Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/269



It is well known that the highest type of Village Indian life was found in Yucatan, Chiapas, and Guatemala, and that the standard declines with the advance of the type northward into Mexico and New Mexico, thus tending to show that it was best adapted to a warm climate; but it does not follow that we must look to these distant regions for the original home of the Mound-Builders. The nearest point from which they could have been derived was New Mexico, and that is rendered the probable point from physical considerations, and still more from their greater nearness in condition to the Village Indians of New Mexico, below whom they must be ranked. The migrations of the American Indian tribes were gradual movements under the operation of physical causes, occupying long periods of time and with slow progress. There is no reason for supposing, in any number of cases, that they were deliberate migrations with a definite destination. With maize, beans, and squashes (the staples of an established horticulture), the Village Indians were independent of fish and game as primary means of subsistence, and with the former they possessed superior resources for migrating over the wide expanses of open prairies between New Mexico and the Mississippi. The movement of the tribes who constructed the earth-works in question can be explained as a natural spread of Village Indians from the valley of the Rio Grande, or the San Juan, to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and thence northward to the valley of the Ohio, which was both easy and feasible. Its successful extension for any considerable distance north of the gulf was rendered improbable, by reason of the increasing severity of the climate. There are some reasons for supposing that climate delayed the movement for centuries, and finally defeated the attempt to transplant permanently even the New Mexican type of village life into a northern temperature so much lower during the greater part of the year.

A number of archæologists, who have considered the question of the probable anterior home of the Mound-Builders, are inclined to derive them