Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/319

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORK IN AMERICA.
305

New York journal—the Illustrated American. Its object is a thorough study of the cliff-buildings of the Colorado district. Mr. Moorehead is one of the most enthusiastic of our young archaeologists, and has already done admirable work in Ohio mound exploration. He was for some time with Mr. Wilson at the Smithsonian Institution, and has recently been making some remarkably successful excavations for the World's Fair. The Colorado expedition started February 29th, and is to be in progress for some months.

Mr. Ad. F. Bandelier, by parentage a Frenchman, is one of our most scholarly and critical students in that most difficult field—Spanish America. He has been markedly successful both in field-work and in study of the old Spanish records. Following the line of criticism so ably used by the late Lewis H. Morgan, Mr. Bandelier has destroyed much of the romance of Aztec and Peruvian history; but from the ruins he has reconstructed pictures of these most interesting societies that are lifelike, and Rev. S. D. Peet. far more in accordance with the genius of the American race than the old ones. His papers—at first published in the annual reports of the Peabody Museum, but latterly in the publications of the American Archæological Institute—are models of scholarship. Mr. Bandelier is now planning an important exploration into Peru-Ecuador. It is to be hoped that he may have no difficulty in finding the financial support that he needs.

Two ladies are doing remarkable work in American anthropology. Mrs. Zelia Nuttall works in the same field as Mr. Bandelier. Although an American, Mrs. Nuttall lives at Dresden, Germany. She surrounds herself with an Aztec atmosphere; her library, one of the richest in Mexican works in existence, is cased in pieces of furniture whose forms and decorations are drawn from Mexican architecture. On all relating to Mexican archæology and history she is an authority. Two of the Peabody Museum monographs are by her one upon a curious feather head-dress, the other upon the Mexican throwing--