
takes it as a matter of course that those lumpish, discoloured, and
much-rolled stones, shaped something like a pear, which come from the
high terraces deposited by the Ancient Thames, were once upon a time
the weapons or tools of somebody who had plenty of muscle in his arm.
Plenty of skill he had in his fingers, too; for to chip a flint-pebble
along both faces, till it takes a more or less symmetrical and standard
shape, is not so easy as it sounds. Hammer away yourself at such a
pebble, and see what a mess you make of it. To go back for one moment
to the subject of eoliths, we may fairly argue that experimental forms
still ruder than the much-trimmed palaeoliths of the early river-drift
must exist somewhere, whether Mr. Harrison's eoliths are to be classed
amongst them or not. Indeed, the Tasmanians of modern days carved their
simple tools so roughly, that any one ignorant of their history might
easily mistake the greater number for common pieces of stone. On the
other hand, as we move on from the earlier to the later types of
river-drift implements, we note how by degrees practice makes perfect.
The forms grow ever more regular and refined, up to the point of time
which has been chosen as the limit for the first of the three main
stages into which the vast palaeolithic epoch has to be broken up.
The man of the late St. Acheul period, as it is termed, was truly a
great artist in his way. If you stare vacantly at his handiwork in
a museum, you are likely to remain cold to its charm. But probe about
in a gravel-bed till you have the good fortune to light on a
masterpiece; tenderly smooth away with your fingers the dirt sticking
to its surface, and bring to view the tapering or oval outline, the
straight edge, the even and delicate chipping over both faces; then,
wrapping it carefully in your handkerchief, take it home to wash, and
feast till bedtime on the clean feel and shining mellow colour of what
is hardly more an implement than a gem. They took a pride in their
work, did the men of old; and, until you can learn to sympathize, you
are no anthropologist.
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