Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/734

Rh 692 AMERICA [ANTIQUITIES. tecting cover standing up far above the level of the neigh bouring country. Articles made by man also occur under conditions indicating great antiquity. Thus along the coast of Ecuador there are volcanic deposits which belong to the period of volcanic activity preceding the present, which may probably be referred to the Post-Pliocene period. This matter is arranged in terraces, and in one of these terraces, now 24 miles from the coast and 150 feet above the sea, Mr Wilson has found beneath the vegetable mould, beds of clay with sand and gravel which contain fragments of pot tery. These beds, it is believed, were deposited beneath the sea, implying an elevation of 150 feet since their forma tion. On the coast there is a pottery-containing stratum, which has been followed for 80 miles, and patches of a similar bed occur over a further distance of 200 miles. These facts, taken in conjunction with what we learn from the traditions and histories of numerous nations, as also the characters of the present natives, render it highly probable that man existed in America long before the origin or arrival of the civilised communities to which allusion will be pre sently made. The histories of these communities generally agree that civilisation was introduced by persons who first appeared as strangers amidst the people already in possession of the country. Hence the question has a twofold aspect, viz., the origin of the earliest uncivilised as well as that of the earliest civilised tribes. It is possible, as the traditions suggest, that people have arrived from various quarters and at various times. As yet we have little positive evidence to rely upon, and caution is required in drawing conclusions from resemblances in customs or religion. For instance, to take one remarkable case. Amongst tribes living high up the Amazon basin there are customs which correspond with those in Borneo. In both areas we find blow-pipes for discharging arrows; large houses inhabited by several families and similarly constructed; baskets and bamboo boxes of almost identical form and construction; and the smoke-dried heads of enemies hung up in the houses. In one tribe on the Amazon the throwing-stick is used, and not the blow-pipe, which is employed by all the surrounding tribes ; the throwing-stick is also used by the Esquimaux, the Andaman Islanders, and the Australians. On the Amazon an arrow or spear is used for catching turtle, which has the barb loosely attached to the shaft, so that when the turtle disappears the shaft floats on the surface and indicates its movements and position. The Australians catch turtle in precisely the same way. Again, many other customs are common to the Americans and tribes living in areas far remote from them, with which they have no apparent direct relationship. If these analogies were always proofs of affinities, then we might infer, as has been done, that America was first peopled by emigrants from the opposite shores of Africa, W. Europe, E. Asia, and Polynesia. In the great valley of the Mississippi and its mighty tributaries, the Ohio and Missouri, are the remains of the works of an extinct race of men, who seem to have made advances in civilisation far beyond the races of red men dis covered there by the first European adventurers. These remains consist chiefly of tumuli and ramparts of earth, enclosing areas of great extent and much regularity of form. Some of them recall the barrows of Europe and of Asia, or the huge mounds and ramparts of Mesopotamia, as displayed at Babylon and Nineveh ; while others remind us of the ruined hippodromes and amphitheatres of the Greeks and Romans. In that part of North America the barrows are usually truncated cones ; but in advancing farther south, they often assume the figure of four-sided pyramids in suc cessive stages, with flattened tops, like the Teocallis, or temples of Mexico and Yucatan. They have been accurately described, and many of them delineated in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, from the researches of Messrs Squier and Davis. The barrows and ramparts are constructed of mingled earth and stones ; and from their solidity and extent, must have required the labour of a numerous population, with leisure and skill sufficient to undertake combined and vast operations. The barrows often contain human bones, and the smaller tumuli appear to have been tombs ; but the larger, especially the quadrangular mounds, would seem to have served as temples to the early inhabitants. These barrows vary in size, from a few feet in circumference and elevation, to structures with a basal circumference of 1000 or 2000 feet, and an altitude of from GO to 90 feet, resem bling, in dimensions, the vast tumulus of Alyattes neai Sardis. One in Mississippi is said to cover a base of six acres. The ramparts also vary in thickness, and in height from 6 to 30 feet, and usually enclose areas varying from 100 to 200 acres. Some contain 400 ; and one on the Mis souri has an area of GOO acres. The enclosures generally are very exact circles or squares, sometimes a union of both ; occasionally they form parallelograms, or follow the sinuo sities of a hill ; and in one district, that of Wisconsin, they assume the fanciful shape of men, quadrupeds, birds, or ser pents, delineated with some ingenuity, on the surface of undulating plains or wide savannahs. These ramparts are usually placed on elevations or hills, or on the banks of streams, so as to show that they were erected for defensive purposes, and their sites are judiciously chosen for this end. The area enclosed, therefore, bears no proportion to the relative labour bestowed on such ramparts : thus, in Ohio, an area of not more than 40 acres is enclosed by mounds of a mile and a half in circumference ; and on the Little Miami, in the same state, is found an enclosure fully four miles round, that contains an area of about 100 acres. These remains are not solitary and few, for in the state of Ohio they amount to at least 10,000. The enclosures in the form of animals are more rare than those now noticed, and seem nearly confined to Wisconsin. One of these represents a gigantic man with two heads, the size of which may be estimated, by the body being 50 feet long, and 25 feet across the breast. Another on a slope near Bush Creek, represents a tolerably designed snake, with an oval ball in its mouth; the undulating folds of its body and spiral of its tail extending to a length of 700 feet. The forms of quadrupeds and birds are also characteristically represented in these works. Those that have been explored contain human bones ; but, though the Indians deposit their dead within them occasionally, they have no tradition of their having belonged to their ancestors. The most pro bable supposition respecting them is that of Mr E. C. Taylor, that each was the sepulchral monument of a different tribe, who have all disappeared from America. The question immediately suggests itself, to what people must we ascribe those vast works 1 They can scarcely be the works of the ancestors of the red men discovered by Europeans in North America. Neither can we ascribe them to the early Greenland and Iceland colonists, who seem never to have passed westward of the Alleghanie.s. We can scarcely attribute them to the somewhat apocryphal advent of the Welsh Madoc. Can their authors be the people obscurely mentioned in the Icelandic soyas, as the inhabitants of New Iceland ? A curious tradition of the present Iroquois records, that when the Lenni Lenapi, the common ancestors of the Iro quois and other tribes, whose language is still widely spread among the Indians, advanced from the north-west to the Mississippi, they found on its eastern side a great nation more civilised than themselves, who lived in fortified towns and cultivated the ground. This people at first granted the Lenni Lenapi leave to pass tlfrough their territories to seek