eating salt-water food, and,
most of all, oysters and clams. Our "clam-bake" is a survival of their
feasts on the beach. Of course under such circumstances extended heaps
of castaway shells and fish-bones would accumulate, and become of
dimensions which seem extraordinary only when we forget the lapse of
time since they were begun. Many objects, some castaway, some lost,
would become intermixed with the loose surface shells and be rapidly
buried beyond further disturbance. Thus an exploration of these heaps of
refuse might be expected to disclose, and really does show, a great
variety of indestructible indications of the people around whose
summer-lodges they were formed,--how they lived, what they fed upon, and
the degree of skill and culture to which they had attained. Scores of
these shell-heaps from Maine to Texas have been excavated by private
persons or by the agency of the museum, and the yield of each, however
miscellaneous, is accessible to us. We may make out from the bones a
list of the animals upon which the makers fed, we may tell from the
stone implements how the men hunted and fished, from the awls, needles,
skin-dressers, etc., of bone and horn with what skill the women worked,
and largely what materials they used, while the bits of baked clay mark
their position in the ceramic scale,--a well-accepted standard of
progress. Nor are these things mixed and confused when deposited in the
museum. All from each shell-heap are kept together, and specimens may
thus be compared with one another all along the coast-line; or the
visitor may go to another room, where the great Rose collection from
Denmark is displayed, and compare them with the relics from the
shell-heaps (_Kjoekken-moedings_) and village-sites of Jutland, where
a parallel life was lived and the monuments of savage homesteads line
the Baltic beaches.

Similarly the sites of villages, towns, and cities have contributed
largely to this collection of native antiquities. This is especially
true of the Southwest, of Central America, and the Andean region, where
the Aztec, the Maya, the Quichuas, the Aymaras, and other
highly-organized nations held sway over wide regions. The greatest
remains of these people lie in their architecture, the ruins of which
astonish the traveller in Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru. Beyond fragments of
carving, this, of course, is unavailable to a museum; but beside the
images and fragments of representative ornament engraved in st