apparently of untold antiquity; it is even believed by competent students of antiquity to have stood over without serious advance or decline since European palæolithic times--a period of not less than ten thousand years.[98] The causes conditioning this “backward” type of culture among the Eskimo, coupled with a relatively advanced and extremely complete technological system, are presumed to lie in their material surroundings; which on the one hand do not permit a congestion of people within a small area or enable the organisation and control of a compact community of any considerable size; while on the other hand they exact a large degree of co-operation and common interest, on pain of extreme hardship if not of extinction. More perplexing at first sight is the case of such sedentary agricultural communities as the Pueblo Indians, who have also not advanced very materially beyond the simpler cultural scheme of savage life, and have not taken seriously to a system of property and a pecuniary control of industry, in spite of their having achieved a very considerable advance in the industrial arts, particularly in agriculture, such as would appear to entitle them to something “higher” than that state of peaceable, non-coercive social organisation, in which they were found on their first contact with civilised men, with maternal descent and mother-goddesses, and without much property rights, accumulated wealth or pecuniary distinction of classes. Again an explanation is probably to be sought in special circumstances of environment, perhaps re-enforced by peculiarities of the racial endowment; though the latter point seems doubtful, since both linguistically and anthropometrically the Pueblos are found to belong to two or three distinct stocks, at the same time that their culture is notably uniform throughout the Pueblo region, both on the technological and on the institutional side. The peculiar material circumstances that appear to have conditioned the Pueblo culture are (_a_) a habitat which favours agricultural settlement only at isolated and widely separated spots, (_b_) sites for habitation (on detached mesas or on other difficult hills or in isolated valleys or canyons) easily secured against aggression from without and not affording notable differential advantages or admitting segregation of the population within the pueblo, (_c_) the absence of beasts of burden, such as have enabled the inhabitants of analogous regions of the old world effectually to cover long distances and make raiding a lucrative, or at least an attractive enterprise.