The migrations of early culture / A study of the significance of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification as evidence of the migrations of peoples and the spread of certain customs and beliefs

by Grafton Elliot Smith

In the face of this overwhelming mass of definite evidence of the reality not only of the spread of culture and its carriers, but also of the ways and the means by which it travelled, it will naturally be asked how it has come to pass that there is even the shadow of a doubt as to the migrations which distributed this “heliolithic” culture-complex so widely in the world. It cannot be explained by lack of knowledge, for most of the facts that I have enumerated are taken bodily from the anthropological journals of forty or more years ago.

The explanation is to be found, I believe, in a curious psychological process incidental to the intensive study of an intricate problem. As knowledge increased and various scholars attempted to define the means by (and the time at) which the contacts of various peoples took place, difficulties were revealed which, though really trivial, were magnified into insuperable obstacles. All of these real difficulties were created by mistaken ideas of the relative chronology of the appearance of civilisation in various centres, and especially by the failure to realise that useful arts were often lost. For example, if on a certain mainland A two practices, a and b—one of them, a, a useful practice, say the making of pottery; the other, b, a useless custom, say the preservation of the corpse—were developed, and a was at least as old, or preferably definitely older than b, it seemed altogether inconceivable to the ethnologist if an island B was influenced by the culture of the mainland A, at some time after the practices a and b were in vogue, that it might, under any conceivable circumstances, fail to preserve the useful art a, even though it might allow the utterly useless practice b to lapse. Therefore it was argued that, if the later inhabitants of B mummified their dead, but did not make pottery, this was clear evidence that they could not have come under the influence of A.

But the whole of the formidable series of obstacles raised by this kind of argument has been entirely swept away by Dr. Rivers, who has demonstrated how often it has happened that a population has completely lost some useful art which it once had, and even more often clung to some useless practice ([65]).

The remarkable feature of the present state of the discussion is that, in spite of Rivers’ complete demolition of these difficulties ([65]), most ethnologists do not seem to realise that there is now a free scope for taking a clear and common-sense view of the truth, unhindered by any obstructions. It is characteristic of the history of scientific, no less than of theological argument, that the immediate effect of the destruction of the foundations of cherished beliefs is to make their more fanatical votaries shout their creed all the louder and more dogmatically, and hurl anathemas at those who dissent.

This is the only explanation I can offer of the remarkable presidential address delivered by Fewkes to the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1912 ([18]), Keane’s incoherent recklessness[5] ([41], pp. 140, 218, 219, and 367 to 370), and the amazing criticisms which during the last four years I have had annually to meet. There is no attempt at argument, but mere dogmatic and often irrelevant assertions. The constant appeal to the meaningless phrase “the similarity of the working of the human mind”[6] ([18]), as though it were a magical incantation against logical induction, and harping on the so-called “psychological argument” ([41]), which is directly opposed to the teaching of psychology, are the only excuses one can obtain from the “orthodox” ethnologist for this obstinate refusal to face the issue. Of course it is a historical fact that the discussions of the theory of evolution inclined ethnologists during the last century the more readily to accept the laisser faire attitude, and put an end to all their difficulties by the pretence that most cultures developed independently in situ. It is all the more surprising that Huxley took some small part in encouraging this lapse into superficiality and abuse of the evolution conception, when it is recalled that, as Sir Michael Foster tells us, the then President of the Ethnological Society “made himself felt in many ways, not the least by the severity with which he repressed the pretensions of shallow persons who, taking advantage of the glamour of the Darwinian doctrine, talked nonsense in the name of anthropological science” (“Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley,” Vol. I., p. 263).

It is a singular commentary on the attitude of the “orthodox” school of ethnologists that, when pressed to accept the obvious teaching of ethnological evidence, they should desert the strong intrenchments which the difficulties of full and adequate explanation have afforded them in the past, and take refuge behind the straw barricades of imaginary psychological and biological analogies, which they have hastily constructed for their own purposes, and in flagrant defiance of all that the psychologist understands by the phrase “working of the human mind,” if perchance he is ever driven to employ this expression, or the meaning attached by the biologist to “evolution.”

It is not sufficient proof of my thesis, however, merely to expose the hollowness of the pretensions of one’s opponents, nor even to show the identity of geographical distribution and the linking up of customs to form the “heliolithic” culture-complex. Many writers have dimly realised that some such spread of culture took place, but by misunderstanding the nature of the factors that came into play or the chronology of the movements they were discussing (see especially Macmillan Brown’s ([7]) and Enoch’s ([16]) books, to mention the latest, but by no means the worst offenders), have brought discredit upon the thesis I am endeavouring to demonstrate.

Another danger has arisen out of the revulsion against Bastian’s old idea of independent evolution by his fellow-countrymen Frobenius, Graebner, Ankermann, Foy and others, with the co-operation of the Austrian philologist, Schmidt, and the Swiss ethnologist, Montandon (who has summarised the views of the new school in the first part of the new journal, Archives suisses d’Anthropologie générale, May, 1914, p. 113); for they have rushed to the other extreme, and, relying mainly upon objects of “material culture,” have put forward a method of analysis and postulated a series of migrations for which the evidence is very doubtful. Rivers ([64]) has pointed out the unreliability of such inferences when unchecked by the consideration of elements of culture which are not so easily bartered or borrowed as bows and spears. He has insisted upon the fundamental importance of the study of social organisation as supplying the most stable and trustworthy data for the analysis of a culture-complex and an index of racial admixture. The study of such a practice as mummification, the influence of which is deep-rooted in the innermost beliefs of the people who resort to it, affords data almost as reliable as Rivers’ method; for the subsequent account will make it abundantly clear that the practice of embalming leaves its impress upon the burial customs of a people long ages after other methods of disposal of their dead have been adopted.

I have been led into this digression by attempting to make it clear that the mere demonstration of the identity of geographical distribution and the linking together of a series of cultural elements by no means represents the solution of the main problem.