In respect to her facility and opportunities for advancing the cause of
scientific knowledge, Harvard University certainly stands pre-eminent.
She has a splendid astronomical observatory, and laboratories for
chemistry and physics unexcelled elsewhere. Her botanical garden is the
only one for instruction of any consequence in the Union, and its
director, Asa Gray, is the chief of American botanists. In the Museum of
Comparative Zoology, founded by Louis Agassiz and sustained by his son,
Alexander Agassiz, Cambridge possesses the most productive, and in some
respects the completest, museum of animal life in the United States,
while it offers to the laboratory student of natural history advantages
which he can find equalled nowhere else in the whole world. Last, and
most modern, it has a museum of anthropology which in point of material
is rivalled only by the National Museum at Washington, and in point of
instructiveness is probably in advance of anything yet attained in the
United States, despite its youth and small resources. This school and
storehouse is the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology,
whose merits deserve a wider recognition than they have yet received.
When, in 1866, George Peabody, of philanthropic fame, was distributing
his bequests among the educational institutions of the Eastern States,
he was desirous of giving to Harvard a certain sum of money, but was
puzzled as to its proper application. It was suggested to him to endow a
department of archaeological research, and his proposition to that effect
was considered by several friends of the university. The institution had
peculiar needs at that time. Its finances generally were weak. The
library and the zoological museum especially needed money, and the idea
of a special department of prehistoric science was entirely new. It was
decided, however, not to attempt to influence Mr. Peabody away from his
own plan. President Walker saw that European minds were eagerly turning
toward studies of primitive man, that the interest in the subject would
grow from year to year, and that, as the first museum in the country
devoted to this branch, it would have the best chance for securing
collections rapidly going to destruction or distributed through private
cabinets. More than all, the fittest man to take charge of it was at
hand, in the person of Professor Jeffries Wyman. On the 3d of November,
1866, therefore, the arrangements were completed, and Mr. Peabody
delivered to a board of trustees one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
as an endowment. On the first of the following month Dr. Wyman began his
curatorship.
As yet, of course, there was no museum. As a nucleus, Professor Wyman
contributed some Indian implements and crania, the nooks and corners of
the college were ransacked for stray skulls, stone axes and arrow-heads,
pottery that had been ploughed up in the suburbs, and relics of
colonial days, all of which, when brought together, served to fill a few
empty cases in a room of Boylston Hall. Soon afterward, printed
circulars were issued, and gifts began to flow in from the neighborhood,
illustrating the life of the native races at and just before the time of
the Pilgrims' landing. Several societies in Boston made permanent
deposits of ethnological accumulations in the infant establishment; Mr.
E. G. Squier, the Peruvian explorer, sent a Peruvian mummy of great
value, with seventy-five crania, and promised larger gifts; the
Smithsonian Institution gave a lot of duplicates, many of which were
gathered by the great Wilkes Exploring Expedition; the Honorable Caleb
Cushing forwarded antiquities gathered by his command during the Mexican
war; and several famous collections were bought in Europe, illustrating
the stone and bronze ages. Thus public interest was stimulated, and even
at the end of the first year a very presentable sketch of a picture of
the aboriginal people of the world was to be seen in that small room in
Boylston Hall. It was accessible to any interested visitors, and began
to receive attention from the scientific world, particularly after the
first annual report appeared in January, 1868, containing an original
essay by the curator and a full statement of the growing importance of
the museum.
From this beginning the work went steadily on. Contributions from
private and public sources came without stint. The fund of the museum
available for explorations and the purchase of collections was
judiciously expended year by year, and each annual report contained news
of great interest to _savants_. The amount of material gathered speedily
outgrew its original quarters, and a new story was added to Boylston
Hall for the reception of the museum. At the end of seven years the
catalogue showed over eight thousand entries, one entry in many cases
covering a series of objects. Then a great calamity happened: Jeffries
Wyman died.
Wyman had been the soul of the whole enterprise. At the founding of the
museum he gave up those studies in anatomy and natural history which had
made him famous and furnished him so sure a foundation as an
anthropologist, in order to devote himself entirely to the new
enterprise. His death occurred in September, 1874, closely following
that of his great associate in Cambridge, Louis Agassiz.
Dr. Wyman had found an eager companion in his studies and excursions,
during several years preceding his death, in Frederick W. Putnam, who
was almost the only man in the neighborhood of Boston having either
interest or capability (not to speak of opportunity) for such pursuits.
A Salem lad, he was one of that group of students whom the elder Agassiz
gathered round him when he began teaching at Harvard,--a group
comprising Alpheus Hyatt, A. E. Verrill, J. A. Allen, Edward S. Morse,
N. S. Shaler, A. S. Packard, Jr., and others now of worldwide
reputation. Putnam was an all-round zoologist, but his specialty was
fishes. Accident, nearly thirty years ago, turned his attention to the
shell-heaps and the primitive implements of his home-neighborhood. The
only man to whom he could go for guidance in studying these was Dr.
Jeffries Wyman, at that time his instructor in comparative anatomy. Thus
the two men were drawn more and more together, and when Wyman organized
the new museum Putnam found much time for helping him, although at that
time he was in charge of the Salem Museum, an editor of "The American
Naturalist," a publisher, and the permanent secretary of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, a position which he still
retains. It happened, consequently, that upon Dr. Wyman's decease Mr.
Putnam was the only man suitable and available to become his successor,
and he was quickly appointed to fill the vacancy.
Sixty thousand dollars of the original fund had been set aside by
Peabody as a building-fund, but he decreed that this sum should be
allowed to grow until it amounted to at least a hundred thousand
dollars. This limit was attained in ten years, and in 1876 a building
was begun for the accommodation of the museum. The college gave the
ground,--a lot on Divinity Avenue, nearly opposite the old Divinity
School, and close to the great structure occupied by the Museum of
Comparative Zoology. Surrounded by green lawns and avenues of old trees,
it is the pleasantest spot in all that charming city. The building was
completed and entered in 1878. It is of brick, four stories in height,
thoroughly fire-proof, simple in design, and tasteful in ornamentation.
The present structure is only a fifth of what the whole building is
designed ultimately to be. Two rooms yet remain to be opened to the
public, but their fitting will not long be delayed. Its spacious doors
open on Divinity Avenue, and there let us enter and glance at its
treasures.
The entrance-hall is a square well in the centre of the building,
accommodating the broad stairways and galleries, and affording room for
many large objects, such as carved figures of stone and the models of
the ruined houses and present pueblos of the village Indians of the
Southwest. The walls are of finished brick.
On the left a large room is devoted to the office, to the reception of
new specimens, and to the library, which is intended to include only
works pertaining to this special study. On the right opens the room
where naturally and properly begins our survey of the museum. Like the
other apartments, it occupies the whole of one side of the building, and
is about thirty-five by forty feet in dimensions. Its ceiling is
twenty-two feet in height, but a broad gallery runs around all four
sides, which adds almost as much exhibition-space as would a second
story, without spoiling the open and well-lighted effect of a lofty
room. Glass cases cover the walls above and below; upon the floor stand
combined upright and table cases, resting upon long cabinets of
interchangeable drawers, and the gallery-rail supports a line of
narrow, flat cases. In each room is a fireplace, while all are well
heated in winter and comfortably ventilated in summer, so that they are
attractive to visitors.
This first room holds what is regarded by the curator as the most
important series of objects ever brought together illustrative of that
ancient people who built the mounds and the singular stone graves of the
southern and central portions of the United States. The contents of each
mound and grave are arranged by themselves, so that as one passes from
case to case a picture of the human life of the past is presented as
nearly perfect as can be constructed out of that part of the handiwork
of the people which has escaped decay. Here can be seen and studied the
many singular results of the potter's art, simple and complex in form
and varied in style of ornament; carvings in stone, shell, and bone;
implements and ornaments of stone, shell, bone, mica, clay, copper, and
other substances; fragments of cloth and twine twisted from vegetable
fibres, which have been preserved through charring. One case in this
room is devoted to a collection of objects from caves in Kentucky and
Tennessee, and contains many interesting fabrics, including a large
piece of cloth woven from bark-fibre, shoes formed by braiding leaves of
the cat-tail rush, and many other things kept for us in the dry air of
the caves through uncounted centuries. In the gallery are grouped
several collections from Mexico and Central America, which are
especially rich in pottery.
In the room, on the second floor, over this one are stored the most
ancient--most primitive--evidences of man's presence yet discovered in
the Atlantic States,--evidences in the shape not only of chipped stones
of his fashioning, but relics of his very frame, which incontestably
extend the period of human occupation along our Atlantic coast back at
least to the glacial era. I refer to the palaeolithic remains exhumed by
Dr. C. C. Abbott from the terraces of river-drift in the valley of the
Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. These deposits of pebbles and sand owe
their origin to the continental glacier, whose front reached in solid
mass almost to that locality; through them was worn the bed of the
present river, and whatever is contained in their undisturbed mass can
belong to no more recent date than the later days of the glacial period.
In these gravels near his home, when cut through by railway-building and
the wearing of the river-bank, Dr. Abbott found his palaeoliths under
such circumstances as left no doubt that they were quite as old as the
formation of the bed itself. If you are inexperienced, and take in your
hand one of these specimens by itself, it may seem to you simply a
small, broken boulder or a fragment from some ledge; but the trained eye
sees (what observation and experiment confirm) that fractures like those
on these specimens are not such as are made by accident; and when a
hundred specimens are displayed before you, all doubt as to their origin
vanishes at a glance.
Some of these relics are deeply eroded by the weather, others much less
so; some are pebbles that have required only a slight chipping to adapt
them to their owner's need, others sharp-edged, elaborately flaked,
"turtle-backed" weapons, similar in shape to much of the more modern and
finished work in flint. With few exceptions, however, these are made of
argillite, and in many cases they have lost the fineness of edge and
angle by weathering and by attrition against the gravel in which they
were rolled under glacial floods. They bear about the same relation in
their roughness and shapelessness to the carefully-worked relics of the
red Indian found on the surface, or in the accumulation of soil
resulting from the decay of countless generations of forest and herbage
which everywhere covers the old gravels, as the matchlock of the Pilgrim
Fathers bears to our target-rifle. But they are of human origin, and
assert the presence of humanity on the Atlantic coast of America at the
close of the glacial period just as logically as the teeth in the
green-sand argue sharks in the Cretaceous sea.
In these gravels are entombed scattered bones of the mastodon and other
extinct mammals, but it was long before there appeared any relic of a
human frame concerning which there could be no misapprehension. At last,
quite recently, Dr. Abbott exhumed a tooth, worn and washed and sunken
deep in the undisturbed drift,--a tooth of a contemporary of the
mastodon and of one of the makers of the argillite implements that
presupposed him; a man who never got beyond the palaeolithic stage,--the
earliest rudiments of a culture far beneath any savagery of historic
times in the Atlantic States. This silent witness of man's antiquity in
America is among the treasures of this museum which are unique and
priceless.
Who were these earliest men? and what has the museum to show similar to
this from other parts of the world? are questions that naturally present
themselves.
The only attempt at an answer to the first, with which I am acquainted,
is suggested by Dr. Abbott in chapter xxxii. of his "Primitive
Industry." After showing that during the last glacial epoch there were
no climatic conditions southward of the actual ice-cap which would
preclude the existence of men, since they would gradually become used to
the slow change (as did so many surviving forms of animal and vegetable
life), Dr. Abbott further clears the way by demonstrating that a strong
line of demarcation exists between the remains of these people and the
earliest traces of the "red Indian" race which Europeans found in
possession of the body of the continent; this gap is not one of
stratification, or, perhaps, of time, but is shown by a strong
distinctness in the character of the worked stones forming the weapons
and implements of each people in respect to both material and degree of
perfection. Considering further the probability (from known evidence)
that the Innuit (Eskimos) once occupied all the interior of the
continent, together with the ascertained fact that on the Atlantic
coast this people quite recently extended as far south as Cape Cod, and
comparing the drift-implements with the exceeding rudeness of the stone
implements possessed by the Eskimos when first seen by the whites, Dr.
Abbott concludes that in the palaeolithic men we have the ancestors of
the Innuit, who were driven to Arctic fastnesses by a new and more
powerful race of invaders, who retained possession of the great mass of
the continent, and whose descendants remain among us yet.
Now, to examine what the Old World has to show, if anything, similar to
these rudiments of civilization, we must go to the opposite gallery,
where we shall find, in the collections from the river-drift of England
and Southern France, implements equally rude and old-looking, but made
of flint instead of the inferior argillite with which the American
autochthones contented themselves. Next, a little better on the whole
than these, we shall see the relics of stone and bone--the latter not
only whittled and broken, but often ornamentally carved--which came from
caves in England and Southern Europe: some have been dug from beneath
thick layers of stalagmite.
In Europe, then, palaeolithic man is separately considered as the
River-drift man and the Cave man, the former believed to be much the
older people, and known by the series of simplest patterns of stone
implements found in the late Pleistocene river-beds. This River-drift
man wandered over the greater part of Europe and Asia, leading a
nomadic, feral life,--a hunter of very low order, like the modern
Australian. The Cave man, on the contrary, seems to have been restricted
in his range, which of itself is considered indicative of different age
and race, and he was far in advance of the River-drift man in the
variety and workmanship of his weapons and implements. Between both, or
rather between the era of the latter and that of the men who made
implements of polished stone and chipped flint, there is just such a
broad distinction as obtains in the United States between the traces of
palaeolithic and those of neolithic man.
The exact parallelism of the palaeolithic ages in the Eastern and Western
hemispheres is still more or less disputed by anthropologists, but the
general opinion seems to be this: If not two peoples, the River-drift
men and the Cave men were certainly distinct sections of the same race
which found their way into Europe at widely-separated times, the former
having far the higher antiquity. It is believed by Dr. Boyd Dawkins
(from whose celebrated cave-explorations in Great Britain has been
derived a representative series of specimens for the museum) "that the
River-drift man is as completely extinct at the present time as the
woolly rhinoceros or the cave bear" which he fed upon; but all authors
identify the men of the caves with the Eskimos, who there, as well as
here, were forced to retreat by the pressure of a race of new-comers,
superior in prowess and cultivation, whose traces we call _neolithic_.
In America, however (where the Atlantic coast, at least, does not afford
caverns like those of Western Europe), the evidence all goes to show
that palaeolithic men were in continuous possession of the region from
the time when they first appeared until driven northward by the Indians,
perhaps close upon the retreat of the great glacier. Returning to the
Abbott collection, we shall find that it contains a large quantity of
rude arrow-points, scrapers, and other forms of stone implements, some
of which are much better than any of the "turtle-backs" or other
palaeoliths from the lower gravels. These are found in the upper part of
the drift, resting upon them and buried in the humus _above_: in the
latter position they are, of course, more or less intermixed with the
jasper and quartz relics of the modern Indian; but these are always made
of argillite, are ruder, are much weather-worn, and never occur in the
"open-air workshops" of the Indians, where quantities of flint-flakes
and unfinished implements of jasper and quartz and of superior pattern
are found lying together within a limited space. These argillite points
and scrapers seem to belong to the palaeolithic man toward the end of his
"age," manifesting a higher stage of culture reached by gradual
improvement. It thus appears that while in Europe the rude-stone age was
divided into two eras,--the River-drift and the Cave,--in Eastern
America the aboriginal Eskimos held sway without interruption, and
slowly bettered themselves through unnumbered centuries, until at last
they were driven into icy exile by merciless conquerors, where, no
doubt, they lost much of the advancement they had gained under more
gracious conditions.
It will be observed that we were obliged to go to another part of the
building in order to see what remains came from palaeolithic Europe and
make our comparisons. This is in accordance with the plan of the museum,
which arranges its treasures according to locality, and not according to
shape, utility, relative age, degree of finish, or any other style of
classification. All the objects found in a particular spot--taken from
one grave or a single shell-heap, or, in wider range, belonging to the
same geographical region--are kept together, no matter how dissimilar
the associated articles may be. Arrangement on any other plan must
necessarily become to a greater or less extent the exponent of the views
of the one man or clique that controls the matter,--must involve a
theory, and hence prove an obstacle to the student who seeks an
unbiassed interpretation of the truth. If it does nothing more, it
destroys the proper perspective. For example, one of the cases in this
museum contains the contents of graves opened in an Indian cemetery on
Santa Catalina Island, California, comprising native work, mortars and
pots of stone,--for no native pottery occurs in the Californian
graves,--beads, flint arrow-heads, etc., together with Spanish swords,
stirrups, glass, and other articles of European manufacture. Separate
these associated articles,--put the arrow-heads and stone pots with a
vast number of other arrow-heads and stone pots,--and there would have
been nothing to show, except at the expense of long study, that their
date of use was no older than the Spanish invasion of California, or, in
the case of the iron-ware, that it had belonged to Indians who yet clung
to many of their native customs and manufactures. Shown together as they
were collected, one perceives at a glance, and the brain appreciates in
true perspective, the picture of life on Santa Catalina Island when
those graves were dug, perhaps three centuries ago. The importance and
value of this plan become more and more apparent as the student
advances. In the publications of the museum, and elsewhere, the curator
draws such conclusions as seem to him just from the materials he
possesses; but he regards it as due to the public that the specimens
themselves shall be exhibited as found, for the verification of his
explanations and the investigation of those who come afterward. The
first and foremost object of this museum--as it should be of every such
institution--is the preservation of historical evidence; the second, the
making it accessible in its original aspect for study. Ornamental
display, when in the least degree inconsistent with scientific uses, has
no place in any of the rooms. Nothing is put up because it is pretty;
and if the history of any specimen is at all doubtful, it is kept out of
sight, or else its label contains the proper cautions and queries.
Having scanned the relics of that far-away time which seems to have
preceded the coming even of the red men into the United States, let us
now see what the museum has to show of the arts and industries and
amusements of those "Indians" who were found in possession when
Europeans came to the New World.
The whole continent was inhabited by what was substantially the same
race of men, divided into many language-stocks, subdivided into a still
greater number of more or less cohesive tribes, and segregated into
innumerable bands or villages. As they varied in dialect, organization,
and environment, so were they greatly diversified in mental
accomplishments and in outward customs and belongings. In subordinate
points the characteristics of some divisions contrasted most pointedly
with those of others; yet in certain cardinal aspects the whole
population known in historic times from Tierra del Fuego to Eskimo-land
was a unit. All were red-skinned Americans, "tarred with the same
stick."[1] Moreover, it has been supposed that no race other than these
red men has ever permanently occupied any portion of the United States
between the departure of the palaeolithic Eskimos and the advent of
Europeans,--the "Mound-Builders" not excepted.
To the prehistoric relics and the modern manufactures of these natives
of America the Peabody Museum is chiefly devoted. The material preserved
was obtained by its original collectors in a variety of ways. Much of it
was gathered in farm-fields, where it had been turned up under the
plough one piece at a time. All parts of the United States are
represented, but some regions more plentifully than others, not only
because one district may contain more persons interested in the matter,
but because of the comparative scarcity of relics in some parts. One of
the most densely populated districts in the whole Union in Indian life
was the Atlantic slope of the Alleghanies; and the valleys of the
fishing-rivers draining this slope have yielded an enormous quantity of
examples of primitive wares, in the shape of architecture, pottery,
weapons, tools, and ornaments of stone, shell, horn, and metal.
No one point, probably, has yielded more than the farm and immediate
neighborhood of Dr. C. C. Abbott (heretofore referred to), at Trenton,
New Jersey. This farm occupies a bluff and wide meadows facing the
Delaware River. It was a location unexcelled in advantages for the
mild-mannered, sunshine-loving Leni-Lenape. On the dry high ground they
could build their lodges underneath great trees and find themselves upon
the highway of travel, while the rich bottom-lands gave them
never-exhausted planting-ground for their fields of maize. Better than
all, they could overlook not only these fields, but far away down the
river, and scan the approach of strangers, or watch the approach of the
returning parties of hunters and fishermen, whose canoes came up the
creeks to moorings at the very foot of the bluff. That this spot was
long tenanted by an Indian village there seems ample proof. Almost every
species of Indian handiwork, in stone, bone, and clay, known to the
Atlantic coast has been found in and about this farm during the past ten
years, and the total yield of a square mile in that locality has been
nearly twenty-five thousand specimens. The great majority of these are
now in the Peabody Museum, and they have furnished Dr. Abbott with the
material for our most valuable book on the stone age in North America,
entitled "Primitive Industry" (George A. Bates, Salem, 1881). They
consist of varied series of axes, celts, hammers, bolas, knives, drills,
scrapers, mortars and pestles, food-vessels and agricultural tools,
fishing- and hunting-implements, spear- and arrow-points, club-heads,
daggers, and other weapons, pipes and gaming-stones, ceremonial and
ornamental objects,--all of stone,--besides a deal of pottery (chiefly
in fragments), bone-work, and implements of copper, probably procured
from other tribes.
Then there is another source of supply,--the shell-heaps. It was the
custom of all the aborigines who lived anywhere near the sea to go to
the shore in summer--the whole band or a group of families together--and
camp there for weeks or months. Certain spots were resorted to annually,
just as we go year after year to our favorite sea-side hotel. The time
there was spent chiefly in catching and eating salt-water food, and,
most of all, oysters and clams. Our "clam-bake" is a survival of their
feasts on the beach. Of course under such circumstances extended heaps
of castaway shells and fish-bones would accumulate, and become of
dimensions which seem extraordinary only when we forget the lapse of
time since they were begun. Many objects, some castaway, some lost,
would become intermixed with the loose surface shells and be rapidly
buried beyond further disturbance. Thus an exploration of these heaps of
refuse might be expected to disclose, and really does show, a great
variety of indestructible indications of the people around whose
summer-lodges they were formed,--how they lived, what they fed upon, and
the degree of skill and culture to which they had attained. Scores of
these shell-heaps from Maine to Texas have been excavated by private
persons or by the agency of the museum, and the yield of each, however
miscellaneous, is accessible to us. We may make out from the bones a
list of the animals upon which the makers fed, we may tell from the
stone implements how the men hunted and fished, from the awls, needles,
skin-dressers, etc., of bone and horn with what skill the women worked,
and largely what materials they used, while the bits of baked clay mark
their position in the ceramic scale,--a well-accepted standard of
progress. Nor are these things mixed and confused when deposited in the
museum. All from each shell-heap are kept together, and specimens may
thus be compared with one another all along the coast-line; or the
visitor may go to another room, where the great Rose collection from
Denmark is displayed, and compare them with the relics from the
shell-heaps (_Kjoekken-moedings_) and village-sites of Jutland, where
a parallel life was lived and the monuments of savage homesteads line
the Baltic beaches.
Similarly the sites of villages, towns, and cities have contributed
largely to this collection of native antiquities. This is especially
true of the Southwest, of Central America, and the Andean region, where
the Aztec, the Maya, the Quichuas, the Aymaras, and other
highly-organized nations held sway over wide regions. The greatest
remains of these people lie in their architecture, the ruins of which
astonish the traveller in Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru. Beyond fragments of
carving, this, of course, is unavailable to a museum; but beside the
images and fragments of representative ornament engraved in stone that
have been brought from these ruins hang pictures of the entire building
or city, so that the visitor's memory is refreshed, and he is enabled to
place the relics in their proper relation to the whole.
In regard to the remarkable remains of the ancient "cliff-dwellers," who
inhabited the canons along the south-western boundary of Colorado, and
are considered the ancestors of the pueblo-building Indians whose
terraced community-houses crown isolated buttes in the midst of the
Arizona deserts and along the Rio Grande, a more effective mode of
representation has been adopted. Upon several of the large hall-tables
will be seen, under glass, models in plaster, colored with exactness, of
those great houses and all their externals. These models were made by
Messrs. Jackson and Holmes, of the United States Geological Survey, and
are wonderfully truthful and instructive. A similar plan has been
adopted in a few other cases to show savage architecture, and it has
proved so effective and interesting that its use should be extended. The
little model of a lacustrine village restored from the vestiges
discovered in the Swiss lakes gives one a better notion of how the
lake-dwellers really conducted their peaceful life and guarded
themselves against their savage enemies of the forest and mountains
than any amount of verbal description could do.
Beyond any one of these in importance as a source of mementos
illustrating the life and art of the aborigines is the burial-place. Not
only do well-recognized graves and cemeteries yield valuable material
whenever explored, but a large part of that gathered in ploughed fields
and on ancient town-sites was undoubtedly put there with the dead, or as
a subsequent offering. Nothing is more fortunate for the science of
archaeology than that the primitive Americans held the notions they did
respecting death and the hereafter; for through these theories and the
practices to which they gave rise an enormous amount of material has
been preserved to us which otherwise would have been lost. It is not too
much to say, I feel sure, that were all other traces of prehistoric
America obliterated from our knowledge and possession save that which
has been and may be derived from burial-places, we might still
reconstruct nearly as complete a picture as can now be outlined.
The modes of disposal of the dead were various among the native races of
America, and most of them may be matched by customs obtaining in the
Eastern hemisphere or the Polynesian islands. The commonest method was
some form of _inhumation_ in pits, graves, or holes in the ground, in
stone graves or cysts, in mounds, beneath or in houses, or in caves.
_Embalmment_, to a limited extent, was also practised, the corpse being
wrapped in garments and made up into a bundle before being placed in the
earth, a cave, charnel-house, or in a box mounted on a scaffold.
_Surface-burial_ was in use in some districts, the corpse being placed
in a pen, a hollow tree or log, or simply covered with loose earth, or
bark, or rocks forming cairns. In several regions, at various times,
_cremation_ was the rule, or at least a partial burning, the resulting
bones and ashes being preserved by some tribes and scattered by others.
_Aerial sepulture_ is the name given to another method, where the body
was left in the cabin or wigwam, deposited on scaffolds or trees, in
boxes or canoes, sometimes supported by posts, sometimes resting on the
ground, placed in baskets perched on pinnacles of rock or hung to the
branches of trees,--the last being the mode often adopted in the case of
children. Lastly, some nations were accustomed to sink their dead
beneath the water, or turn them adrift in canoes.
It is manifest that many of these practices could not be shown, from the
nature of the case or the limits of space, except by pictures or models;
but certain forms are represented in the great stocking-foot-shaped jars
of coarse earthenware which served as coffins in the Nicaraguan region,
in cinerary urns, in bones and skulls prepared to be kept as a sacred
heirloom in the family, and in various descriptions of mummies, swathed
and unswathed, chiefly from Peru and from caves in Mexico.
It has always been the habit of savage and semi-barbarous people, the
world over, to bury with their dead or destroy at the grave more or less
property which may or may not have belonged to the deceased persons.
Among some of the American Indians this was carried to such an extent as
utterly to impoverish all the relatives, who, in fact, seem to have
accumulated wealth solely for the purpose of funereal display. By a few
tribes, like the Natchez, human sacrifice--forcibly of slaves,
voluntarily on the part of relatives--was enjoined whenever a prominent
man died. In most nations, however, the sacrifices were limited to
horses, dogs, and food-animals, ornaments and implements. It was
believed that in the spirit-land to which the soul was going this
property would be of service and these slaves and wives and various
objects would be necessary in order that the dead man might be well
fitted to pursue his immortal journey. Therefore, when a grave is opened
or any form of burial-place is found by the archaeologist, he is almost
sure to obtain a quantity of imperishable property,--weapons and
ornaments of stone, bone, or metal, clay food-dishes, and the
like,--the history of which is identified with that of the deceased and
tells his story.
Two classes of burial-places have been the subject of special
exploration and study by this museum, generally under the personal
supervision of Professor Putnam, or of Mr. Lucien Carr, his assistant.
One of these are the strange stone cysts of Tennessee, which occur in
thousands in the Cumberland valley. They were from two to four feet
below the surface, and were made of large slabs of stone, placed
edgewise to form the sides and ends, on which other flat stones rested,
forming the top of the grave. The bottoms of these cysts were sometimes
lined with small stones, oftener with large potsherds, while in some
instances the lining was probably of bark. While most of the cysts
contained only a single body, two, three, and even five skeletons were
found together in a few instances. Each grave held a greater or less
quantity and variety of articles of native manufacture. Stone implements
were rarer than is customary elsewhere, but those present were unusually
fine. One of the skeletons had a stone arrow-head embedded in the spine.
The pottery was more abundant, and consisted for the most part of
well-made water-bottles and food-dishes, ornamented by incised lines or
designs in color. Implements and ornaments of bone, stone, and shell,
beads of terra-cotta and shell, small mollusks perforated for stringing,
a few carved pipes of pottery, stone, etc., were also gathered and
brought to Cambridge.
While cemeteries of this character are known to have extended over wide
areas of lowland, stone graves were also built into low pyramids by
placing one tier on top of another until from four to six had been laid.
Each tier as completed--probably each grave as added--would be covered
with earth, so that the whole formed a burial-mound fifty feet or more
in diameter and eight or ten feet high (the bottom tier of graves being
sunken), containing perhaps two hundred bodies. Not only within the
cysts, but on and around the stones throughout the mound, were exhumed
many relics, especially of pottery, showing that food and offerings had
been laid upon the graves after they were closed. Nowhere was there the
least indication of any contact with Europeans; and these cemeteries
undoubtedly antedate the coming of the whites.
Among the most strikingly interesting discoveries made during the past
few years is the burial-place in the Miami valley of Ohio, with its
hundreds of singular pits dug in the hard clay below the leaf-mould in
which the skeletons are found. This place was discovered by the members
of the Madisonville Literary and Scientific Society, which, during three
or four years, carried on an exploration under the personal direction of
Dr. C. L. Metz. In 1880 the Peabody Museum was invited to join in the
exploration, and Professor Putnam visited the locality soon afterward.
The result of this co-operation is apparent in the large collections
brought to the museum, where the contents of several of these strange
pits are shown, as well as thousands of objects obtained from others or
occurring with the skeletons in the leaf-mould. More than fifteen
hundred pits and a thousand skeletons have now been uncovered and
examined, several acres having been dug over, foot by foot, with
painstaking completeness.
The pits, hollowed out of the underlying clay, are from two to seven
feet in depth, and about four feet in diameter, hidden under a stratum
of slowly-accumulated leaf-mould two feet thick. The majority of them,
evidently, had been made previous to the burial of the bodies, though
some were more recent than a few of the graves. The labor expended in
digging them, and the peculiar character of their contents, render it
not improbable that they were made in pursuance of some superstition or
as part of a religious rite. This is an unsatisfactory generality, but
more cannot yet be said with safety.
The average pit may be said to be filled with ashes in more or less
well-defined layers. Near the top there may be a mixture of gravel, but
underneath are found only fine gray ashes to the depth of one or two
feet, in which often occur thin strata of charcoal or sand, while at the
bottom burnt stones have often been found. Throughout the whole mass of
ashes and sand, from top to bottom, are bones of fishes, reptiles,
birds, and mammals. The larger bones, such as those of the elk, deer,
and bear, are broken; and all, apparently, are those of animals used for
food. With the bones are always many shells of fresh-water mussels
(_Unionidae_), the more massive of which have a large circular piece cut
out near the centre. Fragments of pottery (rarely a whole vessel) also
abound in each pit, quantities of implements made of bones and antlers,
some forms of which are unlike anything known elsewhere, implements of
chipped and polished stone, pipes carved in various shapes from stone,
and objects of copper. In some pits several bushels of charred corn,
which had been covered with bark matting, lay underneath the ashes; and
in three instances human skeletons, or parts of skeletons, have been
found in the pits,--a fact which seems to have no special significance.
On the hill-side near this great cemetery is to be seen what doubtless
is the site of the permanent village of the people who made the
ash-pits. This site is indicated by several earth-circles, the
explorations of which, prosecuted by means of trenches, revealed in the
centre, upon the hard clay, beneath about two feet of accumulated
leaf-mould, fireplaces made of large stones, enclosing beds of ashes
mingled with potsherds, flint-flakes, burnt bones, and perforated shells
like those in the pits. The few things disclosed within the circles, and
the abundance of household-utensils and refuse found in the ashes in the
pits, suggest the possibility that on special occasions all the articles
in the house, with ornaments, weapons, and other personal property, were
partly destroyed by fire, gathered up with the ashes, and deposited in a
pit dug for the purpose, while the great number of broken bones of
various animals indicates that at such times feasts were held. A custom
like this, which is quite consistent with the Indian character as
manifested within the historic period, would account for the character
of the contents of the pits, while their great number would indicate a
long-continued occupation of the village.
Another phase of American archaeology remains to be considered. It is
represented in the museum by a unique and most interesting series of
specimens illustrating every detail with the greatest particularity and
exactness, so that future students need lose no essential feature of the
picture that lay before the original explorers and describers. In the
northeastern part of Anderson township, near the Little Miami River, a
group of earth-works exist which are among the most remarkable of all
the thousands scattered throughout the Ohio valley. The owner gave to
the museum the exclusive right of exploration, and the locality was
mapped and investigated with that scientific care which alone can give
the results entire credibility and value. Several of the thirteen mounds
within one of the encircling walls contained basins or "altars" of
burned clay, on two of which were literally thousands of objects of
interest, embracing forms unlike anything known before, and exhibiting
an unsuspected degree of cultivation in their makers,--cultivation
which, it is fair to suppose, could have been arrived at only after a
long period of peaceful and prosperous life in the community. I have
space to mention only a few of these articles.
One altar contained about two bushels of ornaments made of stone, mica,
shells, pearls, and the teeth of bears and other animals. Pearls were so
plentiful, indeed, that as many as sixty thousand are in the possession
of the museum. They seem to have been derived mainly, if not wholly,
from the fresh-water mussels, and are of all shapes and sizes, out of
which might be selected hundreds of perfect spheres, from the size of
bird-shot to that of a cherry. What splendid necklaces must the latter
have made! But, alas for the mercenary collector, all are ruined by
fire,--a fact advantageous to science. Like nearly all the other
objects, every pearl is perforated for suspension.
Articles of copper are none too common anywhere, and the collection of
relics hammered from that native metal (which must have been obtained,
through barter, from the tribes that mined it on Lake Superior, showing
how extensive were the tradings of those days) has not only thrown much
light on this branch of ancient art and craftsmanship in America
generally, but added some peculiar forms to the museum's stock, chiefly
in the line of pendent ornaments. One of the forms procured, represented
by many specimens, was a spool-shaped ear-ring: something like it had
been seen heretofore, but its purpose had been a mystery. Several of the
ornaments of copper were covered with native silver, which had been
hammered out into thin sheets and folded over the copper. A few were
similarly covered with gold; and this is the first time this metal has
been found in the mounds.
This would show that beauty was highly appreciated by the natives of the
Little Miami valley, say, a thousand years ago. That they had a real
regard for art, in advance of what has usually been accorded to the red
men of the Northern States, is evident from other contents of these two
altar-mounds. One altar contained several sheets of mica and thin plates
of copper out of which had been cut some designs in scroll-work which
for symmetry and elegance of curve merit a high place; also heads of
animals and a grotesque human profile, which are of less worth, but
notable in the dearth heretofore of things of that sort among _relicta_
from the mounds.
Far in advance of these, however, are the figurines of terra-cotta found
on another altar. They had all been badly burnt, and many of them seemed
to have been broken purposely before being placed upon the altar; but it
has been found possible to unite many pieces, and enough remains to
show at a glance the great importance these small and graceful human
images will have in the study of early American art. They are from four
to six inches in height, partly nude, and carefully moulded in regard to
anatomy. The method of wearing the hair, the use of the button-like or
spool-shaped ear-rings, the expression of the features, etc., are all in
the highest degree instructive, while the whole effect is pleasing and
artistic. Associated with them were two remarkable dishes carved from
stone, in the shape of animals, showing an unusual degree of skill and
taste.
A discovery in the same mounds which interests scientific men even more
than this, or than anything else has done for a long time, is the
finding in these mounds of quantities of meteoric iron. It was said by
Hildreth ("Archaeologia Americana," i., 1820, page 163) that traces of
iron-work had been found in a mound at Marietta, Ohio; but a
re-examination of the specimens preserved at Worcester showed that they
were of oxidized copper. The present discovery was therefore the first
of its kind, and excited so much interest that chemists and
mineralogists have been called into council with the archaeologists on
the subject. This is the only kind of crude iron that is malleable; and
that the people who built the mounds, or any other of the native races
of the United States, had any knowledge of working iron-ore, yet remains
to be shown. Some of the iron was in its original shape,--unworked
nodules; a part in solid bars, etc.; but much of it had been treated
like silver,--that is, hammered into sheets and used in thin plates as
an ornamental covering for ear-rings and pendants. The mixture of nickel
in this meteoric iron has not only preserved it, but caused a polished
surface to gleam white, as though plated with silver, while tarnishing
less easily than that metal. No doubt it was among the most highly
prized of all the treasures of those old days, and nothing more precious
than this could have been offered as a sacrifice, when, with lavish
hand, pearls and silver and gold, weapons and tools, household furniture
and products of the chase and the farm, were heaped upon the funeral
pyre or contributed to the sacrificial flame.
In materials illustrating the life and crafts of the Indians during the
last century and at present, this museum is not yet so well supplied as
some others,--that at Washington, for example, which has been
constituted the depository for the collections of scores of government
expeditions into the West and North. Nevertheless, some things of great
value and completeness in this way are already owned. Thus, in the South
American room may be seen a series of specimens illustrating the whole
operation of pottery-making among the Caribs of British Guiana. This was
obtained several years ago by Professor H. A. Ward, who bought the
entire stock of materials of a woman of that tribe whom he found at
work. These consisted of a mass of clay ready for the potter, a number
of vessels ready for the fire, others which had been burned, and several
ornamented in colors. The gourd scrapers of several shapes, with which
she smoothed the vessels, small, smooth stones used in polishing the raw
colors, and other appurtenances, are included, together with toy vessels
which the woman hastily pinched into shape and gave to her children as
playthings to amuse them while she worked, the forms of which help to
explain many similar articles found in ancient graves.
With like completeness, when Dr. E. Palmer was exploring for the museum
the nitre-caves in Northern Mexico, anciently occupied as places of
human sepulture, he sent with the "mummies" extracted from them a full
series of such natural products of the vicinity as would enable the
museum to exhibit the leaves, fibres, and other vegetable productions
from which the cloth, baskets, and so forth were constructed by the
people who placed their dead in the caves. Dr. Palmer also sent a full
set of the rude apparatus by which the present Indians of Mexico make
their cactus-cakes and syrup, from the thorn-tipped pole with which the
prickly fruit is gathered to the great earthen colanders through which
it is strained; also all the implements and utensils, the native still,
etc., used in making _pulque_ and in preparing and weaving the fibre of
the agave.
To go with greater detail into the treasures of this remarkable
collection, whose value is so great, not only historically, but in an
educational aspect (since it is readily accessible throughout and
instructively presented), is forbidden by the limits of space; but the
temptation to transgress is strong. I have said nothing, for example, of
the great series of crania, now many times larger than when Wyman
printed his papers in the early reports. A portion of this collection
has more recently been described by Mr. Lucien Carr, whose voluntary
services as an assistant at the museum have been of inestimable
advantage to it. I have alluded only incidentally to the department of
ceramics, which contains what is unquestionably the most important lot
of material ever brought together for the investigation of the history
and progress of the potter's art on the Western continent, from the
"cord-marked" potsherds of the shell-heaps to the fanciful creations of
Mexico and Peru.
It will be seen, then, to summarize briefly what this essay has said,
that the trustees of the Peabody Museum have secured to the public a
fire-proof building containing nearly four hundred thousand specimens
illustrating human progress in the "childhood of the world;" and these
have been placed under proper care and arranged in accordance with the
demands of modern anthropological science. An instructive and attractive
museum has been formed in this way, where, from time to time, free
descriptive lectures are given by the curator, and whither students may
go for special investigations with the assurance that, so far as America
is concerned, they have access to the most important collections that
have been brought together, while material for comparison with the
antiquities of other parts of the globe is not wanting.