Prehistoric America

Introduction to the 2005 Edition

INTRODUCTION Why reprint Nadaillac's Pre-HistoricAmerica?To be sure, it is not a source that immediately pops to mind in looking at nineteenth-century scholarship, as do Morgan's Ancient Society and Tylor's Primitive Culture. Nevertheless, it is an important work, and one that saw numerous reprinting after its French publication in 1883. It was translated into English by N. D'Anvers (otherwise known as Nancy Bell) and edited by W. H. Dall in this 1884 edition from G.P. Putnam's Sons of New York. A London edition ofthis translation followed in 1885 from John Murray. G.P. Putnam's Sons reissued the work in 1890, and it was again reprinted in 1896 as part ofa series called"Catholic Summer andWinter School Library Series" by D. H. McBride of Chicago. In its day, it was a well-known book, and would have been in the libraries of many educated people, not merely antiquarians. This volume was a source discussed a few times by Cyrus Thomas in his Introduction to the Study ofNorth American Archaeology (1898), a point criticized by an anonymous reviewer ofthat work (probably S. D. Peet, 1898) who said: "If Nadaillac, a French author, and Nordjenskjold, a Swedish explorer and writer, know more about North American archaeology than North American scholars themselves, it is time some one was waking up" (1898:373). Perhaps Peet was annoyed by Nadaillac's negative comment on one of Peet's theories (921)? Well, did Nadaillac know more about North 1 References to the text of this edition are cited as parenthetical page numbers throughout. xiv INTRODUCTION America? An examination ofthe sources cited by him shows that he was astonishingly well read in the American literature . Ifhe was at some disadvantage in seeing the Americas from afar, his volume did have interesting and important things to say about American archaeology as seen by an educated outsider.Tojudge from some ofthe Thomas's reviewer's subsequent examples, he may well have "known" more than some of those very "North American scholars" referred to. He was, at the least, as good as any of them in sorting out the chafffrom the grain. Although the American edition tilts a little more clearly toward American Indians as the modern descendents ofthe "Mound Builders," the general tone of both the French and American editions is one ofskepticism about "lost races" at a time when much archaeology was still "fantastic" (Williams 1991). Given the poor quality of the data at the time, this was no mean achievement! As Dall emphasizes in his closing to this volume, it is evolutionary theory and ideas ofsimilar development that serve as a veritable touchstone for these nineteenth-century scholars in sorting out which supposed facts to believe and which to reject. Comparison ofthis book with more recent archaeologies ofthe New World must bring a frisson of disappointment that we have not come further since this book was published even though we know so much more today. The more things change, the more they are the same. Jean Fran~ois Albert du Pouget, Marquis de Nadaillac, was born in 1817 or 1818 and died in 1904. He descended from an early fifteenth-century family with a coat of arms blazoned as "d'or au chevron d'azur accompagne en pointe d'un mont de six coupeaux de sinople." He served as a Second Empire civil servant in Basses-Pyrenees until 1871 and later in Indre-et-Loire until his retirement in 1877, in the early years of the Third Republic. He was a respected prehistorian , best known to his European contemporaries as an Americanist. He published I:anciennete de l'homme (1870), Les premiers hommes et les temps prehistoriques (1880), I:Amerique prehistorique (1883, presented here in the 1884 INTRODUCTION xv translation), Les anciennes populations de Colombie (1885), Moeurs et monuments des peuples prehistoriques (1888), and Unite de l'espece humaine (1899). The topic was also covered in his The Unity ofthe Human Species (1898) in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1897. The editor of this volume, William Healy Dall, certainly would have been among the few people at this time who were academically prepared to study American archaeology. He was the child of Charles Henry Appleton Dall, a Unitarian missionary and scholar, and Caroline Wells Healey, an important early worker for women's rights. He attended Harvard in natural history under the guidance of Louis Agassiz...