The Project Gutenberg eBook, The New Stone Age in Northern Europe, by John M. Tyler

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Title: The New Stone Age in Northern Europe

Author: John M. Tyler

Release Date: December 18, 2012 [eBook #41649]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW STONE AGE IN NORTHERN EUROPE***

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RECONSTRUCTED LAKE-DWELLINGS

THE NEW STONE AGE
IN NORTHERN EUROPE

BY

JOHN M. TYLER

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF BIOLOGY, AMHERST COLLEGE

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1922

Copyright, 1921, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
Published March, 1921

To
JOSEPH DÉCHELETTE

PATRIOT AND ARCHÆOLOGIST
KILLED IN BATTLE AT VINGRÉ (AISNE)
OCTOBER 3, 1914

PREFACE

The dawn of history came late in Northern Europe and the morning was stormy. We see the Roman Empire struggling in vain to hold back successive swarms of barbarians, pouring from a dim, misty, mysterious northland. Centuries of destruction and confusion follow; then gradually states and institutions emerge, and finally our own civilization, which, though still crude and semibarbarous, has its glories as well as its obvious defects.

The growth, development, and training of these remarkable destroyers and rebuilders was slowly going on through the ages of prehistoric time. Most of the germs, and many of the determinants, of our modern institutions and civilization can be recognized in the habits, customs, and life of the Neolithic period. Hence the importance of its study to the historian and sociologist. It has left us an abundance of records, if we can decipher and interpret them. It opens with savages living on shell-heaps along the Baltic. Later we find the stone monuments of the dead rising in France, England, Scandinavia, and parts of Germany. They begin as small rude shelters and end as temples, like that at Stonehenge. People were thinking and cooperating, and there must have been no mean social organization.

We find agriculture highly developed in the valleys of the Danube and its tributaries. We see villages erected on piles along the shores of the Swiss lakes—probably a later development. We find implements, pottery, and bones of animals; charred grains of wheat and barley and loaves of bread; cloth and ornaments—almost a complete inventory of the food and furnishings of the people of this period. We should call them highly civilized, had they been able to write their own history. What was their past and whence had they come?

Implements and pottery tell us of exchange of patterns and ideas, or may suggest migrations of peoples, and finally map out long trade-routes. Some day the study of the pottery will give us a definite chronology, but not yet.

We can reconstruct, to some extent, these phases of prehistoric life. Our greatest difficulties begin when we attempt to combine these separate parts in one pattern or picture, to trace their chronological succession or the extent of their overlappings and their mutual influence and relations in custom and thought. Here, we admit, our knowledge is still very vague and inadequate. Twenty years ago the problem seemed insoluble; perhaps it still remains so. But during that time explorations, investigations, and study have given us many most important facts and suggestions. Some inferences we can accept with a fair degree of confidence, others have varying degrees of probability, sometimes we can only guess. But guesses do no harm, if acknowledged and recognized as such.

I venture to hope that historian and sociologist may find valuable facts and suggestions in this book. But, while writing it, I have thought more often of the eager young student who may glance over its pages, feel the allurement of some topic and resolve to know more about it. The bibliography is prepared especially for him. It is anything but complete. The literature of the period is almost endless. I have referred to only a few of the best and most suggestive works. They will introduce him to a chain of others. If he studies their facts and arguments he will probably reject some of my opinions or theories, modify others, and form his own. If I can do any young student this service, my work will have been amply repaid. America has sent few laborers into this rich harvest field.

I wish that this little book might play the part of a good host, and introduce many intelligent, thoughtful, and puzzled readers to the company and view-point of the prehistorian.

In prehistory we find man entering upon course after course of hard and rigid discipline and training, usually under the spur of necessity, the best of all teachers. Every course lasts through millennia. Their chief end is to socialize and humanize individual men. Environment, natural or artificial, is a means to this end. It compels men to struggle, each with himself; only as men improve is any marked change of conditions possible or desirable. Men must “pass” in the lower course before they can be promoted to the next higher, to find here a similar field of struggle on a somewhat higher plane. Human evolution, as a process of humanizing and socializing man, is and must be chiefly ethical; for ethics is nothing more nor less than the science and art of living rightly with one’s neighbor. And man is incurably religious, always feeling after the power or powers in or behind nature, whose essential character she is compelling him to express, as her inadequate but only mouthpiece. He will gradually become like what he is feeling after, dimly recognizing, and rudely worshipping. These are the most important departments of the school of prehistoric man.

The story told us by the evolutionist and prehistorian is full of surprises. It tells us of the failure of dominant species of animals and of promising races of men. It shows men plodding wearily through hardship and discouragement, and finding