Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/868

ARCHAEOLOGY] Mindeleff, Nordenskjöld, Powell and Stevenson. From Casa Grande, in Chihuahua, to Quemada, in Zacatecas, Carl S. Lumholtz found survivals of the cliff dwellers. Between Quemada and Copan, in Honduras, is an unbroken series of mural structures. The traditions agree with the monuments, whatever may be objected to assigning any one ruin to the Toltec, the Chichimec or the Nahuatl, that there are distinct varieties in ground-plan, motives, stone-craft, wall decorations and sculptures. Among these splendours in stone the following recent explorers must be the student’s guide:—Bowditch, Charnay, Förstemann, F. T. Goodman, Gordon, Holmes, Maudslay, Mercer, Putnam, Sapper, Marshall H. Saville, Seler, Cyrus Thomas, Thompson. A list of the ruins, printed in the handbook on Mexico published by the Department of State in Washington, covers several pages. The special characteristics of each are to be seen partly in the skill and genius of their makers, and partly in the exigencies of the site and the available materials. A fascinating study in this connexion is that of the water-supply. The cenotes or underground reservoirs were the important factors in locating the ruins of northern Yucatan. From Honduras to Panama the urn burials, the pottery, the rude carved images and, above all, the grotesque jewellery, absorb the archaeologist’s attention. (Publications of Peabody Museum.)

Beyond Chiriqui southward is El Dorado. Here also bewildering products of ancient metallurgy tax the imagination as to the processes involved, and questions of acculturation also interfere with true scientific results. The fact remains, however, that the curious metal-craft of the narrow strip along the Pacific from Mexico to Titicaca is the greatest of archaeological enigmas. Bandelier, Dorsey, Holmes, Seler and Uhle have taken up the questions anew. Beyond Colombia are Ecuador and Peru, where, in the widening of the continent, architecture, stone-working, pottery, metallurgy, textiles are again exalted. Among the Cordilleras in their western and interior drainages, over a space covering more than twenty degrees of latitude, the student comes again upon massive ruins. The materials on the coast were clay and gravel wrought into concrete, sun-dried bricks and pisé, or rammed work, cut stalks of plants formed with clay a kind of staff, and lintels were made by burying stems of caña brava (Gynerium saccharoides) in blocks of pisé. On the uplands structures were of stone laid up in a dozen ways. Walls for buildings, garden terraces and aqueducts were straight or sloping. Doorways were usually square, but corbelled archways and gateways surmounted with sculptures were not uncommon. Ornamentation was in carving and in colour, the latter far more effectively used than in Middle America. A glance at the exquisite textiles reveals at once the inspiration of mural decorations. The most prolific source of Peruvian relics is the sepulchres or huacas, the same materials being used in their construction as in building the houses. Here, owing to a dry climate, are the dead, clad and surrounded with food, vessels, tools and art products, as in life. The textiles and the pottery can only be mentioned; their quality and endless varieties astonish the technologist. In the Carib province there are no mural remains, but the pottery, with its excessive onlaying, recalls Mexico and the jewellers of Chiriqui. The polished stone work is superb, finding its climax in Porto Rico, which seems to have been the sacred island of the Caribs. For the coasts of South America the vast shell-heaps are the repositories of ancient history.

Since 1880 organized institutions of anthropology have taken the spade out of the hands of individual explorers in order to know the truth concerning Glacial or Pleistocene man. The geologist and the trained archaeologist are associated. In North America the sites have been examined by the Peabody Museum, the Bureau of American Ethnology, and others, with the result that only the Trenton gravels have any standing. The so-called palaeolithic implements are everywhere. The question is one of geology, simply to decide whether those recovered at Trenton are ancient. Putnam and George Frederick Wright maintain that they are ancient, Alex. Francis Chamberlain and Holmes that they are post-Glacial and comparatively recent (Am. Anthrop., N.S. i. pp. 107, 614). Elsewhere in the United States fossilized bones, crania of a low order, association of human remains with those of fossil animals are not necessarily evidence of vast antiquity. In South America the shell-heaps, of enormous size, are supposed to show that the animals have undergone changes in size and that such vast masses require untold ages to accumulate. The first is a biological problem. As for the second, the elements of savage voracity and wastefulness, of uncertainty as to cubical contents on uneven surface, and of the number of mouths to fill, make it hazardous to construct a chronological table on a shell-heap. Hudson’s village sites in Patagonia contain pottery, and that brings them all into the territory of Indian archaeology. Ameghino refers deposits in Patagonia, from which undoubted human bones and relics have been exhumed, to the Miocene. The question is of the age of the sediments from which these were taken. The bones of other associated animals, says John B. Hatcher, demonstrate the Pleistocene nature of the deposits, by which is not necessarily meant older Quaternary, for their horizons have not been differentiated and correlated in South America. Hatcher believes that “there is no good evidence in favour of a great antiquity for man in Patagonia.” In a cave near Consuelo Cove, southern Patagonia, have been found fragments of the skin and bones of a large ground-sloth, Grypotherium (Neomylodon) listai, associated with human remains. Ameghino argues that this creature is still living, while Dr Moreno advances the theory that the animal has been extinct for a long period, and that it was domesticated by a people of great antiquity, who dwelt there prior to the Indians. Rodolfo Hauthal, Walter E. Roth and Dr R. Lehmann Nitsche review their work with the conclusion, not unanimously held by them, that man co-existed here with all the other animals whose remains were found during an inter-Glacial period. Arthur Smith Woodward sums up the question in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, closing with this sentence: “If we accept the confirmatory evidence afforded by Mr Spencer Moore, we can hardly refuse to believe that this ground-sloth was kept and fed by an early race of men.” These are individual opinions, subject to revision by that court of appeals, the institutional judgment. (Summary in H. Hesketh Prichard, Through the Heart of Patagonia (1902), Appendix A.)

—A valuable endowment of research in specimens, literature and pictures, deposited in libraries, museums and galleries since 1880, will keep ethnologists and archaeologists employed for many years to come. The scientific inquirer will find a mass of material in the papers and reports contributed to the numerous. societies and institutions which are devoted to anthropological research. Museums of aboriginal culture are without number; in Washington the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum, the Bureau of American Ethnology and the American Anthropologist issue publications on every division of the subject, lists of their publications and general bibliographies. Also the Peabody Museum, Cambridge; the American Museum of Natural History, New York;. the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; the Field Museum, Chicago; the California Academy and the California University, San Francisco; and the Canadian Institute, Toronto, publish monographs and lists. The most comprehensive work on North America is the Handbook of American Indians (prepared by the Bureau of American Ethnology, under W. H. Holmes, and edited by F. Webb Hodge).

The following represent a select list of works on the American aborigines:—H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, vols. i.-v. (1874–1876); A. F. Bandelier, Papers on the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico (see Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America, 1881, 1890, 1892); also 10th, 11th, 12th Reports Peabody Museum; Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo  (6th Rep. Bur. Am. Ethnol., 1888); also Bulls. 20, 26, 27 and Reports Brit. Assoc. 1885–1898; Charles P. Bowditch, Mexican and Central American Antiquities; ''Bull. 28, Bur. Am. Ethnol.; also The Temples of the Cross and Mayan Nomenclature (Cambridge, Mass., 1906); David Boyle, Reports of the Provincial Museum of Toronto on Archaeology and Ethnology of Canada; D. G. Brinton, Library of Aboriginal American Literature,vols.'' i.-viii. (Philadelphia, 1822–1890); The American Race (New York, 1891); Gustav Bruhl, Die Culturvölker Amerikas (Cincinnati, 1889); Désiré Charnay, The Ancient Cities of the New World (New York, 1887); Frank Cushing, Zuni Folk Tales (New York, 1901); William H. Dall, Alaska and its Resources (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1870) (also papers by Bur. Am. Ethnol.); J. Deniker, The Races of Man (London, 1900); Roland B. Dixon, The Northern Maidu, Cal., Bull. 17, Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. (New York, 1905); Paul Ehrenreich, Die Völkerstämme Brasiliens  (Berlin, 1892); Anthropologische Studien über die Urbewohner Brasiliens  (Berlin, 1897); Livingston Farrand, The American Nation: A History,