"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 2: The Aborigines of America

On the American continent, the contrast between "savage" and "civilized" man was experienced not as a representation of events at the ends of the world or an interpretation of national ancestral relics, but rather in the active and often violent expropriation of an existing aboriginal population. In this context, the physical and moral presence of the American Indian was the dominant influence on anthropological inquiry in the United States until the middle of the twentieth century. Since the Bible postulated the original unity of all men, the basic problem of American anthropology was to establish an Old World origin for the aborigines of America. Until well into the nineteenth century, anthropological writers took quite seriously the arguments of such works as John Adair's History of the American Indians. Alleging numerous similarities between the cultural forms he had observed during long residence among southeastern tribes and those of the ancient Hebrews in the Old Testament, Adair attempted to prove the derivation of the Indians from the "ten lost tribes of Israel."

After 1800, the expansion of the new American nation toward the Pacific opened new vistas of anthropological inquiry, to which Thomas Jefferson contributed both as president of the United States and president of the American Philosophical Society. Although his instructions to the Lewis and Clark expedition reflect traditional biblical concerns, they may be taken as the start of a continuous empirical tradition. From this time on, the ethnological data collected by explorers, missionaries, and settlers in the American West was subject to systematic reinterpretation by men with ties to scholarly and scientific institutions on the Eastern seaboard. New issues of scholarly controversy emerged; old ones were transformed in the context of new developments in biological and philological inquiry.

One long-standing debate centered around the large earthen mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, which many writers besides Caleb Atwater had difficulty attributing to the Indians then being driven from the Northwest Territory. For decades after Atwater's "Mounds of the Ohio" was published in the proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society in 1820, scholars disputed the problem of the "mound-builders" - whether or not these ceremonial centers and defensive structures had been built by an intellectually superior race which had been replaced by more vigorous barbarian intruders.

By the 1830s, the study of human skeletal remains had developed beyond the limited comparisons possible in the later eighteenth century. Following the lead of European comparative anatomists and influenced by the newly fashionable "science' of phrenology - the physiological psychology of its day - Samuel Morton of Philadelphia pursued cranial researches that by 1850 had established an "American School" of physical anthropology, which argued the separate creation of distinct races in the various major geographical regions of the earth. Against this "polygenist" viewpoint, "monogenists" turned to European comparative philology, which, by showing the common source of a number of apparently divergent languages, offered a methodological model for reducing human diversity to the unity postulated by Christian orthodoxy. On the American continent, where a relatively uniform physical type contrasted with a wide diversity of languages, the attempt to define the natural history of man in strictly physical terms was unsuccessful. "Ethnology" (as the study of human variety came to be called) remained an embracive inquiry, and the classification of human groups tended to be done on the basis of language.

From the time of Albert Gallatin's Synopsis in 1836, a series of attempts were made to synthesize the growing body of ethnographic data. By 1879, the geologist John Wesley Powell, who had collected ethnographic data during government-sponsored explorations of the Great Basin area, was able to win permanent government support for ethnographic inquiry with the founding of the Bureau of Ethnology. While the Bureau did not realize Powell's promise that "anthropologic science" would provide a more rational basis for the implementation of reservation policy, by 1889 Powell had produced a classification of American Indian linguistic families which was to provide the basic framework for the subsequent investigations of academic anthropologists.

table of contents