The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

Every form marks its own place in sequence by its relative complexity or affinity to other allied forms, in the same manner that every word in the science of language has a place assigned to it in the order of development or phonetic decay.

If there is such a thing as a science of language, and none can doubt it, who shall affirm that there is no such thing as a science of the arts? Language, it is true, embraces a wider sphere, and includes the arts; but, on the other hand, it is liable to sources of uncertainty for the purposes of science, from which the arts are free. Language is impalpable, invisible to the eye, except through the medium of a written character, which may or may not accurately express the sounds, and subject to acoustic changes in the collection of the materials, which are a perpetual cause of error and misclassification.

In tracing the development of the material arts, on the other hand, we have, in the earliest periods, the support of collateral evidence afforded by the fauna with which they are associated and by geological sequence, all which is wanting in the science of language.

Why, then, has language hitherto received more scientific treatment than the arts? Merely on account of the greater facility with which the data are collected. Whilst words take seconds to record, hours and days may be spent in the accurate delineation of form. Words cost nothing, are packed in folios, transmitted by post, and stored on the shelves of every private library. A million classified words may be carried in the coat pocket without inconvenience, whilst a hundredth part of that number of material objects require a museum to contain them, and are accessible only to a few. This is the reason why the arts have never been subjected to those classifications which form the groundwork of a science.

Then, again, in approaching prehistoric times, or in studying modern savages who represent prehistoric man, language loses its persistency, or fails us altogether. Although, in an advanced stage of civilization, especially when it has been committed to writing, it affords the surest test of culture, this is certainly not the case with the lowest savages, amongst whom language changes so rapidly that even neighbouring tribes cannot understand one another. And if this is the case in respect to language, still more strongly does it apply to all ideas that are communicated by word of mouth. In endeavouring to trace back prehistoric culture to its root forms, we find that in proportion as the value of language and of the ideas conveyed by language diminishes, that of ideas embodied in material forms increases in stability and permanence. Whilst in the earliest phases of humanity the names for things change with every generation if not more frequently, the things themselves are handed down unchanged from father to son and from tribe to tribe, and many of them have continued to our own time, faithful records of the condition of the people by whom they were fabricated.

Of the antiquity of savages we at present know little or nothing; but when archaeologists have exhausted the antiquities of civilized countries, a wide and interesting field of research will be open to them in the study of the antiquities of savages, which are doubtless to be discovered in their surface and drift deposits; and if the stability of their form has been such as we have reason to believe, we shall then be able to arrive at something like certainty in respect to the degree of slowness or rapidity, as well as the order, in which they have been developed.

Leaving now the Australians, and turning to other existing races in a higher, though still in a low, stage of civilization, such as, for example, the Fijians, who at the time of their discovery were still in the stone age, we find, on examining the forms of their implements, that we are in a higher stratum of culture, the characteristics of which correspond exactly to what might have been expected to be found on the principle of gradual evolution. The forms of their tools and weapons present the same connexions of form between themselves as amongst those of the Australians, but they are of a more complex type, and are no longer directly traceable to the natural forms of the limbs of trees, &c. The links of connexion between weapons of the same kind are as close as before, but in their varieties they present forms so singular as scarcely to make it possible to infer that they were designed for the purposes of use. They appear rather to have varied through the instrumentality of some law of succession similar to that by which species of animals have been evolved. In many cases, indeed, the sequence of ideas has led to the use of forms that are absolutely unserviceable as weapons and tools, and human selection, corresponding to natural selection, appears to have retained for use only such forms as could be employed, whilst the others have been consigned to state purposes or applied to symbolic uses. In many cases we find that their clubs have been converted into the forms of animals’ heads, and in all such cases (and there are several in the collection) we see, by grouping a sufficient number of like forms together, that those which are in the shape of animals’ heads have not been designed for the purpose of representing animals’ heads, but their forms have simply been evolved during the numerous variations which the weapon has undergone in the process of development, and when the idea of an animal’s head suggested itself, it has merely been necessary to add an eye, or a line for the mouth, in order to give them the resemblance in question. Examples of this may be seen in the collection of specimens from Africa, New Caledonia, New Zealand, and Solomon Isles.

In ornamentation, the stability of form is very remarkable. Particular forms of ornamentation fix themselves on a tribe or nation, and are repeated over and over again with but little variation of detail, as, for example, in the case of the coil and broken coil ornaments amongst the New Zealanders and the inhabitants of New Guinea, which were probably derived from Assam, or the representation of the head of an albatross amongst the Indians of the north-west coast of North America, or that of a human head amongst the inhabitants of New Ireland.

In the transformations of this latter ornament, which I took occasion to bring to the notice of the meeting of the Anthropological Department of the British Association at Brighton in 1872[5], and which are represented in [Plate IV], we see a remarkable example of degradation of form, produced by gradual changes, caused by these people in copying from one another until the original design is lost. The representation of a human figure is here seen to lose gradually its limbs and body, then the sides of the face, leaving only the nose and ears, and ultimately the nose only, which finally expands at the base, and is converted into the representation of a half moon. In this sequence we have an exact parallel to the transformations observed upon ancient British coins by Mr. Evans[6], by which a coin of Philip of Macedon, representing a chariot and horses, becomes converted by a succession of similar changes into the representation of a single horse, and ultimately into fragments of a horse. Other examples of similar transformations from other countries are also shown.