STEPHEN D.

OUSLEY

BOAS, BRINTON, AND THE JESUP

NORTH PACIFIC EXPEDITION The Return of the Americanoids

At the time of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (JNPE, 1897-1902), there were many speculative theories regarding the origin of American Indians, largely because there were few high quality data available. Scattered observations and isolated similarities between various American Indian tribes and other peoples in some part of the world by "armchair scientists" lead to many unscientific theories (Boas 1888a, Huddleston 1967). Archaeological evidence remained largely undiscovered. Franz Boas summarized the contemporary situation in a letter to Morris Jesup, president of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), proposing an expedition to the North Pacific: "Scientists are divided in their opinions regarding the affiliations of the American race. While some claim
Stephen D. Ousley is the Director of the Repatriation Osteology Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests include the history of anthropology, morphometries, quantitative genetics, and forensic anthropology. Author's address: Repatriation Office, Department of Anthropology, NMNH MRC 138, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, USA. E-mail: ousley.steve@nmnh.sLedu An earlier version of this paper was presented at "Constructing Cultures Then and Now: Celebrating Franz Boas and the Centenary of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902" at the American Museum of Natural History, New York,in 1997. Acknowledgments: I am greatly indebted to the late Douglas Cole, who provided important feedback, shared crucial facts, and sent me several draft chapters from his planned book on Franz Boas. Igor Krupnik has provided information and encouragement over the last few years. Richard Jantz provided insight and ideas concerning Boas and biological anthropology. At the American Museum of Natural History, Belinda Kaye provided help in finding further resources. Many thanks also to the staff at the Milton Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University and to Jim Miller and Dave Wilt at the Engineering Library, University of Maryland, College Park.

that its affiliations with the Asiatic race are strongest, others believe that it is an entirely independentrace, just as closely affiliated with other Europeans as with Asiatics" (19 January 1897). Apparently, Boas was giving great weight to the writings of Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837-1899), a prominent Philadelphia physician and selftaught anthropologist, author of several popular books, and "the leading scholar of American Indian mythology" (Stocking 1968:208). Since the early 1890s Brinton had forcefully asserted that American Indians had migrated over a land bridge from Europe and developed their cultures in isolation from the rest of the world (Brinton 1890:38-41, 1891:17-32). Neither biology, nor language, nor culture showed any connections between Asiatic and American peoples (Brinton 1886, 1894). Brinton's ideas were outside of the mainstream, as he himself admitted. By this time, most in the scientific community believed that the ancestors of the American Indians had migrated over the Bering Strait from Asia (Darnell 1988).However,the limited evidence supporting an Asian origin was not any better than Brinton's evidence from several disciplines supporting a European origin. Brinton excluded Asia as a source because he was skeptical of the cultural evidence for Asian origins: "I maintain, therefore, in conclusion, that up to the present time there has not been shown a single dialect, not an art nor an institution, not a myth or religious rite, not a domesticated plant or animal, not a tool, weapon, game or symbol, in use in America at the time of the discovery, which had been previously imported from Asia, or from any other continent of the Old World" (Brinton 1894:151). Brinton also stressed that it would be impossible to conclusively establish the origin of the American Indians because they had changed so much since their migration: "It is time to dismiss as trivial all attempts to connect the American

race genealogically (biologically) with any other, or to trace the typical culture of this continent to the historic forms of the Old World" (Brinton 1890:18). The JNPE was Boas's answer to Brinton's challenges. Boas included anthropometric data, such as head, face, and body measurements in the JNPE because anthropometric data were the best available biological data, and because he believed that biological data were as useful as cultural data for illuminating population relationships and origins in a scientific study (Boas 1899a, 1929, Jantz 1995, Ousley and Jantz n.d.). The anthropometric data would be collected to objectively establish the "genealogical connections" that Brinton maintained were impossible: "The study of the physical types of the coast of the North Pacific Ocean must form one of the most important subjects of investigation of the Jesup Expedition" (Boas 1897a:537). Brinton's statements about American Indians represented hypotheses to be tested by Boas, a scientist who also sought to highlight the methodological superiority of "field scientists" over the library-based "armchair scientists" (Herskovits 1953, Kummer 1994).As a result, the JNPE was conceived as, and in many respects has remained, an exemplary undertaking in anthropology (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988). Through the JNPE, Boas redefined an American anthropology still in its infancy. Boas and Brinton Many of Boas's early publications were in response to Brinton's writings and the nineteenth-centuryevolutionaryanthropology that Brinton represented. Darnell (1988:71) has suggested that Boas saw Brinton as a "theoretical opponent." While Boas did not often criticize Brinton's ideas directly, his criticisms appear to increase over time. Boas's (1890) review of Brinton's 11

NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 14:2 2000

Essays of an Americanist contained no criticism at all. Boas merely remarked that the book was "valuable" and "suggestive" and that it would encourage further debate. In his review of Brinton's Races and Peoples, despite the similar contents and viewpoints, Boas (1891) commented that the book was "attractive;' "interesting;' and "suggestive," but also critiqued some of Brinton's specific conclusions about race using data that Boas had collected himself. Brinton was a major advocate of what Boas (1896) termed the comparative method, which maintained that similarities among cultures were due to psychological universals. Brinton had delivered the opening address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meetings of 1895 with a paper titled "The Aims of Anthropology;' and Boas had responded at the AAAS meetings of 1896 with a paper titled ''The Limits of the Comparative Method." For Brinton, the comparative method was an integral part of anthropology due to the discovery of ''the psychical unity of man, the parallelism of his development everywhere and in all time; nay, more, the nigh absolute uniformity of his thoughts and actions, his aims and methods, when in the same degree of development, no matter where he is, or in what epoch living. ... I shall refer more than once to this discovery; for its full recognition is the corner stone of true anthropology" (Brinton 1895:4). Indeed, Brinton had earlier specified that
"It is the aim of Ethnography

... to

depict, of Ethnology to explain, the physical conditions, the stage of culture, and the social life of the various tribes of men, with the final aim of interpreting, by a comparison of such facts, the universal laws of progress of the human species" (Brinton 1886:57). Brinton's comparative method was related to E. B. Tylor's evolutionist anthropology, which provided theoretical reasons for unilineal cultural development (Stocking 1968, Tylor 1871). Initially, Boas, like Brinton, believed in the psychic unity of mankind and that "the greatest aim of our science" was to study the "frequent occurrence of similar phenomena in cultural areas that have no historical contact" because they show that "the human mind develops everywhere according to the same laws" (Boas 1888a:637). At the same time Boas stressed the

need for an empirical approach, because "far-reaching theories have been built on weak foundations," and Boas acknowledged the possibility of the diffusion of cultural traits, unlike Brinton (Boas 1888a:637). In 1896, in direct response to Brinton, Boas was of a very different opinion: "We have another method, which is in many respects much safer. A detailed study of customs in their relation to the total culture of the tribe practicing them, in connection with an investigation of their geographical distribution among neighboring tribes, affords us almost always a means of determining with considerable accuracy the historical causes that led to the formation of customs in question and to the psychological processes that were at work in their development" (Boas 1896:905). Thus explanation moved from Brinton's universal psychic process to historical causes and psychological processes. As Boas later described it, "there are investigators who would exclude the consideration of transmission altogether, who believe it to be unlikely and deem the alleged proof irrelevant, and who ascribe sameness of cultural traits wholly to the psychic unity of mankind and to the uniform reaction of the human mind upon the same stimulus. An extremist in this direction was the late Daniel G. Brinton" (Boas 1904: 519). Boas and Brinton also had vastly different opinions on how cultural data were to be collected and used. Boas (1896) had provided examples of the same cultural traits in different societies that were due to different causes, a possibility that Brinton had never considered. For Brinton, cultural universals and similarities were evident from cultural traits noted in publications, and information was to be gathered that supported the theory of the psychic unity of mankind. For Boas, maintaining this viewpoint would be unscientific because the histories of the traits were unknown and their cultural contexts uncertain. With a thorough investigation of many culture traits, the same observations could be used to illuminate the phenomena of integration, invention, diffusion, and transmission. Boas advocated a study of culture traits to determine their histories and origins inductively, rather than gathering evidence to prove a theory deductively (Stocking 1968). Boas could also test a null hypothesis of diffusion, which was falsifiable,

unlike that of the psychic unity of mankind (Boas 1896, 1904). Brinton tended to emphasize cultural universals by filtering evidence from biology, language, and culture and ignoring data to the contrary (Darnell 1988). In contrast, Boas repeatedly stressed that analyses using each element of anthropology need not agree (Boas 1895, 1897b, 1899a, 1899b, 1904, 1911). Brinton produced confident, broad, and shallow evolutionary explanations, while Boas advocated thorough multidisciplinary investigations and ostensibly neutral results, even if the results were mutually inconsistent and did not lead to broad theories. Above all, Boas believed in collecting data through fieldwork done by professionals, in contrast to Brinton, the armchair anthropologist who relied on published accounts from untrained observers (Darnell 1988, Kummer 1994). As a result, Brinton unquestioningly accepted contemporary anthropological assumptions and supported them by filtering and compiling second-hand observations. Boas initially accepted the assumptions of anthropology until his ethnographic, linguistic, or biological observations made them untenable (Ousley and Jantz n.d., Stocking 1968). Brinton's acceptance of racial superiority especially set him apart from Boas: "The black, the brown and the red races differ anatomically so much from the white, especially in their splanchnic organs, that even with equal cerebral capacity, they never could rival its results by equal efforts" (Brinton 1895:12). Although cordial in his correspondence and in public, Boas isolated Brinton professionally. When Brinton and Boas were on the editorial board of American Anthropologist, Boas worked behind the scenes to exclude Brinton (Darnell 1988, citing personal communication of Stocking). Though Boas disagreed with Brinton's methods, theories, and conclusions, in some ways he emulated Brinton and followed in his footsteps. Brinton was well known internationally, had many prestigious titles, and had been president of the International Congress of Anthropology in Chicago in 1893 during the World's Columbian Exposition, for which Boas had worked (Darnell 1988). Boas, like Brinton, was one of the few anthropologists to serve as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1892 Boas and Brinton were on A. F. Chamber-

12

EUROPEAN

REVIEW OF

a.

c.

"Americanolds"

d
"Mongoloids"

<J)

Eskimos

Figure 1. The "Americanoid" Theory. a. Initial migration b. Isolation and differentiation c. Back migration d. Eskimo migration and separation of "Americanoids:'

lain's Ph.D. committee and granted to him the first anthropology Ph.D. in the UnitedStates (Cole 1999). Brintonhad succeeded in anthropology with a medical degree and with only an honorary academic position (Darnell 1988, 1998). Boas seems to have admired Brinton's success and prestige even though he did not believe they were deserved. The" Americanoid" Theory Inthe 8 October 1897 issue of Science, Boas reviewed the initialJNPE excursions of the previous summer. He expressed confidence that the kinds of data collected under the JNPE would allow well-founded conclusions and seemed open to what those particular conclusions would be (Boas 1897a). By the middle of June 1898, some eight months later, and two years before the Siberian data would be collected, Boas had concluded that ''The types of man which we find on the North Pacific coast of America, while distinctly American, show a great affinityto North Asiatic forms; and the question arises, whether this affinity is due to mixture, to migration, or to gradual differentiation"(Boas 1898:6).

This was apparently several months before Boas initiated correspondence withJochelson, who may have already reached the same conclusion:"During the YakutExpedition(1895- 1897), the author [Jochelson] became convinced that there were cultural and somatological connections between the Palae-asiatics and the Indians of North America" (Jochelson 1925:2). Boas and Jochelson had come to the same conclusion, perhaps out of general impressions, before visiting Natives on the other side of the Pacific.
Boas's impressions may have started forming in early 1886 while he was working at the Museum fOr Volkerkunde in Berlin, where he met a group of Bella Coola who were "exhibited" at the museum and were measured by Rudolf Virchow. The general public, as well as Virchow, remarked on their "atypical" appearance, believing that they resembled Asians, especially the Japanese, more than they resembled other American Indians. Before the end of the year Boas had produced three publications about Bella Coola language and culture and had borrowed money to visit the Northwest Coast for the first of many times (Cole 1985:71-72; Herskovits 1943). Not long afterwards, Boas (1888b:194)

wrote that ''the physique of the northern (Northwest Coast) tribes reminds us of the Japanese." After the JNPE Boas stated more strongly that there was overwhelming evidence for strong ties across the North Pacific: "It seems clear, however, even at this time, that the isolated tribes of eastern Siberia and those of the northwest coast of America form one race, similar in type, and with many elements of culture in common" (Boas 1903:115). "Comparisons of type, language and culture make it at once evident that the Northeast Siberian people are much more closely akin to the Americans than to other Asiatics" Boas 1905:99). Thus Boas claimed that there were three separate lines of evidence, biological, linguistic, and ethnographic, that showed strong affinities between northeastern Siberians and Northwest Coast Indians. However, there were two additional conclusions that Boas had to consider. First, separating these very similar peoples from both sides of the north Pacific were the Eskimo, who Boas believed were very different. Second, the great biological and cultural variability in American Indians that Boas had observed 13

NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 14:2 2000

meant that American Indians had been in the New World longer than the contemporary Siberian peoples had been in Siberia (Boas 1902). Boas constructed a theory of how the New World was peopled that took all of his conclusions into account. This was called the "Americanoid" theory. Boas's theory (Fig. 1) explaining the contemporary situation was as follows: Asians first migrated across a land bridge to America (a) and were cut off by glaciers for a long time, allowing for the great differentiation and diversification of American Indians (b). Later, when the glaciers retreated, the land bridge opened up again, and some Americans flowed back into Asia (c) until they met more typical "Mongoloids" migrating from the south and west. Thus was formed an arc of related tribes, Americanoids, stretching across north Pacific coastal areas. This arc was later broken by the culturally and morphologically distinct Eskimo, who migrated to the Bering Strait (d) from their origin near Hudson Bay, where more elements of their ancient type and culture were found (Boas 1910:369-370). The Eskimo formed a "wedge" that separated the Americanoids on either side of the Bering Strait. Boas's theory explained why the northeast Siberians were physically different from typical "Mongoloids" and Eskimos, yet similar to Northwest Coast Indians, a pattern he believed was also reflected in mythology and folklore (Boas 1902, 1905, 1907, 1910, 1912b, 1929). However, Boas never presented specific biological results to support his theory. The origin of the term "Americanoid" is not as obscure as the scientific basis for the theory itself. The earliest occurrence of "Americanoid" is found in a work published seven years before the beginning of the JNPE, a source familiar to Boas. Brinton used the term in his Essays of an Americanist (1890) while ridiculing anthropologists who believed that the American Indians were part of the Mongoloid race. He maintained that if American Indians were considered Mongoloids, then Asian Mongoloids should be considered a branch of the "Americanoid" race because American Indians were obviously the purer race, due to their hair, which was closer to a perfect circle in cross-section (Brinton 1890:62). After Boas conclusively disproved Brinton's claims of American Indian cultural and biological isolation, using the term "Americanoid," now validated, would have been an ironic coup de grace.

All subsequent uses of "Americanoid" were linked to Boas. Jochelson, Bogoras, Sternberg, and Boas were present at the 14th International Congress of Americanists in Stuttgart in 1904. In Sternberg's (1904) paper from that meeting, a comparison of Gilyak and American Indian languages, the term was for the first time used in a publication by one of the Jesup participants, and it referred to the language group that the returning migrants spoke. Later the J. W. Powell American Indian linguistic map was revised at the Bureau of American Ethnology by Roland Dixon and shows Siberian languages labeled "Americanoid" (Bureau of the Census 1915). Dixon would likely have been influenced by Boas's opinions of the languages of the north Pacific. He was chosen by Boas to conduct ethnographic research and collect anthropometric data for the JNPE and to study the Indian languages of California for the Huntington Expedition (1898-1899). Additionally, Boas supervised Dixon's doctoral dissertation on the Maidu language (Douglas Cole, pers. comm., Tozzer and Coon 1943). Jochelson (1926:92) later applied "Americanoid" to the Chukchi, Koryak, Italmen, and Nivkh peoples and seemed to claim credit for the term.

The Results of the JNPE For Boas, the JNPE was a major coup. He had enough evidence to disprove Brinton's repeated assertions that American Indian culture was autochtonous to the New World and showed no connection to any cultures of the Old World (Boas 1903). Boas also claimed that the anthropometric data disproved Brinton's related claims that American Indians showed no "genealogical" connections to any other peoples of the world, though he never presented an anthropometric analysis. Two decades after the JNPE an anthropometric analysis was completed, but the results refuted the biological basis for the Americanoid theory. In 1923 Boas secured funding from the AMNH for Dina Jochelson-Brodsky to analyze Jesup Expedition and Aleutian anthropometric data and produce a manuscript during the last six months of the year (Boas to Osborn, 7 May 1923; Henry Fairfield Osborn to Boas, 15 May 1923; Clark Wissler to Boas, 19 May 1923; Boas to Jochelson-Brodsky, 28 May 1923). She was well-qualified for the task,

having independently written German and Russian summaries of JNPE anthropometric data on Siberian females (Jochelson-Brodsky 1906, 1907). Conducting a statistical analysis was no small feat, requiring an immense computational effort with pencil and paper. A thorough analysis might require many weeks of calculations that would be unappreciated in the typological environment of the day, as was the case with Boas's later studies of the hereditary and environmental effects on anthropometries (Boas 1912a, 1913, 1916; Herskovits, 1953). Additionally, statistics were not in favor with contemporary researchers: "In spite of the critical attitude of the present days' anthropologists to averages they still form the chief base for somatological considerations, particularly when we point out the distributions of individual cases, their extremes and frequency, and the standard deviation from the averages ..." (Jochelson-Brodsky n.d.:104). In her manuscript Jochelson-Brodsky (n.d.) presented over sixty tables summarizing the means, standard deviations, and distributions of twentyfive anthropometric measurements recorded during the JNPE and during the Riabouschinsky Expedition of 1909-1911 to Kamchatka and the Aleutians (Jochelson 1912). She also compared the population means to published means of other Siberian and American Indian populations. As in every univariate analysis, when one measurement or index is compared at a time, some groups are more similar in some measurements and very different in others. Like other researchers, including Boas, she could only compare populations using the few measurements that she believed were most important. Her limited conclusions about population relationships were based on the means for standing height and the cephalic index (CI), the ratio of head breadth to head length. Table 1 shows a comparison of Cis of Siberian and American males using data from several of her tables. In contrast to the Americanoid theory, Siberians and Northwest Coast Indians are on opposite sides of the distribution. Eastern Siberians show lower Cis, and Northwest Coast Indians show higher Cis. The western Siberian groups (Yakut and Samoyed) have values more similar to the American Indians, as Jochelson-Brodsky noted (n.d.: 19). The Eskimo are not outliers, but are

14

EUROPEAN REVIEW OF

Group Ainu Japanese Italmen (Kamchadal) Alaskan Eskimo Evenk (Tungus) Chuvants Koryak Yukaghir Asiatic Eskimo Nunatagmiut Eskimo Chukchi Haida Tahltan Yakut Nuxalk (Bella Coola) Aleut Samoyed Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nivkh (Gilyak)

N 95 78 158 114 88 233 76 91 176 63 207 32 75 152 72 20

CI 77.3 78.5 78.9 79.2 79.6 79.9 80.2 80.4 81.3 81.6 81.9 82.1 82.5 82.7 83.0 83.8 83.8 84.1 86.0

Table1. The CephalicIndex (CI)of Siberian and American males, sorted from lowest to highest. N is the number in each cat-

egory.Data combinedfrom tables 8, 8a,

and 9 in Jochelson-Brodsky (n.d.).

within the range of eastern Siberian values. Jochelson-Brodsky's results do not indicate similarity between Siberians and American Indians, and she tactfully avoided stating this explicitly in her manuscript. JochelsonBrodsky's work was what Boas wanted, an overall assessment of similarities and differences between populations, but it was never published. Boas must have known about Jochelson-Brodsky's results, because he arranged funding for the analysis and apparently was the, person who edited her manuscript. However, in a later publication, Boas (1929:112) mentioned Siberian-Northwest Coast cranial similarity found by JochelsonBrodsky without a specific reference, though he must have been referring to her unpublished manuscript. Jochelson also mentioned specific resemblances between Siberian and Northwest Coast Indians in 1926 without a specific reference, citing similarities in the cephalic index and nose, eye, lip, and cheek form (Jochelson 1926:93). The only Jesup volume dealing with biological data, an analysis of Siberian and Northwest Coast crania, was conducted by Bruno Oetteking (1930). His volume, begun in 1913 and frequently interrupted, illustrates the contemporary racial and typological emphasis as well as the shortcomings of scant cranial samples. It is a compilation of over ninety cranial

measurements, indices, and angles, and over eighty cranioscopies, comprising almost 400 pages. Like Jochelson-Brodsky, Oetteking could only calculate and compare means and indices. Though he acknowledged that the sample sizes of complete, undeformed skulls were insufficient for analysis, Oetteking concluded that the Northwest Coast Amerindians were of the "Mongol" stock and probably mixed with racially "progressive" and "superior" early Caucasoids (Oetteking 1930:376). Oetteking's volume was favorably reviewed by Ales Hrdlicka, a prominent physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution. Given Boas's progressive views on evolution and race, it is worth questioning why Oetteking's massive volume was published but JochelsonBrodsky's analysis was not. Boas apparently preferred uncertain results to results that definitely contradicted his Americanoid theory. The lack of data to support Boas's unusual theory and his general reluctance to emphasize it may be the main reasons that the Americanoid theory was never accepted by many anthropologists (Freed et al. 1988a). Initially, Boas may have been motivated to inflate JNPE conclusions because of the great expense of the JNPE, which necessitated definitive results for Morris Jesup. However, Boas's strategy backfired: Because Boas claimed that all evidence pointed to one answer to the main question posed by the JNPE, he could not justify further data collection, and Jesup denied Boas's repeated appeals for more funds to extend the JNPE. The relationship between Boas and Jesup disintegrated, due to Boas's inability to produce the JNPE summary volume that would tie all research together, to Jesup's refusal to fund other expeditions proposed by Boas, and to disagreements concerning how museum objects should be exhibited. Boas angrily resigned from the AMNH in 1905, but was paid by the AMNH to oversee further publication of JNPE volumes (Cole 1999, Freed et al. 1988b).Additional JNPE volumes were published, even after Jesup's death in 1908, but Boas never started the promised JNPE summary volume, which was still a matter of concern in 1926 for AMNH president Henry Fairfield Osborn (Freed et al. 1988b, citing letter from Osborn to Clark Wissler, 26 December 1926). Boas's refusal to write the summary volume can be partially attributed to his continued anger and bitterness after leav-

ing the AMNH (Cole 1999, Freed et al. 1988b), but it is also clear that a volume containing an anthropometric analysis would contradict his Americanoid theory. Univariate and multivariate analyses of north Pacific anthropometries from the JNPE call Boas's theory into question due to an absence of Americanoids and the close relationship of the Eskimo to northeastern Siberians (Ousley 1993, 1995, Ousley and Jantz n.d.). Only a small Nivkh sample, which Boas apparently never analyzed, shows great affinity to Indians of the Northwest Coast. Both North American Eskimo groups show unquestionable Siberian affinities: In particular, the Labrador Eskimo sample is most similar to the Maritime Koryak. Thus there is no Eskimo "wedge" based on anthropometries. Additionally, the anthropometric affinities of the Eskimo samples strongly suggest an Asian origin rather than one in central Canada, as archaeological and ethnographic data have proven (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988, Levin 1963). In short, there has never been a biological basis for Boas's Americanoid theory, and univariate and multivariate analyses of the anthropometric data collected during the Jesup Expedition actually contradict it.

Conclusion
For Boas, the main goal of collecting ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological, and anthropometric data during the JNPE was to empirically disprove, through a superior methodology, Brinton's assertions of the total independence of American Indian and Old World populations. Boas achieved his goal in convincingly rejecting Brinton's hypothesis and ostensibly discovering the ancestral home of the American Indians. Boas's "Americanoid" theory was based on ethnographic data and his general impressions formed many years before. By 1897 Boas could have written a Brintonian manuscript using anecdotal evidence for SiberianNorthwest Coast cultural and biological similarities. Instead, evidence was gathered through fieldwork that showed cultural ties between peoples from both sides of the Pacific, but Boas clearly misrepresented the biological results of the JNPE. Boas's theory accommodated all of his observations and assumptions and was a more clearly defined alternative to Brinton's theory of the psychic unity 15

NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 14:2 2000

of mankind, which was not falsifiable. In fact, the biological results may have been crucial for disproving both psychic unity and New World-Old Word independence: If the biological data had not shown agreement with the cultural data, Brinton could have argued that the JNPE cultural similarities were merely due to psychic universals, and Boas would have had a harder time convincing Jesup, other anthropologists, and the general public that he had proven that the home of the American Indian was in the Old World. Thanks to the Americanoids, Boas thoroughly trounced the nineteenthcentury "armchair" anthropology represented by D. G. Brinton. Boas had discovered that anthropology itself was largely a set of untested folk traditions. The Americanoids were imaginary pawns in Boas's struggle to mold anthropology into a true science of mankind. It is ironic that data from the JNPE refute Brinton's hypothesis and also disprove Boas's Americanoid theory. Disproving hypotheses and theories is only possible in a science. It is also ironic that Boas's Americanoid theory assumed an explicit link between biology (populations) and culture, requiring migrations to spread cultural traits: Boas (1895, 1897b, 1899a, 1899b, 1904, 1911) repeatedly emphasized that relationships among peoples based on biology, culture, and language will not necessarily agree but rarely cited specific examples. He consistently emphasized variations on the themes of "If we ... eliminate the hypothetical assumption of correlation between primitive type (biology), primitive language, and primitive culture, we recognize that any attempt at classification which includes more than one of these traits can not be consistent" (Boas 1911:10), and "Let us await further evidence before committing ourselves to theories that cannot be proven" (Boas 1912a:562). We now have data from Boas himself illustrating his warnings, which many scientists still do not heed.

of Northwest America. Science 12: 194-196. 1890 Review of Daniel G. Brinton, Essays of an Americanist. Journal of American Folklore 3:168. 1891 Review of Daniel G. Brinton, Races and Peoples. Journal of American Folklore 4:87-88. 1895 Fifth Report of the Indians of British Columbia. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1895:523-592. 1896 The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology. Science 4:901-908. 1897a The Jesup Expedition to the North Pacific Coast. Science 6:535538. 1897b Review of Paul Ehrenreich, Anthropologische Studien Oeber die Ureinwohner Brasiliens. Science 6: 880-883. 1898 Facial Paintings of the Indians of Northern British Columbia. In: F.Boas (ed.), The Jesup North Pacific Expedition 1(1) = Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History 2:1-24. 1899a Some Recent Criticisms of Physical Anthropology. American Anthropologist 1:98-106. 1899b Review of William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe. Science 10:292296. 1902 Some Problems in North American Archaeology. American Journal of Archaeology 6:1-6. 1903 The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. American Museum Journal 3(5):73-119. 1904 The History of Anthropology. Science 20:513-524. 1905 The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Congress of Americanists, New York, 1902 (Easton, PA), 91-100. 1907 Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 15(1-2).
New York, NY.

Brinton, Daniel G. 1886 Anthropology and Ethnology. Philadelphia, PA: Iconographic Publishing Company. 1890 Essays of an Americanist. Philadelphia, PA:Porter and Coates. 1891 The American Race. New York, NY: Hodges. 1894 On Various Supposed Relations Between the American and Asian Races. In: C. Staniland Wake (ed.), Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology(Chicago, IL: Schulte), 145-151. 1895 The Aims of Anthropology. Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 44:1-17. Bureau of the Census 1915 Indian Population of the United States and Alaska 1910.Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Cole, Douglas 1985 Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 1999 Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Darnell, Regna 1988 Daniel Garrison Brinton: The "Fearless Critic" of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania. 1998 And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution In Americanist Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: J.
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1910 Ethnological Problems in Canada. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 40:529-539. 1911 Introduction. Handbook of American Indian Languages. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40(1). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 1912a Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. American Anthropologist 14(3):530-562. 1912b The History of the American Race. Annals of the American Academy of Sciences 21 :177-183. 1913 Die Analyse anthropometrischer Serien, nebst Bemerkungen Ober die Deutung der Instabilitat menschlicher Typen. Archiv fOr Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie 10(3):290-302. 1916 New Evidence in Regard to the Instability of Human Types. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2(12):713-718. 1929 Migrations of Asiatic Races and Cultures to North America. Scientific Monthly 29:11 0-121.

Fitzhugh, William and Aron Crowell 1988 (eds.) Crossroads of Continents. Baltimore, MD: Smithsonian Institution Press. Freed, Stanley A., Freed, Ruth S., and Laila Williamson 1988a Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolutionaries: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902). American Anthropologist 90(1 ):7-24. 1988b The American Museum's Jesup North Pacific Expedition. In Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988:97-103.
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STUDIESIN AMERICAN INDIAN ART

A Memorial Tribute to Norman Feder
Edited by
CHRISTIAN

F. FEEST

Essayson Norman Feder and his work by Arthur C. Einhorn, Joyce Herold, Tilly Laskey, Roanne P. Goldfein, Christian F. Feest, and Steven C. Brown Essayson Native American art by Colin F. Taylor, Bill Holm, Arni Brownstone, Imre Nagy, Molly Lee, Marvin Cohodas, Ruth B. Phillips, Sally McLendon, William C. Sturtevant, Christian F. Feest and Sylvia S. Kasprycki

ERN AS Monographs 2 viii + 208 pp, 84 color and 62 b/w illustrations, 39 line drawings ISBN 3-00-005871-0 (paper) OM 59/$35.00(VISA, Mastercard, Diners Club, American Expresswelcome) Order from: European Review of Native American Studies Fasanenweg 4a, 0-63674 Altenstadt, Germany or from University of Washington Press

NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 14:2 2000

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