that the native populations in the area could not have built them. In 1848
skull measurements were used by Ephraim George Squier (1821–88) and
Edwin Hamilton Davis (1811–88) to demonstrate the diVerences between
modern native populations and the people who had erected the mounds (ibid.
92–3). The estrangement of American Indians from these archaeological
remains bore obvious implications related to the rights to the land on
which they were built. By the time this thesis had been proved wrong in
1894 by the entomologist Cyrus Thomas (1825–1910), many natives had been
slaughtered and State legislation had divided reservations into small parcels
making it possible for whites to appropriate part of them (Hinsley 1981;
McGuire 1992; Patterson 1991: 247).
One of the major debates at the time was whether natives belonged to
the same human species as Euro-Americans. One of those contributing to
the debate in Canada was Daniel Wilson, who during his time in Scotland
had been inXuenced by phrenology (Chapter 12). Wilson still maintained
the Enlightenment belief that all human races derived from a common
origin, a theory which was known as monogenism. He expressed this view
both in his teaching—in his course on ancient and modern ethnology—and
in his publications. In hisPrehistoric Man(1862) he drew parallels between
prehistoric Europe and America, arguing that the similarities were due to
independent cultural evolutions from an initial psychic unity. As he put it:
It is not easy to discriminate here between hereditary race diVerences and those due to
food and habit of life... Some of the most conWdent judgments which have been
delivered on this subject have been distorted by prejudice or wilful slander, as in the
many lamentable cases in which slave-holders or conquerors have excused their ill-
treatment of subject and invaded races on the ground of their being creatures of
bestial nature in mind and morals
(Wilson 1885). 2Wilson rejected Darwinian evolutionism and this, along with his growing
involvement in university administration—he became the president of his
university in 1887—may have prevented him from becoming one of the
leading archaeologists of his time (Trigger 1981; Trigger in Murray 2001:
1325). However, his guidance was important to Boyle, who was appointed
curator at the Canadian Institute Museum in Toronto in 1884. Wilson did
not consider that natives had a history. In the classiWcation of his large
collection of artefacts, for example, he employed functional criteria, and
made no attempt to establish a chronological sequence. This approach
2 In http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/anthropology/history.htm.Archaeology of the Primitive 291