The Reindeer Hunting Tribes of Northern Europe

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Abstract
There is some truth in the assertion that the greatness of Britain, as displayed to the world at the Great Exhibition of 1851, should be ascribed as much to the favourable juxtaposition of iron and oal as to any qualities inherent in the British people : it can hardly be disputed that the re-eminence in Prehistoric Archaeology once enjoyed by France was due in large measure to the rchaeological richness of the caves and rock-shelters of the Dordogne and the Pyrenees. But, if we must deplore the backwardness of France in fields where other countrie are as richly endowed by history, it is only fair to acknowledge that her archaeologists succeeded in systematizing. the cultures of Upper Palaeolithic man in western Europe, at a time when the Neolithic was still chaotic in many countries and a ' hiatus ' separated the two epochs. The exploration of the French caves began in the sixties of the last century and may be said to have already reached its culminating point by 1912, when Breuil put forward his famous classification at the Geneva Congress (Breuil, 1912). It is eloquent of the advanced stage reached by Upper Palaeolithic cave research in western Europe before the Great War that, after the lapse of a quarter of a century, Breuil has felt able (in 1937) to re-print his original lecture with only minor alterations.

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