Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
In the outlying parts of Europe, perhaps even in Gaul, it is extremely
doubtful whether any closer connection between race and culture exists
than in the Alps. It has long been maintained that the brachycephalic
people of the Round Barrows introduced bronze into Britain. Surely, as
we have already shown, things point to that conclusion.[K] Beddoe,
Dawkins, and other authorities maintain it at all events. Yet Canon
Taylor makes it pretty evident that the new race arrived in Britain,
as it certainly did in Gaul, considerably in advance of any knowledge
of the metals. As for Scandinavia, much the same relation holds true.
Both race and culture, as we shall see, came from the south, but it is
by no means clear that they arrived at the same time or that one
brought the other. In Spain, Siret has asserted that bronze came in
the hands of a new immigrant broad-headed race, but the authoritative
opinion of Cartailhac discovers no direct evidence to this effect.
The final conclusions which would seem to follow from our tedious
summary is this: That the nearly contemporaneous appearance of a
brachycephalic race and the first knowledge of metals indicative of
Oriental cultural influences in western Europe, is more or less a
coincidence. The first civilized peoples of the Hallstatt period seem
to have been closely allied, both in physical type and culture, with
the Greeks and other peoples of the classic East. Among them, perhaps
over them, swept the representatives of our broad-headed Alpine type
who came from the direction of Asia. These invaders may have been the
Scythians, although the matter is incapable of proof. Pressure from
this direction set both culture and population in motion toward the
west, in much the same way that the fall of Constantinople in the
fifteenth century induced the Renaissance in Italy.
IV. _The remarkable prehistoric civilization of Italy is due to the
union of two cultures: one from the Hallstatt region having entered
Europe by way of the Danube, the other coming from the southeast by
sea being distinctly Mediterranean. From these evolved the Umbrian and
the Etruscan civilizations, followed in the historic period by the
early Latin._
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