Professor Putnam's Lecture.

The last in the course of lectures on Anthropology was given at the Peabody Museum yesterday afternoon by Professor Putnam on the subject of American Archaeology. The shortness of the time allowed but a brief survey of the most interesting features of archaeological study in North America.

The North American continent is divided into districts which are more or less definitely distinguished by the differences in the characteristic forms of art and culture among the ancient inhabitants. There was one type of art on the northwestern coast, another in a district that begins south of this and extends eastward past the Great Lakes and by way of the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic coast; two districts adjoining each other in the middle Atlantic region and extending to the west and south; the Pueblo district in the southwest, and another around California. There are marks of a migration from the neighborhood of Oregon eastward to the Atlantic and down the coast to the Carolinas. Another migration seems to have started in the Pueblo region and sent off-shoots, possibly at intervals of hundreds or thousands of years, north to the neighborhood of Utah and northeast to the Great Lakes. Of the latter branch were the mound builders of Ohio. The people of the northwest give indications of Asiatic admixture, and those of the southern migration are somewhat like the inhabitants of the south Pacific islands. These facts give some strength to the theories of the origin of the earliest tribes. On the eastern coast on the other hand, in the islands of the Caribbean Sea there are indications that the inhabitants came originally across the Atlantic from Northern Africa.

The inhabitants of the northwestern section along the Pacific were the Aleuts and the western Esquimaux. They are characterized by their carvings of bone, ivory and stone, in which there is often a singular combination of human heads and animal bodies. They had no pottery and used instead vessels of wood, stone or basket work.

On the Atlantic coast, notably in the Delaware valley, have been found the oldest relics of the paleolithic period. These are rude stone implements used for knives, hatchets, etc. There is a marked similarity between some of these implements and those belonging to the same period found in Europe.

Professor Putnam then described in detail the formation of the shell heaps which are found all along the Atlantic coast, and exhibited charts showing the construction of the mounds of Ohio. In conclusion he announced that another series of lectures on anthropology would probably be given next year, and also that a course in archaeology would be open to undergraduates of Harvard College and Radcliffe College.