correctly rejected those claims, the Folsom discovery in 1927 ultimately showed that human antiquity on the North American continent reached back to the late Pleistocene period.

Holmes’s work was particularly valued by his peers because of his scientific approach, which entailed the considerable rhetoric on the proper conduct of science that was symptomatic of the growing professionalism of late-nineteenth-century archaeology, and Holmes’s own explicit efforts to highlight the stark contrasts he saw between his efforts and the “old archaeology.” Science to Holmes meant a commitment to empirical observation and measurement and a strong sense of order and method.

The method of choice, reflecting his geological background, was an archaeological uniformitarianism in which the past was understood in terms of the ethnographic present. Holmes was well aware, in principle, that traces of specific ethnographic groups could only be followed a short distance into the past, but, in practice, he often slighted that principle, attaching ethnographic labels to archaeological phenomena. He did so in the belief—partly rooted in his rejection of the American Paleolithic—that American prehistory was shallow. As a result, when he organized the archaeological record, it was along geographical lines and into cultural areas; temporal units were largely absent.

At the same time, however, Holmes was a confirmed evolutionist who followed anthropologist lewis henry morgan’s general cultural evolutionary scheme and envisioned “the pathways of progress” from savagery to barbarism to civilization as being driven by human volition. Progress for Holmes was the axis and measure of evolutionary change, and he embarked on his ambitious effort to show through different classes of material culture “human progress from the point of view of material culture.” But he ultimately came to realize that progress was not always evident in the small details, however clear on the larger scale.

Holmes was a key figure in Washington, D.C., museums and research bureaus when those were at the center of science in the United States. But in the twentieth century, that center shifted into the university system, and that caused a change in the theoretical compass of American archaeology. Holmes’s brand of evolutionary theory was no longer fashionable, and the next generation of archaeologists—armed with stratigraphy and seriation and needing to fill the chronological gap created by Folsom—moved beyond his geographical archaeology into culture history.

David J. Meltzer

See also

United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 188–191.

Honduras; Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History

See Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia

Hrdlicka, Ales

(1869–1943)

Hrdlicka was born in Bohemia, in what is now the czech republic, and immigrated with his family to the United States in 1881. He studied medicine at the New York Eclectic Medical College, and practiced in New York City while continuing to study at the New York Homeopathic College. In 1894 he became a junior physician at a homeopathic hospital for the insane and consequently became interested in anthropometry. In 1896 he was invited to join a multidisciplinary research team at the newly founded Pathological Institute in New York City. Prior to taking up this appointment Hrdlicka attended classes in Paris at the Ecole d’Anthropologie, and studied anthropometric techniques in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes.

In 1899 he resigned from the institute and became an unsalaried field anthropologist for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he worked under anthropologist frederic ward putnam from Harvard University. From 1899 until 1902 Hrdlicka undertook anthropometric surveys of the Indians of the American Southwest and northern mexico.