Produced by Richard Tonsing, Julia Miller and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Essays of an Americanist.
I. ETHNOLOGIC AND ARCHÆOLOGIC.
II. MYTHOLOGY AND FOLK LORE.
III. GRAPHIC SYSTEMS AND LITERATURE.
IV. LINGUISTIC.
BY
DANIEL G. BRINTON. A. M., M. D.,
PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN ARCHÆOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
PENNSYLVANIA, PRESIDENT OF THE NUMISMATIC AND ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY OF
PHILADELPHIA, PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN FOLK-LORE SOCIETY, MEMBER OF THE
AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY, THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, THE
SOCIÉTÈ ROYALE DES ANTIQUAIRES DU NORD, THE SOCIÉTÈ AMÉRICAINE DE
FRANCE, THE BERLINER ANTHROPOLOGISCHE GESELLSCHAFT, THE REAL ACADEMIA DE
HISTORIA, MADRID, ETC., ETC.
PHILADELPHIA:
PORTER & COATES.
1890.
COPYRIGHT
BY D. G. BRINTON.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE.
The word “Essays” appears on the title of this book in the sense in
which old Montaigne employed it—attempts, endeavors. The articles which
make up the volume have been collected from many scattered sources, to
which I have from time to time contributed them, for the definite
purpose of endeavoring to vindicate certain opinions about debated
subjects concerning the ancient population of the American continent.
In a number of points, as for example in the antiquity of man upon this
continent, in the specific distinction of an American race, in the
generic similarity of its languages, in recognizing its mythology as
often abstract and symbolic, in the phonetic character of some of its
graphic methods, in believing that its tribes possessed considerable
poetic feeling, in maintaining the absolute autochthony of their
culture—in these and in many other points referred to in the following
pages I am at variance with most modern anthropologists; and these
essays are to show more fully and connectedly than could their separate
publication, what are my grounds for such opinions.
There is a prevailing tendency among ethnologists of to-day to underrate
the psychology of savage life. This error arises partly from an
unwillingness to go beyond merely physical investigations, partly from
judging of the ancient condition of a tribe by that of its modern and
degenerate representatives, partly from inability to speak its tongue
and to gain the real sense of its expressions, partly from preconceived
theories as to what a savage might be expected to know and feel. As
against this error I have essayed to show that among very rude tribes we
find sentiments of a high character, proving a mental nature of
excellent capacity in certain directions.
Several of the Essays have not previously appeared in print, and others
have been substantially re-written, so as to bring them up to the latest
researches in their special fields. Nevertheless, the reader will find a
certain amount of repetition in several of them, a defect which I hope
is compensated by the greater clearness which this repetition gives to
the special subject discussed.
_Philadelphia, February, 1890._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE iii, iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS v-xii
PART I.
ETHNOLOGIC AND ARCHÆOLOGIC.
INTRODUCTORY 17–19
A REVIEW OF THE DATA FOR THE STUDY OF THE PRE-HISTORIC
CHRONOLOGY OF AMERICA 20–47
Classification of Data. I. _Legendary_: of northern tribes;
of Peruvians, Mexicans and Mayas; limited range. II.
_Monumental_: pueblos of New Mexico; stone and brick
structures of Mexico, Central America and Peru; ruins of
Tiahuanaco; artificial shell heaps; the _sambaquis_ of
Brazil. III. _Industrial_: palæolithic implements; early
polished stone implements; dissemination of cultivated food
plants. IV. _Linguistic_: multitude and extension of
linguistic stocks; tenacity of linguistic form;
similarities of internal form; study of internal form. V.
_Physical_: racial classifications; traits of the American
type; permanence of the type. VI. _Geologic_: date of the
glacial epochs in North and South America; the earliest
Americans immigrants; lines of migrations. Importance of
archæological studies.
ON PALÆOLITHS, AMERICAN AND OTHER 48–55
The cutting instrument as the standard of culture; the
three “Ages” of Stone, Bronze and Iron; subdivisions of the
Age of Stone into Palæolithic and Neolithic; a true
“Palæolith”; subdivision of the Palæolithic period into the
epochs of “simple” and “compound” implements; palæolithic
finds along the Delaware river; the glacial period in
America; earliest appearance of man in America.
ON THE ALLEGED MONGOLIAN AFFINITIES OF THE AMERICAN RACE 56–66
A practical question; Cuvier’s triple division of the human
species; alleged Mongolian affinities in language; supposed
affinities in culture; imagined physical resemblances, as
color, cranial analogies, the oblique or “Mongoloid” eye,
etc. Insufficiency of all these.
THE PROBABLE NATIONALITY OF THE “MOUND-BUILDERS.” 67–82
Who were the “Mound-builders”? Known tribes as constructors
of mounds, the Iroquois, Algonkins, Cherokees and
Chahta-Muskoki family. Descriptions from De Soto’s
expedition; from Huguenots in Florida; from French writers
on Louisiana; great size of the southern mounds; probable
builders of Ohio mounds.
THE TOLTECS AND THEIR FABULOUS EMPIRE 83–100
Statement of the question; the current opinion; the adverse
opinion; Tula as an historic site; the Serpent-Hill; the
Aztec legends about Tula; date of the desertion of Tula;
meaning of the name Tula or Tollan; the mythical cyclus of
Tula; birth of Huitzilopochtli; myth of Quetzalcoatl at
Tula; his subjects, the Toltecs; purely fabulous narratives
concerning them.
PART II.
MYTHOLOGY AND FOLK-LORE.
INTRODUCTORY 101–103
THE SACRED NAMES IN QUICHE MYTHOLOGY 104–129
The Quiches of Guatemala, and their relationship; sources
of information. Their Sacred Book, the _Popol Vuh_; its
opening words; The name Hun-Ahpu-Vuch, the God of Light;
Hun-Ahpu-Utiu; Nim-ak, the Great Hog; Nim-tzyiz; Tepeu;
Gucumatz; Qux-cho and Qux-palo; Ah-raxa-lak and
Ah-raxa-sel; Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, the primal pair;
Cakulha; Huracan and Cabrakan; Chirakan, the god of the
Storm and the Earthquake; Xbalanque and his journey to
Xibalba, or the Descent into Hell.
THE HERO-GOD OF THE ALGONKINS AS A CHEAT AND LIAR 130–134
Micmac story of Gluskap, the Liar; the Cree god, the
Deceiver; Michabo and his tricks; psychological
significance of such stories.
THE JOURNEY OF THE SOUL 135–147
General belief in a soul; Egyptian theory of its fate; it
sinks and rises with the sun; invocation to Osiris; symbols
of the river, the boat, the dog, and the sacred numbers;
recurrence of these symbols in Greek, Vedantic and Norse
beliefs; the Aztec account of the soul’s journey to
Paradise. Origin of these symbolic narratives from the
apparent daily course of the Sun.
THE SACRED SYMBOLS IN AMERICA 148–162
The four symbols of the Ta Ki, the Triskeles, the Svastika
and the Cross; the prevalence of the Triskeles in the Old
World; the meaning of the Ta Ki in Chinese philosophy; the
Yin and Yang; the Svastika; origin illustrated from n
picture-writing; the Copan stone; the earth-plain; the
wheel-cross; winter-counts and year cycles; time-wheels and
sun-motions; the Four Ages and Tree of Life.
THE FOLK-LORE OF YUCATAN 163–180
Mental activity of the Mayas; the diviners; the “field
mass”; invocation to the rain-gods; fire-worship;
prognostics; transformations of sorcerers; nagualism; a
Maya witch story; the Balams; the Man of the Woods; stories
of dwarfs and imps; female deceivers; fabulous birds and
snakes.
FOLK-LORE OF THE MODERN LENAPE 181–192
Source of information; reminiscences of the tribe;
Messianic hopes; relics of the Stone Age; methods of
hunting and fishing; utensils, boats and houses; the native
games; the sweat-lodge; their canticos, and the derivation
of the term; medical knowledge; cure for rattlesnake bites;
native trephining; position of the Lenâpé as
“grandfathers”; wampum belts; totemic divisions;
peculiarities of the dialect; Lenâpé grammar.
PART III.
GRAPHIC SYSTEMS AND LITERATURE.
INTRODUCTORY 193–194
THE PHONETIC ELEMENTS IN THE GRAPHIC SYSTEMS OF THE MAYAS AND
MEXICANS 195–212
Material for the study; were the native hieroglyphs
phonetic? Character and arrangement of phonetic symbols;
the failure of Landa’s alphabet; phonetic signs in Maya
MSS.; hieroglyph of the firmament; phonetic terminals;
signs of cardinal points; Mexican phonetic elements;
principle of the rebus; examples; the ikonomatic system.
THE IKONOMATIC METHOD OF PHONETIC WRITING 213–229
Thought-Writing and Sound-Writing; the ikonomatic method
explained; illustrations from Egyptian inscriptions; from
the canting arms in heraldry; from the Mexican
picture-writing; values of position and colors;
determinatives and ideograms in Aztec MSS.; further
illustrations from Maya hieroglyphs; Chipeway pictography.
THE WRITING AND RECORDS OF THE ANCIENT MAYAS 230–254
1. Introductory—Phoneticism in Maya and Aztec writing. 2.
Descriptions by Spanish writers; by Peter Martyr; by Las
Casas; by Alonso Ponce; by Lizana; by Aguilar; by Buena
Ventura; by Cogolludo; by Soto-Mayor; by Landa; facsimile
of Landa’s alphabet; critiques on it; conclusions. 3.
References from native sources; Maya words for “writing,”
“book,” “calendar,” etc.; a prophecy of Ahkul Chel
translated. 4. The existing Codices; the Dresden Codex; the
Codex Peresianus; the Codex Troano; the Codex Cortesianus;
the mural paintings and inscriptions.
THE BOOKS OF CHILAN BALAM 255–273
High civilization of ancient Mayas; destruction of their
literature; modern Books of Chilan Balam; signification of
this name; contents of the Books; specimen of the
prophecies; linguistic value; opinion of Pio Perez; length
of the Maya year-cycles; hieroglyphs of the months and
days; the 13 _ahau katuns_; medical contents of the books.
ON THE “STONE OF THE GIANTS.” 274–283
Location of the Stone near Orizaba; its figures; refer to a
date in February, 1502; translation of the hieroglyphs, and
identification of the date as that of the death of the
Emperor Ahuitzotzin; the stone a sepulchral tablet.
NATIVE AMERICAN POETRY 284–304
Nature of poetry; principle of repetition; Eskimo nith
songs; other Eskimo songs; a Pawnee song; Kioway love
songs; a Chipeway serenade; Aztec love songs; war-songs of
the Otomis; of the Aztecs; of the Qquichuas; prophetic
chants of the Mayas. Faculty of poetry universal.
PART IV.
LINGUISTIC.
INTRODUCTORY 305–307
AMERICAN LANGUAGES, AND WHY WE SHOULD STUDY THEM. 308–327
Indian geographic names; language a guide to ethnology;
reveals the growth of arts and the psychologic processes of
a people; illustration from the Lenâpé tongue; structure of
language best studied in savage tongues; rank of American
tongues; characteristic traits; pronominal forms; idea of
personality; polysynthesis; incorporation; holophrasis;
origin of these; lucidity of American tongues; their
vocabularies; power of expressing abstract ideas;
conclusion.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT’S RESEARCHES IN AMERICAN LANGUAGES 328–348
What led Humboldt toward the American tongues; progress of
his studies; fundamental doctrine of his philosophy of
language; his theory of the evolution of languages; opinion
on American languages; his criterion of the relative
perfection of languages; not abundance of forms, nor verbal
richness; American tongues not degenerations; Humboldt’s
classification of languages; psychological origin of
Incorporation in language; its shortcomings; in simple
sentences; in compound sentences; absence of true formal
elements; the nature of the American verb.
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LANGUAGES 349–389
Study of the human species on the geographic system; have
American languages any common trait? Duponceau’s theory of
polysynthesis; Humboldt on Polysynthesis and Incorporation;
Francis Lieber on Holophrasis; Prof. Steinthal on the
incorporative plan; Lucien Adam’s criticism of it; Prof.
Müller’s inadequate statement; Major Powell’s omission to
consider it; definitions of polysynthesis, incorporation
and holophrasis; illustrations; critical application of the
theory to the Othomi language; to the Bri-bri language; to
the Tupi-Guarani dialects; to the Mutsun; conclusions;
addendum; critique by M. Adam on this essay.
THE EARLIEST FORM OF HUMAN SPEECH AS REVEALED BY AMERICAN
TONGUES 390–409
The _Homo alalus_ or speechless man, a romance; linguistic
stocks; the phonetic elements significant; examples; but
not of same significance in different stocks; notion of
_self_ and _other_; pronouns a late development;
alternating consonants and permutable vowels; examples;
phoneticism inadequate; difficulties thus created;
counter-sense in language; notion of Being and Not-Being;
incorporation; sentence-words; no dependent clauses; no
tenses; no adjectives; no numerals; notion of Animate and
Inanimate; classificatory particles; primitive man a
_visuaire_.
THE CONCEPTION OF LOVE IN SOME AMERICAN LANGUAGES 410–432
Significance of love-words; various origins. I. Algonkin
love-words; various senses; highest forms. II. Nahuatl
love-words; poverty of the tongue; made up by terminations;
words for friendship. III. Maya love-words; singular
derivations; the Huasteca dialect; the Cakchiquel dialect;
comparisons. IV. Qquichua love-words; abundant; various
meanings. V. Tupi-Guarani love-words; meaning of.
Conclusions.
THE LINEAL MEASURES OF THE SEMI-CIVILIZED NATIONS OF MEXICO AND
CENTRAL AMERICA 433–451
Metrical standards a criterion of progress; those of the
Mayas; of the Cakchiquels; of the Mexicans or Aztecs; of
the Mound-Builders of Ohio. Conclusions.
THE CURIOUS HOAX OF THE TAENSA LANGUAGE 452–467
How it began; the deception exposed; absurdities of the
invention; a wonderful calendar; a yet more wonderful
marriage-song; a second Psalmanazar; rejoinder of the
editor; reply to that; final verdict.
INDEX OF AUTHORS AND AUTHORITIES 469–474
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 475–489
PART I.
ETHNOLOGIC AND ARCHÆOLOGIC.
INTRODUCTORY.
Ever since America was discovered, the question about it which has
excited the most general interest has been, Whence came its inhabitants?
The inquiry, Who are the American Indians? has been the theme of many a
ponderous folio and labored dissertation, with answers nearly as various
as the number of debaters.
Few or none of them have reflected on the unphilosophical character of
the inquiry as thus crudely put. Take a precisely analogous question,
and this will be apparent—Whence came the African Negroes? All will
reply—From Africa, of course. Originally? Yes, originally; they
constitute the African or Negro sub-species of Man.
The answer in the case of the American Indians is entirely
parallel—their origin is American; the racial type was created and fixed
on the American continent; they constitute as true and distinct a
sub-species as do the African or the White Race.
Each of the great continental areas moulded the plastic, primitive man
into a conformation of body and mind peculiar to itself, in some special
harmony with its own geographic features, thus producing a race or
sub-species, subtly correlated in a thousand ways to its environment,
but never forfeiting its claim to humanity, never failing in its
parallel and progressive development with all other varieties of the
species.
America was no exception to this rule, and it is time to dismiss as
trivial all attempts to connect the American race genealogically with
any other, or to trace the typical culture of this continent to the
historic forms of the Old World. My early studies inclined me to these
opinions, and they have been constantly strengthened by further
research. Yet they are not popularly accepted; the very latest writer of
competence on the pre-history of America says, “It is now generally held
that the earliest population (of the continent) was intruded upon by
other races, coming either from Asia or from the Pacific Islands, from
whom were descended the various tribes which have occupied the soil down
to the present time.”[1]
It is true that this opinion is that generally held, and for this reason
I have selected for reprinting some articles intended to show that it is
utterly fallacious—devoid of any respectable foundation.
The first two papers treat of the archæologic material, and its value
for ascertaining the pre-historic life of the American race; the third,
on its pretended affinities to Asiatic peoples. These are followed by
two papers respectively on the Toltecs and Mound-Builders, setting
aright, I hope, the position of these semi-mythical shapes in the
culture-history of North America, maintaining that for neither do we
have to call in as explanation migrations from Asia, Europe, Oceanica or
Africa, as has so often been attempted.
A REVIEW OF THE DATA FOR THE STUDY OF THE PRE-HISTORIC CHRONOLOGY OF
AMERICA.[2]
Early in this century the doubt was expressed by Alexander von
Humboldt[3] whether it is philosophical to inquire into the origin of
any of the human races or sub-species. Although he expressed this doubt
with particular reference to the American race, I believe I am right in
assuming that the hesitancy he felt in pushing inquiry so far should now
diminish in view of new methods of research and a wider range of
observations. We may not, in fact we shall not, be able to trace the
American or any other sub-species directly back to its origin in place
or time; but by reviewing all the data which have been offered in
solution of such a problem, we may perceptibly narrow the question, and
also estimate the relative value of the means proposed. It is to such a
review, applied to the American race, that I now invite your attention.
The data upon which theories of the antiquity, the genealogy and the
affinities of this race have been constructed are varied. For
convenience of treatment I shall class them under six heads. They are:
I. _Legendary_, including the traditions of the native tribes and their
own statements of their history.
II. _Monumental_, where we have to do with those structures whose age or
character seems to throw light on the question.
III. _Industrial_, under which heading we may inquire as to the origin
of both the useful and the decorative arts in the New World.
IV. _Linguistic_, broaching the immense and important questions as to
the diversity and affinities of languages.
V. _Physical_, which takes into consideration the anatomic and
morphologic peculiarities of the American race; and finally,
VI. _Geologic_, where its position in the geologic horizons is to be
determined, and the influence upon it of the physical geography of the
continent.
_Legendary._ Turning to the first of these, the legendary data, I
confess to a feeling of surprise that learned scholars should still hold
to the opinion that the native tribes, even some of the most savage of
them, retain to this day traditions which they had brought from their
supposed Asiatic homes. Thus the missionaries, Bishop Henry Faraud and
the Abbé Emile Petitot, both entirely familiar with the Cree and the
Athapaskan languages and lore, insist that the myths and legends of
these tribes bear such strong resemblances to the Semitic traditions
that both must have had a common origin.[4] No one can deny the
resemblance; but the scientific student of mythology discovers such
identities too frequently, and at points too remote, to ask any other
explanation for them than the common nature of the human mind.
The question has been often raised how long a savage tribe, ignorant of
writing, is likely to retain the memory of past deeds. From a great many
examples in America and elsewhere, it is probable that the lapse of five
generations, or say two centuries, completely obliterates all
recollection of historic occurrences. Of course, there are certain
events of continuous influence which may be retained in memory
longer—for example, the federation of prominent tribes; and perhaps a
genealogy may run back farther. My friend, Dr. Franz Boas, informs me
that some tribes on Vancouver’s Island pretend to preserve their
genealogies for twelve or fifteen generations back; but he adds that the
remoter names are clearly of mythical purport.
It appears obvious that all efforts to establish a pre-historic
chronology by means of the legends of savage tribes, are and must be
vain.
The case is not much better with those semi-civilized American nations,
the Mayas and Nahuas, who possessed a partially phonetic alphabet, or
with the Quichuas, who preserved their records by the ingenious device
of the quipu. Manco Capac, the alleged founder of the Peruvian state,
floats before us as a vague and mythical figure, though he is placed in
time not earlier than the date when Leif, the son of Erik, anchored his
war-ship on the Nova Scotian coast.[5] Historians are agreed that the
long lists of Incas in the pages of Montesinos, extending about two
thousand years anterior to the Conquest, are spurious, due to the
imagination or the easy credulity of that writer.
The annals of Mexico fare no better before the fire of criticism. It is
extremely doubtful that their earliest reminiscences refer to any event
outside the narrow valley parcelled out between the petty states of
Tenochtitlan, Tezcuco, and Tlacopan.[6] The only fact that bears out the
long and mysterious journey from the land of the Seven Caves,
Chicomoztoc, in the distant northwest, by the great water, is that the
learned and indefatigable Buschmann has conclusively shown that the four
languages of Sonora and all the dialects of the Shoshonian family reveal
marks of continued and deep impressions of the Nahuatl tongue.[7] But
the chronicles of Mexico proper contain no fixed date prior to that of
the founding of the city of Tenochtitlan, in the year 1325 of our era.
I am aware that there are still some writers who maintain that both the
Mexican and the Maya astronomic cycles assume a commencement for their
records centuries, even thousands of years, before the beginning of our
era. These opinions, however, have not obtained the assent of other
students. We are too ignorant both of the astronomy and the methods of
writing of these nations to admit such claims; and the facts advanced
are capable of quite other interpretation.
It is, on the whole, rare for the American tribes to declare themselves
autochthonous. The Mayas, on the peninsula of Yucatan, stated that their
earliest ancestors came there from beyond the seas, some from the far
east, others from the west. So the Toltecs, under Quetzalcoatl, were
fabled to have entered Mexico from beyond the Eastern Ocean. The Creeks
and Choctaws pointed to the west, the Algonkins generally to the east,
as their primal home.[8] These legends are chiefly mythical, not much
truer than those of other tribes who claimed to have climbed up from
some under-world. Sifting them all, we shall find in them little to
enlighten us as to the pre-historic chronology of the tribes, though
they may furnish interesting vistas in comparative mythology.
That in which we may expect the legends of tribes to be of most avail is
their later history, the record of their wars, migrations and social
development within a few generations. The spirit of the uncivilized man
is, however, very careless of the past. We have means of testing the
exactness of such traditions in some instances, and the result is rarely
such as to inspire confidence in verbal records. Those of you who were
present at the last meeting will remember how diversely two able
students of Iroquois tradition estimated its value. Even when remarkable
events are not forgotten, the dates of their occurrence are generally
vague. The inference, therefore, is that very few data, dependent on
legendary evidence alone, can be accepted.
_Monumental._ When we turn to the monumental data, to the architecture
and structural relics of the ancient Americans, we naturally think first
of the imposing stone-built fortresses of Peru, the massive pyramids and
temples of Yucatan and Mexico, and the vast brick-piles of the Pueblo
Indians.
It is doubtful if any of these notable monuments supply pre-historic
dates of excessive antiquity. The pueblos, both those now occupied and
the vastly greater number whose ruins lie scattered over the valleys and
mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, were constructed by the ancestors of
the tribes who still inhabit that region, and this at no distant day.
Though we cannot assign exact dates to the development of this peculiar
civilization, there are abundant reasons, drawn from language, physical
geography and the character of the architecture, to include all these
structures within the period since the commencement of our era.[9]
There is every reason to suppose that the same is true of all the stone
and brick edifices of Mexico and Central America. The majority of them
were occupied at the period of the Conquest; others were in process of
building; and of others the record of the date of their construction was
clearly in memory and was not distant. Thus, the famous temple of
Huitzilopochtli at Tenochtitlan, and the spacious palace—or, if you
prefer the word, “communal house”—of the ruler of Tezcuco, had been
completed within the lifetime of many who met the Spaniards. To be sure,
even then there were once famous cities fallen to ruin and sunk to
oblivion in the tropical forests. Such was Palenque, which could not
have failed to attract the attention of Cortes had it been inhabited.
Such also was T’Ho, on the site of the present city of Mérida, Yucatan,
where the earliest explorers found lofty stone mounds and temples
covered with a forest as heavy as the primitive growth around it.[10]
But tradition and the present condition of such of these old cities as
have been examined, unite in the probability that they do not antedate
the Conquest more than a few centuries.
In the opinion of some observers, the enigmatical ruins on the plain of
Tiahuanaco, a few leagues from the shore of Lake Titicaca, in Peru,
carry us far, very far, beyond any such modern date. “Even the memory of
their builders,” says one of the more recent visitors to these
marvellous relics, General Bartolomé Mitre, “even their memory was lost
thousands of years before the discovery of America.”[11]
Such a statement is neither more nor less than a confession of
ignorance. We have not discovered the period nor the people concerned in
the ruins of Tiahuanaco. It must be remembered that they are not the
remains of a populous city, but merely the foundations and beginnings of
some vast religious edifice which was left incomplete, probably owing to
the death of the projector or to unforeseen difficulties. If this is
borne in mind, much of the obscurity about the origin, the purpose and
the position of these structures will be removed. They do not justify a
claim to an age of thousands of years before the Conquest; hundreds will
suffice. Nor is it necessary to assent to the opinion advanced by
General Mitre, and supported by some other archæologists, that the most
ancient monuments in America are those of most perfect construction,
and, therefore, that in this continent there has been, in civilization,
not progress but failure, not advance but retrogression.
The uncertainty which rests over the age of the structures at Tiahuanaco
is scarcely greater than that which still shrouds the origin of the
mounds and earthworks of the Ohio and Upper Mississippi valleys. Yet I
venture to say that the opinion is steadily gaining ground that these
interesting memorials of vanished nations are not older than the
mediæval period of European history. The condition of the arts which
they reveal indicates a date that we must place among the more recent in
American chronology. The simple fact that tobacco and maize were
cultivated plants is evidence enough for this.[12]
There is, however, a class of monuments of much greater antiquity than
any I have mentioned. These are the artificial shell-heaps which are
found along the shores of both oceans and of many rivers in both North
and South America. They correspond to the kitchen-middens of European
archæology.
In several parts of the continent they have been examined by competent
observers and the question of their date approximately ascertained. I
need not say this differs widely, for these refuse heaps of ancient
villages or stations were of course begun at wide intervals.
Long ago I called attention to the singular size and antiquity of those
I found in Florida and along the Tennessee River;[13] and the later
researches of Professor Jeffries Wyman would, in his opinion, measure
the age of some of the former by tens of thousands of years.[14]
Further to the south, in Costa Rica, Dr. Earl Flint has examined the
extensive artificial shell deposits which are found along the shores of
that republic. They are many feet in height, covered by a dense forest
of primeval appearance, and are undoubtedly of human origin.
In Brazil such shell-heaps are called _sambaquis_, and they are of
frequent occurrence along the bays and inlets of the coast. Some of them
are of extraordinary dimensions, rising occasionally to more than a
hundred feet in height. The lower layers have been consolidated into a
firm, stony breccia of shells and bones, while the surface stratum, from
six to ten feet thick, is composed of sand and vegetable loam supporting
a growth of the largest trees. Yet even the lowest layers of this
breccia, or shell-conglomerate, yield tokens of human industry, as stone
axes, flint arrow-heads, chisels, and fragments of very rude pottery, as
well as human bones, sometimes split to extract the marrow. The shells
are by no means all of modern type. Many are of species now wholly
extinct, or extinct in the locality. This fact alone carries us back to
an antiquity which probably should be counted by thousands of years
before our era.
At that remote period not only did a fishing and hunting race dwell
along the Brazilian coast, but this race was fairly advanced on the path
to culture; it was acquainted with pottery, with compound implements,
and with the polishing of stone. We further know that this race was not
that which occupied the land when the whites discovered it; for the
human skulls disinterred from the sambaquis are, craniologically, almost
diametrically opposite those of the Botocudos and the Tupis. Yet if we
can trust the researches of Dr. Lund in the caverns of Brazil, the
oldest skulls in these deposits, found in immediate connection with the
bones of extinct mammalia, belonged to the ancestors of these tribes.
Markedly dolichocephalic, they present an entire contrast to the
brachycephalic type from the sambaquis.[15]
This class of monuments, therefore, supply us data which prove man’s
existence in America in what some call the “diluvial,” others the
“quaternary,” and others again the “pleistocene” epoch—that
characterized by the presence of some extinct species.
_Industrial._ Let us now turn to the industrial activity of the American
race, and see whether it will furnish us other data concerning the
pre-historic life of the New World. We may reasonably look in this
direction for aid, since it is now universally conceded that at no time
did man spring into being fully armed and equipped for the struggle for
existence, but everywhere followed the same path of painful effort from
absolute ignorance and utter feebleness to knowledge and power. At
first, his only weapons or tools were such as he possessed in common
with the anthropoid apes: to wit, an unshapen stone and a broken stick.
Little by little, he learned to fit his stone to his hand and to chip it
to an edge, and with this he could sharpen the end of his stick, thus
providing himself with a spear and an axe.
It was long before he learned to shape and adjust the stone to the end
of the stick, and to hurl this by means of a cord attached to a second
and elastic stick—in other words, a bow; still longer before he
discovered the art of fashioning clay into vessels and of polishing and
boring stones. These simple arts are landmarks in the progress of the
race: the latter divides the history of culture into the palæolithic or
rough stone period, and the neolithic or polished stone period; while
the shaping of a stone for attachment to a handle or shaft marks the
difference between the epoch of compound implements and the earlier
epoch of simple implements, both included in the older or palæolithic
age.[16] With these principles as guides, we may ask how far back on
this scale do the industrial relics in America carry us?
I have spoken of the great antiquity of some of the American
shell-heaps, how they carry us back to the diluvial epoch, and that of
numerous extinct species. Yet it is generally true that in the oldest
hitherto examined in Brazil, Guiana, Costa Rica and Florida, fragments
of pottery, of polished stone, and compound implements, occur even in
the lowest strata.[17] Venerable though they are, they supply no date
older than what in Europe we should call the neolithic period. The
arrow-heads which have been exhumed from the loess of the ancient
lake-beds of Nebraska, the net-sinkers and celts which have been
recovered from the auriferous gravels of California, prove by their form
and finish that the tribes who fashioned them had already taken long
strides beyond the culture of the earlier palæolithic age. The same is
true, though in a less degree, of the chipped stones and bones which
Ameghino exhumed from the lacrustine deposits of the Pampas, although he
proves that these relics were the products of tribes contemporary with
the extinct glyptodon and mylodon, as well as the fossil horse and dog.
In the very oldest station which he examined, there appears to have been
found a quartz arrow-head; yet he argues that this station dated from
the pliocene division of the tertiary, long anterior to the austral
glacial epoch.[18] This leaves another such open conflict between
geology and the history of culture, as Professor Rau has already pointed
out as existing in Californian archæology.
There is, however, one station in America which has furnished an ample
line of specimens, and among them not one, so far as I know, indicating
a knowledge of compound implements. This is that of the “Trenton
gravels,” New Jersey. There we appear to be in face of a stage of
culture as primitive as that of the stations of Chelles and St. Acheul
in France, absolutely without pottery, without polished stone, without
compound implements.[19]
Assuming that these post-glacial gravels about Trenton supply one of the
earliest authentic starting points in the history of culture on this
continent, the later developments of industry will furnish a number of
other data. This first date was long before the extinction of the native
American horse, the elephant, the mammoth, and other animals important
to early man. There is nothing unlikely therefore in the reported
discoveries of his pointed flints or his bones in place along with the
remains of these quadrupeds.
Not only the form but the material of implements supplies us data. If
man in his earliest stage was, as some maintain, quite migratory, it is
certain that he did not carry his stone implements with him, nor did he
obtain by barter or capture those of other tribes. All the oldest
implements are manufactured from the rocks of the locality. When,
therefore, we find a weapon of a material not obtainable in the
vicinity, we have a sure indication that it belongs to a period of
development considerably later than the earliest. When the obsidian of
the Yellowstone Park is found in Ohio, when the black slate of
Vancouver’s Island is exhumed in Delaware, it is obvious we must assume
for such extensive transits a very noticeable æsthetic and commercial
development.
I can but touch in the lightest manner on the data offered by the vast
realm of industrial activity. The return it offers is abundant, but the
harvesting delicate. In the dissemination of certain kinds of arts,
certain inventions, certain decorative designs and æsthetic conceptions
from one tribe to another, we have a most valuable means of tracing the
pre-historic intercourse of nations: but we must sedulously discriminate
such borrowing from the synchronous and similar development of
independent culture under like conditions.
In one department of industry we shall be largely free from this danger,
that is, in the extension of agriculture. One of America’s ablest
ethnologists, Dr. Charles Pickering, as the result of a lifetime devoted
to his science, finally settled upon the extension of cultivated plants
as the safest guide in the labyrinth of pre-historic migrations. Its
value is easily seen in America when we reflect that the two tropical
plants, maize and tobacco, extended their area in most remote times from
their limited local habitat about the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the
north as far as the St. Lawrence river and to the south quite to the
Archipelago of Chiloe. Their presence is easily traced by the stone or
earthen-ware implements required for their use. How many ages it must
have required for these plants to have thus extended their domain, amid
hostile and savage tribes, through five thousand miles of space! The
squash, the bean, the potato and the mandioca, are native food-plants
offering in a less degree similar material for tracing ancient commerce
and migration. Humboldt and others have claimed as much for the banana
(_Musa paradisiaca_), but the recent researches of Dr. Karl von den
Steinen have removed that valued fruit from the list of native American
plants. Both species of banana (_M. paradisiaca_ and _M. sapientium_)
were undoubtedly introduced into the New World after the discovery.[20]
Indeed, summing up the reply to an inquiry which has often been
addressed to the industrial evolution of the indigenes of our continent,
I should say that they did not borrow a single art or invention nor a
single cultivated plant from any part of the Old World previous to the
arrival of Columbus. What they had was their own, developed from their
own soil, the outgrowth of their own lives and needs.
_Linguistic._ This individuality of the race is still more strongly
expressed in their languages. You are all aware that it is upon
linguistic data almost exclusively that American ethnology has been and
must be based. The study of the native tongues becomes therefore of
transcendent importance in the pre-historic chronology of the Continent.
But to obtain its best results, this study must be conducted in a much
more thorough manner than has hitherto been the custom.
In America we are confronted with an astonishing multiplicity of
linguistic stocks. They have been placed at about eighty in North and
one hundred in South America. It is stated that there are that many
radically diverse in elements and structure. To appreciate the vista in
time that this fact opens to our thoughts, we must recognize the
tenacity of life manifested by these tongues. Some of them have scores
of dialects, spoken by tribes wandering over the widest areas. Take the
Athapascan or Tinné, for example, found in its greatest purity amid the
tribes who dwell on the Arctic sea, and along the Mackenzie river, in
British America, but which is also the tongue of the Apaches who carried
it almost to the valley of Mexico. The Algonkin was spoken from Hudson
Bay to the Savannah river and from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains.
The Guarani of the Rio de la Plata underlies dialects which were current
as far north as Florida.
How, then, in spite of such tenacity of American languages, have so many
stocks come into existence? This was the question which my predecessor
in this chair last year undertook to answer. His suggestions appear to
me extremely valuable, and only in one point do I widely differ from
him, and that is, in the length of time required for these numerous
tongues to originate, to sever into dialects and to be carried to
distant regions.[21] According to the able linguist, Dr. Stoll, the
difference which is presented between the Cakchiquel and Maya dialects
could not have arisen in less than two thousand years;[22] and any one
who has carefully compared the earliest grammars of an American tongue
with its present condition will acknowledge that the changes are
surprisingly few. To me the exceeding diversity of languages in America
and the many dialects into which these have split, are cogent proofs of
the vast antiquity of the race, an antiquity stretching back tens of
thousands of years. Nothing less can explain these multitudinous forms
of speech.
Underlying all these varied forms of expression, however, I think future
investigation will demonstrate some curious identities of internal form,
traits almost or entirely peculiar to American languages, and never
quite absent from any of them.
Such was the opinion of the two earliest philosophical investigators of
these tongues, P. S. Duponceau and Wilhelm von Humboldt. They called
these traits _polysynthesis_ and _incorporation_, and it was proposed to
apply the term _incorporative_ as a distinguishing adjective to all
American languages. Of late years this opinion has been earnestly
combatted by M. Lucien Adam and others; but my own studies have led me
to adopt the views of the older analysts against these modern critics. I
do not think that the student can compare any two stocks on the
continent without being impressed with the resemblance of their
expression of the relations of Being, through the incorporative plan.
Along with this identity of plan, there coëxists the utmost independence
of expression. An American language is usually perfectly transparent.
Nothing is easier than to reduce it to its ultimate elements, its
fundamental radicals. These are few in numbers and interjectional in
character. The Athapascan, the Algonkin, whose wide extension I have
referred to, have been reduced to half a dozen particles or sounds
expressive of the simplest conceptions.[23] Upon these, by combination,
repetition, imitation and other such processes, the astonishing
structure of the tongue has been erected, every portion of it displaying
the mechanism of its origin. It is this transparency which renders these
tongues so attractive to the philosophic student of human expression,
and so valuable to him who would obtain from them the record of the
progress of the nation.
A thorough study of such a language would embrace its material, its
formal and its psychologic contents. Its material elements include the
peculiarities of its vocabulary: for example, its numerals and the
system they indicate, its words for weights and measures, for color and
direction, for relations of consanguinity and affinity, for articles of
use and ornament, for social and domestic conditions, and the like.
Few studies of American languages go beyond this material or
lexicographic limit; but in truth these are merely the externalities of
a tongue, and have nothing to do with linguistic science proper. This
concerns itself with the forms of the language, with the relation of
parts of speech to each other and to the sentence, and with the
historical development of the grammatical categories. Beyond this,
again, is the determination of the psychical character of the tribe
through the forms instinctively adopted for the expression of its
thoughts, and reciprocally the reaction exerted by these forms on the
later intellectual growth of those who were taught them as their only
means of articulate expression.
These are data of the highest value in the study of prehistoric time;
but so far as America is concerned, I could name very few scholars who
have pursued this promising line of research.
_Physical._ Much more attention has been paid to the physical than the
linguistic data of the native Americans, but it may freely be said, with
not more satisfactory results. This failure is partly owing to the
preconceived notions which still govern the study of ethnology. Linnæus
offered the cautious division of the human species into races named from
the five great geographical areas it inhabited; Blumenbach pointed out
that this roughly corresponded with the division into five colors, the
white, black, yellow, brown and red races, occupying respectively
Europe, Africa, Asia, Polynesia and America. Unfortunately, Cuvier chose
to simplify this scheme, by merging the brown and red races, the
Polynesian or Malayan and the American, into the yellow or Mongolian.
The latest writers of the French school, and I am sorry to add various
Americans, servilely follow this groundless rejection of the older
scheme, and speak of Malayans and Americans alike as Mongolians or
Mongoloids. Neither in language nor ethnic anatomy is there any more
resemblance than between whites and Mongolians.
It is gratifying to see that the more accurate German investigators
decidedly reject the blunder of Cuvier, and declare that the American
race is as independent as any other of those named. Thus Dr. Paul
Ehrenreich, who has lately published an admirable monograph on the
Botocudos of Brazil, a tribe often quoted for its so-called “Mongoloid”
aspect, declares that any such assertion must be contradicted in
positive terms. Both in osteology and anatomy, in formation of the hair
and shape of the skull, the differences are marked, permanent and
radical.
What is true of the Botocudos is not less so of the other American
tribes which are claimed to present Mongolian traits. Such assertions
are based on the superficial observations of travellers, most of whom do
not know the first principles of ethnic anatomy. This is sufficiently
shown by the importance they attach to the oblique eye, a slight
malformation of the skin of scarcely any weight.[24]
The anatomy and physiology of the various American tribes present,
indeed, great diversity, and yet, beneath it all is a really remarkable
fixedness of type. We observe this diversity in the shape of the skull,
which may be, as among the Botocudos, strictly dolichocephalic, while
the Araucanians are brachycephalic; the nasal index varies more than in
the extremest members of the white race; the tint of the skin may be a
dark brown with an under-color of red, or of so light a hue that a blush
is easily perceptible. The beard is usually absent, but D’Orbigny
visited a tribe who wore it full and long.[25] The height varies from an
average of six feet four inches for adult males in Patagonia to less
than five feet among the Warraus of Guiana; and so it is with all the
other traits of the race. There is not one which is not subject to
extensive variation.
On the other hand, these variations are not greater than can be adduced
in various members of the white or black race. In spite of them all,
there is a wonderful family likeness among tribes of American origin. No
observer well acquainted with the type would err in taking it for
another. Darwin says that the Fuegians so closely resemble the Botocudos
that they seem members of the same tribe. I have seen Arawacks from
Guiana who in the northwest would have passed for Sioux.
In spite of the total dissimilarity of climate and other physical
surroundings, the tribes of the tropics differ no more from those near
the Arctic circle than they do among themselves. This is a striking
lesson how independent of environment are the essential characteristics
of a race, and it is a sweeping refutation of those theories which make
such characteristics dependent upon external agencies.
A still more remarkable fact has been demonstrated by Professor J.
Kollmann of Bâle: to wit, that the essential physical identity of the
American race is as extended in time as it is in space. This accurate
student has analyzed the cranioscopic formulas of the most ancient
American skulls, those from the alleged tertiary deposits of the Pampas,
those from the caverns of Lagoa Santa in Brazil, that obtained from Rock
Bluff, Illinois, the celebrated Calaveras skull from California, and one
from Pontemelo in Buenos Ayres of geologic antiquity. His results are
most interesting. These very ancient remains prove that in all important
craniologic indicia the earliest Americans, those who were
contemporaries of the fossil horse and other long since extinct
quadrupeds, possessed the same racial character as the natives of the
present day, with similar skulls and a like physiognomy.[26] We reach
therefore the momentous conclusion that the American race throughout the
whole continent, and from its earliest appearance in time, is and has
been _one_, as distinct in type as any other race, and from its
isolation probably the purest of all in its racial traits. This is a
fact of the first order in establishing its prehistoric chronology.
_Geologic._ I have left the geologic data to the last, as it is these
which carry us with reasonable safety to the remotest periods. No one
who examines the evidence will now deny that man lived in both North and
South America during and after the glacial epochs, and that he was the
contemporary of many species of animals now extinct. As you are aware,
the attempt has several times been made to fix the date for the final
retrocession of the glaciers of North America. The estimates have varied
from about 12,000 years ago up to 50,000, with a majority in favor of
about 35,000 years.
There have also been various discoveries which are said to place the
human species in America previous to the appearance of the glaciers.
Some remains of man’s industry or of his skeleton have been reported
from interglacial, others from tertiary deposits.[27] Unfortunately,
these finds have not always been sufficient, or not of a character to
convince the archæologist. I have before adverted to the impossibility,
for instance, of an archæologist accepting the discovery of a
finely-polished stone implement in a tertiary gravel, except as an
intrusive deposit. It is a violent anachronism, which is without a
parallel in other countries. Even the discovery of a compound implement,
as a stemmed arrowhead, in strata of tertiary date, is, with our present
knowledge, quite out of the question.
Although there are well recognized signs of glacial action in South
America, it is not certain that the glacial epoch coincided in time in
the two continents. That there was a reasonable approximation is
probable from the appearance of later deposits. We may suppose therefore
that the habitable area of the New World was notably less at that
period, and that the existing tribes were confined to a much narrower
space. This would force them into closer relations, and tend powerfully
to the production of that uniformity of type to which I have before
referred.
We might also expect to discover in the tropical regions of America more
frequent evidence of the primitive Americans than in either temperate
zone. This has not been the case, probably because the geologic deposits
of the tropics have been less investigated. Throughout the West Indies
there is an entire absence of palæolithic remains. Those islands were
first peopled by tribes in the polished stone stage of culture. In the
valley of Mexico human remains have been disinterred from a volcanic
deposit of supposed tertiary age, and you have all heard of those human
footprints which Dr. Earl Flint has unearthed in Nicaragua. These are
found under layers of compact volcanic tufas, separated by strata of
sand and vegetable loam. There can be no doubt of their human origin or
of their great antiquity; but no geologist need be informed of the
difficulty of assigning an age to volcanic strata, especially in a
tropical country, subject to earthquakes, subsidence and floods.[28]
It would not be in accordance with my present purpose to examine the
numerous alleged finds of human remains in the strata of the tertiary
and quaternary. All such furnish data for the pre-historic chronology of
America, and should be carefully scrutinized by him who would obtain
further light upon that chronology. I must hasten to some other
considerations which touch the remote events to which I am now alluding.
Since a comparison of the fauna of South America and Africa, and a
survey of the sea-bottom between those continents, have dispelled the
dream of the ancient Atlantis, and relegated that land connection at
least to the eocene period of the tertiary, no one can suppose the
American man to have migrated from Africa or southwestern Europe. For
other and equally solid reasons, no immigration of Polynesians can be
assumed. Yet zoölogists, perfectly willing to derive man from an
anthropoid, and polygenists to the utmost, hesitate to consider man an
autochthon in the New World. There is too wide a gap between the highest
monkeys and the human species in this continent.[29] Discoveries of
fossil apes might bridge this, but none such has been reported.
If we accept the theory that man as a species spread from one primal
centre, and in the higher plasticity of his early life separated into
well defined races, which became unalterably fixed not much later than
the close of the glacial epoch—and this theory appears to be that now
most agreeable to anthropologists—then the earliest Americans made their
advent on this continent as immigrants. This is our first fact in their
pre-historic chronology; but before we can assign it an accurate
position on the scale of geologic time, we must await more complete
discoveries than we now have at our command.
We must also wait until our friends the geologists have come to some
better understanding among themselves as to what took place in the
pleistocene age. You have heard me talking freely about the glacial
epoch and its extension in America; but geologists are by no means of
one mind as to this extension, and a respectable minority of them, led
by Sir J. William Dawson, deny the existence or even possibility of any
continental glacier. What others point out as a terminal moraine they
explain to be “nothing but the southern limit of the ice-drift of a
period of submergence.”[30]
It is clear that when we speak about the migration of the Americans at a
time when the polar half of each continent was either covered with a
glacier thousands of feet thick, or submerged to that depth beneath an
arctic sea, we have to do with geographical conditions totally unlike
those of to-day. I call attention to this obvious fact because it has
not been obvious to all writers.
In your archæological reading you will rarely come across a prettier
piece of theoretical history than Mr. Lewis A. Morgan’s description of
the gradual peopling of the two Americas by tracing the lines of easiest
subsistence. He begins at the fishy rivers of the northwest coast, and
follows the original colony which he assumes landed at that point, all
the way to Patagonia and Florida.[31] But how baseless becomes this
vision when we consider the geography of America as it is shown by
geology to have been at a period contemporary with the earliest remains
of man! We know to a certainty that the human race had already spread
far and wide over both its continental areas before Mr. Morgan’s lines
of easiest nutrition had come into existence.
Properly employed, a study of those geologic features of a country which
determine its geography will prove of vast advantage in ascertaining the
events of pre-historic time. These features undoubtedly fixed the lines
of migration and of early commerce. Man in his wanderings has always
been guided by the course of rivers, the trend of mountain chains, the
direction of ocean currents, the position of deserts, passes and swamps.
The railroad of to-day follows the trail of the primitive man, and the
rivers have ever been the natural highways of nations. The theories of
Morgan therefore remain true as theories; only in their application he
fell into an error which was natural enough to the science of twenty
years ago. Perhaps when twenty years more shall have elapsed, the
post-tertiary geology of our continent will have been so clearly defined
that the geography of its different epochs will be known sufficiently to
trace these lines of migration at the various epochs of man’s residence
in the western world, from his first arrival.
I have now set before you, in a superficial manner it is true, the
various sources from which we may derive aid in establishing the
pre-historic chronology of America. I have also endeavored, to a limited
extent, to express myself as to the relative value of these sources.
None of them can be neglected, and it will be only from an exhaustive
study of them all that we can expect to solve the numerous knotty
problems, and lift the veil which hangs so darkly on all that concerns
the existence of the American race before the sixteenth century.
We are merely beginning the enormous labor which is before us; we have
yet to discover the methods by which we can analyze fruitfully the facts
we already know. But I look forward with the utmost confidence to a rich
return from such investigations. The day is coming, and that rapidly,
when the pre-historic life of man in both the New and the Old World will
be revealed to us in a thousand unexpected details. We have but to turn
backward about thirty years to reach a time when the science of
pre-historic archæology was unknown, and its early gropings were jeered
at as absurdities. Already it has established for itself a position in
the first rank of the sciences which have to do with the highest of
problems. It has cast a light upon the pathway of the human race from
the time that man first deserved his name down to the commencement of
recorded history. Its conquests are but beginning. Year by year masses
of new facts are brought to knowledge from unexpected quarters, current
errors are corrected, and novel methods of exploration devised.
As Americans by adoption, it should be our first interest and duty to
study the Americans by race, in both their present and past development.
The task is long and the opportunity is fleeting. A century more, and
the anthropologist will scarcely find a native of pure blood; the tribes
and languages of to-day will have been extinguished or corrupted. Nor
will the archæologist be in better case. Every day the progress of
civilization, ruthless of the monuments of barbarism, is destroying the
feeble vestiges of the ancient race; mounds are levelled, embankments
disappear, the stones of temples are built into factories, the holy
places desecrated. We have assembled here to aid in recovering something
from this wreck of a race and its monuments: let me urge upon you all
the need of prompt action and earnest work, inasmuch as the
opportunities we enjoy will never again present themselves in such
fulness.
ON PALÆOLITHS, AMERICAN AND OTHER.[32]
There has been much talk in scientific circles lately about Palæoliths,
and much misunderstanding about them. Let me try to explain in a few
words what they are, what they tell, and what mistakes people make about
them.
Since man first appeared on this planet, his history has been a slow
progress from the most rudimentary arts up to those which he now
possesses. We know this, because in a given locality those remains of
his art which are found undisturbed in strata geologically the oldest
are always the rudest. The exceptions to this rule are in appearance
only, as for instance when a given locality was not occupied by men
until they had already acquired considerable knowledge of arts, or when
a cultivated nation was overrun by a barbarous one.
The general line of advance I have indicated shows, wherever we can
trace it, many similarities—similarities not necessarily dependent on an
ancient intercourse, but simply because primitive man felt everywhere
the same wants, and satisfied them in pretty much the same manner. He
felt the need of defence and attack, and everywhere a stick and a stone
offered themselves as the handiest and most effective weapons; he used
both wherever he was, and adapted them to like shapes.
In casting about for some standard wherewith to measure the long
progress from this simple beginning to the present day, antiquaries have
hit upon a very excellent one—the choice of a material employed at any
given epoch for obtaining a cutting edge—for manufacturing _l’instrument
tranchant_. Man conquers nature as he does his enemy—by cutting her
down. The world at present uses iron, or its next product steel, for
that purpose; before it came into vogue many nations employed bronze;
but in the earliest periods of man’s history, and to-day in some savage
tribes, stone was the substance almost exclusively wrought for this
purpose. These distinctions divide the progress of man into the three
great periods; the Age of Iron, the Age of Bronze, and the Age of Stone.
Do not make the mistake of supposing that the remains of human art
reveal this sequence in every locality; I have already hinted that this
is not the case. And do not make that other mistake of supposing that
all three are found in chronologic sequence over the whole world. On the
contrary, they are synchronous even to-day, as there are now tribes in
Brazil in the Age of Stone and nations in Asia in the Age of Bronze. The
word “Age” in this connection does not mean a definite period of time,
but a recognized condition of art.
In Western Europe, however, where these terms originated, the three Ages
were chronologic. Previous to about two thousand years before the
Christian era, all the nations in that region employed stone exclusively
to manufacture their cutting implements; later, bronze was preferred for
the same purpose; and still later, iron. I say “preferred,” for do not
imagine that the implement of stone or of bronze was straightway
discarded when the better material was learned. We know that stone
battle-axes were used in Ireland and Germany down to the tenth century,
and bronze was employed by Romans and Egyptians long after they became
acquainted with iron.
Each of these three Ages has various subdivisions. Those of the Age of
Stone are particularly important. They are two, based upon the manner in
which the stone was brought to an edge. All the specimens in
geologically the oldest deposits have been brought to an edge by a
process of chipping off small pieces, so as to produce a sharp line or
crest on a part or the whole of the border of the stone. This artificial
process leaves such peculiar traces that a practiced eye cannot confound
it with any accidental chipping which natural means effect.
The later deposits of the Age of Stone show that the early workmen had
acquired another manner of dressing their material; they rubbed one
stone against another, thus grinding it down to a sharp polished edge.
These two methods give the names to the two periods of the Age of Stone,
the Period of Chipped Stone and the Period of Polished Stone. Do not
suppose, however, that the workmen in polished stone forgot the art of
chipping stone. On the contrary, they continued it side by side with
their new learning, and you will find on the sites of their workshops
plenty of stone implements in form and technical production like the
chipped implements of the older period.
We know that the polished or ground-stone implements came into use later
than the earliest chipped implements, for in the oldest beds the latter
are found exclusively. Hence the time when they were used exclusively is
called the older stone implement period or the Palæolithic period;
while, the time when both chipped and polished stones were used, metals
were yet unknown, is named the newer stone implement period, or the
Neolithic period. A true “Palæolith” is a typical chipped stone
implement, the position of which when found leads us to believe that it
was manufactured in the older of these periods.
We are not entirely dependent on its position to decide its antiquity.
The kind of stone it is, the amount of weather-wearing or _patine_ it
shows, certain characteristics of shape and size, the indication that
the chipping was done in a peculiar manner, all these aid the skilled
observer in pronouncing definitely as to whether it is a true Palæolith.
Nor is position always a guarantee of antiquity. A genuine Palæolith may
have been washed into newer strata, or be exposed by natural agencies on
the surface of the ground, and in such cases it may not be possible to
distinguish it from the products of Neolithic industry. A recent product
of art may have sunk or been buried in an ancient stratum, and thus
become what is termed an “intrusive deposit.”
The Palæolithic period itself is advantageously subdivided further into
two Epochs, an earlier one in which men made “simple” implements only,
and a later one in which they manufactured “compound” implements as
well. I was the first to point out this distinction, and as I have found
it really useful, and as others have also expressed to me the value
which it has been to them in this line of research, I will explain it
further.[33] A “compound” implement is one composed of several parts
adapted to each other, as the bow and the arrow, the spear with its
shaft and blade, or the axe with its head and helve and the means of
fastening the one to the other. These were not early acquisitions.
During long ages man contented himself with such tools or weapons as he
could frame of a single piece of wood or stone, simply holding it in his
hand. When he found he could increase its effectiveness by fitting it to
a handle, the discovery marked an era in his culture.
He may indeed in his rudest ages have lashed a stone to the end of his
club, or have inserted a spall of flint in the split end of a stick; but
these are not compound implements in the proper sense of the term. The
expression means an art-product which clearly shows that it was but one
part of a mechanical apparatus. The arrow-head with its stem, barbs and
body, the stone axe with its grooves or drilled perforation for the
handle, are incomplete in themselves, they disclose a preconceived plan
for the adjustment of parts which man in his earliest and rudest
condition does not seem to have possessed. The most ancient strata in
which the remains of human art have been found, either in Europe or
America, yield “simple” implements only; “compound” implements are a
conquest of his inventive faculty at a later date.
So far as America is concerned it is probable that the oldest remains of
man yet discovered on the northern continent have been those exhumed in
the valley of the Delaware River, in the states of Pennsylvania, New
Jersey and Delaware. According to the most careful geological observers
that large deposit of gravel covering about five thousand acres on both
banks of the river below Trenton is a post-glacial deposit not less than
twelve or fifteen thousand years old. Imbedded in this at various depths
a large number of true palæoliths have been discovered by Dr. C. C.
Abbott, Professor F. A. Putnam, myself and others. Every one of them so
far as I am aware belongs to the class of “simple” implements, not an
arrowhead nor grooved axe nor stemmed scraper having been reported.
Another deposit of gravel further down the Delaware River is much older:
The best authorities in such matters believe that it was deposited, not
after the recession of the great glacier which once covered Canada and
the northern portion of the United States, but while that tremendous
phenomena was at its height, and when all the streams of the central
United States were periodically choked with vast masses of ice and snow.
In this, which is called the Columbian gravel, chipped stone implements
have been found by Mr. Cresson, all of the “simple” variety, and at such
depths as to preclude the theory of an intrusive deposit. These
discoveries carry the age of the appearance of man in the Delaware
valley back to a date which is possibly over a hundred thousand years
ago.
The great glacier left its mass of boulders, pebbles and broken stone,
which it pushed before it, or carried with it, in a long line of
so-called “moraines,” extending, roughly speaking, from New York to St.
Louis. In this mass, at its edges where the great wash from the melting
ice poured down, palæoliths have been found in undisturbed position,
proving that also there man had struggled with the inclemency of the
ice-age, and, poorly provided as he was, had come out victorious. Here
too all the implements he left are of the “simple” type, indicating at
once the vast antiquity of the period and the presence of a race
substantially the same as that to the east at the same date.
No tribe has been known to history which was confined to the knowledge
of “simple” implements, or which manufactured stone implements
exclusively in the Palæolithic forms. Wherever, therefore, these are
found without the admixture of artificially ground or polished stones we
may be sure we face the remains of a time whose antiquity cannot be
measured by any chronology applied to the historic records of humanity.
This enables us in a measure to define the limits of the region known to
the human race at this, its earliest epoch; with our present deficient
knowledge we can do so only partially and by exclusion. It is safe to
state that in Europe Palæolithic man did not occupy the central alpine
area of Switzerland and its surroundings, nor the plains of Russia, nor
any part of the Scandinavian peninsula, Scotland, Ireland, nor Iceland.
In North America he had no habitations north of the forty-first parallel
of latitude except perhaps close to the shores of the two great
oceans;[34] it is not probable that his foot pressed the soil of any of
the West Indian Islands; but when the great Austral Glacier was in its
recession depositing the fertile loam of the pampas of Buenos Ayres
human beings with their rude Palæoliths were following up the retreating
line of ice, as in the Northern Hemisphere. Ages uncounted and
uncountable have passed since then, but man has left indestructible
evidences that even in that early morn of his existence he had explored
and conquered that continent which a late generation has chosen to call
“the New World.”
ON THE ALLEGED MONGOLIAN AFFINITIES OF THE AMERICAN RACE.[35]
Were the question I am about to discuss one of merely theoretical
bearings, I should not approach it; but the widespread belief that the
American tribes are genealogically connected with the Mongolians is
constantly directing and coloring the studies of many Americanists, very
much as did at one time the belief that the red men are the present
representatives of the ten lost tribes of Israel. It is practically
worth while, therefore, to examine the grounds on which the American
race is classed by these anthropologists as a branch of the Mongolian,
and to inquire whether the ancient culture of America betrayed any
positive signs of Mongolian influence.
You will permit me to avoid the discussion as to what constitutes races
in anthropology. To me they are zoölogical sub-species, marked by fixed
and correlated characteristics, impressed so firmly that they have
suffered no appreciable alteration within the historic period either
through time or environment. In this sense, Blumenbach, in the last
century, recognized five races, corresponding to the five great
land-areas of the globe, and to their characteristic faunal and floral
centres. This division was an eminently scientific one, and still
remains the most in accord with anatomical and linguistic research.
About twenty years after the appearance of Blumenbach’s work, however,
the eminent naturalist Cuvier published his great work on “The Animal
Kingdom,” in which he rejected Blumenbach’s classification, and proposed
one dividing the human species into three races,—the white or Caucasian,
the black or Ethiopian, and the yellow or Mongolian. In the latter he
included the Malays and the American Indians.
This triple division has been very popular in France, and to some extent
in other countries. It is not, and it was not in its inception, a
scientific deduction from observed facts, but was a sort of _a priori_
hypothesis based on the physiological theories of Bichat, and at a later
day derived support from the philosophic dreams of Auguste Comte.
Bichat, for instance, had recognized three fundamental physiological
systems in man—the vegetative or visceral, the osso-muscular, and the
cerebro-spinal. The anthropologists, in turn, considered it a happy
thought to divide the human species into three races, each of which
should show the predominance of one or other of these systems. Thus the
black race was to show the predominance of the vegetative system; the
yellow race, the osso-muscular system; the white race, the nervous
system.[36] As Bichat had not discovered any more physiological systems,
so there could be no more human races on the earth: and thus the sacred
triplets of the Comtian philosophy could be vindicated.
How little value attaches to any such generalizations you will readily
perceive, and you will be prepared, with me, to dismiss them all, and to
turn to the facts of the case, inquiring whether there are any traits of
the red race which justify their being called “Mongolian” or
“Mongoloid.”
Such affinities have been asserted to exist in language, in culture, and
in physical peculiarities, and I shall take these up _seriatim_ for
examination.
First, as to language.
The great Mongolian stock is divided into the southern branch, speaking
monosyllabic, isolating languages, and the northern branch, whose
dialects are polysyllabic and agglutinating. The latter are sometimes
called Turanian or Ural-Altaic; and as they are geographically
contiguous to the Eskimo, and almost to the Athabascans, we might
reasonably expect the linguistic kinship, if any exists, to be shown in
this branch of Mongol speech. Is such the case? Not in the least. To
prove it, I think it enough to quote the positive statement of the best
European authority on the Ural-Altaic languages, Dr. Heinrich Winkler.
He emphatically says, that, in the present state of linguistic science,
not only is there no connection apparent between any Ural-Altaic and any
American language, but that such connection is shown to be highly
improbable. The evidence is all the other way.[37]
I need not, therefore, delay over this part of my subject, but will
proceed to inquire whether there are any American affinities to the
monosyllabic, isolating languages of Asia.
There is one prominent example, which has often been put forward, of a
supposed monosyllabic American language; and its relationship to the
Chinese has frequently been asserted—a relationship, it has been said,
extending both to its vocabulary and its grammar. This is the Otomi,
spoken in and near the valley of Mexico. It requires, however, but a
brief analysis of the Otomi to see that it is not a monosyllabic
language in the linguistic sense, and that in its sentence-building it
is incorporative and polysynthetic, like the great majority of American
tongues, and totally unlike the Chinese. I may refer to my own published
study of the Otomi, and to that of the Count de Charencey, as proving
what I say.[38]
Some have thought that the Maya of Yucatan has in its vocabulary a
certain number of Chinese elements; but all these can readily be
explained on the doctrine of coincidences. The Mexican antiquary Mendoza
has marshalled far more coincidences of like character and equal worth
to show that the Nahuatl is an Aryan dialect descended from the
Sanscrit.[39] In fine, any, even the remotest, linguistic connection
between American and Mongolian languages has yet to be shown; and any
linguist who considers the radically diverse genius of the two groups of
tongues will not expect to find such relationship.
I shall not detain you long with arguments touching supposed Mongolian
elements of culture in ancient America. Any one at all intimately
conversant with the progress of American archæology in the last twenty
years must see how rapidly has grown the conviction that American
culture was homebred, to the manor born: that it was wholly indigenous
and had borrowed nothing—nothing, from either Europe, Asia, or Africa.
The peculiarities of native American culture are typical, and extend
throughout the continent. Mr. Lewis Morgan was perfectly right in the
general outline of his theory to this effect, though, like all persons
enamored of a theory, he carried it too far.
This typical, racial American culture is as far as possible, in spirit
and form, from the Mongolian. Compare the rich theology of Mexico or
Peru with the barren myths of China. The theory of governments, the
method of house-construction, the position of woman, the art of war,[40]
are all equally diverse, equally un-Mongolian. It is useless to bring up
single art-products or devices, such as the calendar, and lay stress on
certain similarities. The doctrine of the parallelism of human
development explains far more satisfactorily all these coincidences. The
sooner that Americanists generally, and especially those in Europe,
recognize the absolute autochthony of native American culture, the more
valuable will their studies become.
It is no longer in season to quote the opinions of Alexander von
Humboldt and his contemporaries on this subject, as I see is done in
some recent works. The science of archæology has virtually come into
being since they wrote, and we now know that the development of human
culture is governed by laws with which they were unacquainted.
Civilization sprang up in certain centres in both continents, widely
remote from each other; but, as the conditions of its origin were
everywhere the same, its early products were much alike.
It is evident from what I have said, that the asserted Mongolian or
Mongoloid connection of the American race finds no support either from
linguistics or the history of culture. If anywhere, it must be in
physical resemblances. In fact, it has been mainly from these that the
arguments have been drawn. Let us examine them.
Cuvier, who, as I have said, is responsible for the confusion of the
American with the Mongolian race, based his racial scheme on the color
of the skin, and included the American within the limits of the yellow
race. Cuvier had seen very few pure Mongolians, and perhaps no
pure-blooded Americans; otherwise he would not have maintained that the
hue of the latter is yellow. Certainly it is not. You may call it
reddish, or coppery, or cinnamon, or burnt sugar, but you cannot call it
yellow. Some individuals or small tribes may approach the peculiar dusky
olive of the Chinaman, but so do some of the European peoples of Aryan
descent; and there are not wanting anthropologists who maintain that the
Aryans are also Mongoloid. The one position is just as defensible as the
other on the ground of color.
Several of the most prominent classifications of mankind are based upon
the character of the hair; the three great divisions being, as you know,
into the straight, the curly, and the woolly haired varieties. These
external features of the hair depend upon the form of the individual
hairs as seen in cross-section. The nearer this approaches a circle, the
straighter is the hair. It is true that both Mongolians and Americans
belong to the straight haired varieties; but of the two, the American
has the straighter hair, that whose cross-section comes nearer to a
perfect circle. So that by all the rules of terminology and logic, if we
are to call either branch a variation from the other, we should say that
the Mongol is a variety of the American race, and call it “Americanoid,”
instead of _vice versa_.
The color of the hair of the two races is, moreover, distinctly
different. Although superficially both seem black, yet, observed
carefully by reflected light, it is seen that the ground-tone of the
Mongolian is bluish, while that of the American is reddish.
Of positive cranial characteristics of the red race, I call attention to
the interparietal bone (the _os Incæ_), which is found in its extreme
development in the American, in its greatest rarity among the
Mongolians; also to the form of the glabella, found most prominent in
American crania, least prominent in Altaic or northern Mongoloid crania;
and the peculiar American characteristics of the occipital bone,
flattened externally, and internally presenting in nearly forty per
cent. of cases the “Aymarian depression,” as it has been termed, instead
of the internal occipital protuberance.[41]
The shape of the skull has been made another ground of race-distinction;
and, although we have learned of late years that its value was greatly
over-estimated by the earlier craniologists, we have also learned that
in the average, and throughout large numbers of peoples, it is a very
persistent characteristic, and one potently indicative of descent or
relationship. Now, of all the peoples of the world, the Mongols,
especially the Turanian branch, are the most brachycephalic; they have
the roundest heads; and it is in a high degree noteworthy that precisely
the American nation dwelling nearest to these, having undoubted contact
with them for unnumbered generations, are long-headed, or
dolichocephalic, in a marked degree. I mean the Eskimo, and I cannot but
be surprised that such an eminent anthropologist as Virchow,[42] in
spite of this anatomical fact, and in defiance of the linguistic
evidence, should have repeated the assertion that the Eskimo are of
Mongolian descent.
Throughout the American continent generally, the natives were not
markedly brachycephalic. This was abundantly illustrated more than
twenty years ago by the late Prof. James Aitkins Meigs, in his
“Observations on the Cranial Forms of the American Aborigines.” They
certainly, in this respect, show no greater Mongoloid affinities than do
their white successors on the soil of the United States.
If color, hair, and crania are thus shown to present such feeble
similarities, what is it that has given rise to a notion of the
Mongoloid origin of the American Indian? Is it the so-called Mongolian
eye, the oblique eye, with a seeming droop at its inner canthus? Yes, a
good deal has been made of this by certain writers, especially by
travellers who are not anatomists. The distinguished ethnologist
Topinard says the Chinese are very often found without it, and I can
confirm this opinion by those I have seen in this country. It is,
indeed, a slight deformity, affecting the skin of the eyebrow only, and
is not at all infrequent in the white race. Surgeons know it under the
name _epicanthus_, and, as with us it is considered a disfigurement, it
is usually removed in infancy by a slight operation. In a few American
tribes it is rather prevalent, but in most of the pure Indians I have
seen, no trace of it was visible. It certainly does not rank as a racial
characteristic.[43]
The nasal index has been recommended by some anatomists as one of the
most persistent and trustworthy of racial indications. The Mongolian
origin of the red race derives faint support from this quarter. From the
measurements given in the last edition of Topinard’s work[44] the
Mongolian index is 80, while that of the Eskimo and tribes of the United
States and Canada, as far as observed, is 70, that of the average
Parisian of to-day being 69 (omitting fractions). According to this
test, the American is much closer to the white than to the yellow race.
Most of the writers (for instance, Avé-Lallemant, St. Hilaire, Peschel,
and Virchow) who have argued for the Mongoloid character of the
Americans, have quoted some one tribe which, it is asserted, shows
marked Chinese traits. This has especially been said of the natives of
three localities,—the Eskimo, the tribes of the North Pacific coast, and
the Botocudos of Brazil. So far as the last-mentioned are concerned, the
Botocudos, any such similarity has been categorically denied by the
latest and most scientific traveller who has visited them, Dr. Paul
Ehrenreich. It is enough if I refer you to his paper in the _Zeitschrift
für Ethnologie_ for 1887, where he dismisses, I should say once for all,
the notion of any such resemblance existing. I have already pointed out
that the Eskimo are totally un-Mongolian in cranial shape, in nasal
index, and in linguistic character. They do possess in some instances a
general physiognomical similarity, and this is all; and this is not
worth much, as against the dissimilarities mentioned. The same is true
of the differences and similarities of some tribes of the north-west
coast. In estimating the value of resemblances observed in this part of
our continent, we should remember that we have sufficient evidence to
believe that for many generations some slight intercourse has been going
on between the adjacent mainlands and islands of the two continents in
the regions of their nearest proximity. The same train of events led to
a blending of the negro and the white races along the shores of the Red
Sea; but any one who recognizes the distinction of races at all—and I am
aware that certain eccentric anthropologists do not—will not, on that
account, claim that the white race is negroid. With just as little
reason, it seems to me, has it been argued that the native Americans as
a race are Mongoloid.[45]
An acute philosophical writer has stated that the superficial observer
is apt to be impressed with the similarities of objects; while the
profounder student finds his attention more profitably attracted to
their differences. By this maxim we may explain this theory of the
affinities of the American race as well as many another which has been
broached.
THE PROBABLE NATIONALITY OF THE “MOUND-BUILDERS.”
[The following Essay is reprinted without alteration. It appeared in
the _American Antiquarian_ for October, 1881, and has a certain
degree of historic value as illustrating the progress of archæologic
study in the United States. It is, I believe, the first reasoned
argument that the constructors of the mounds of the Ohio Valley were
the ancestors of tribes known and resident not remote from the sites
of these ancient works. Though this opinion has not yet been fully
accepted, the tendency of later studies is unquestionably in its
favor.]
The question, Who were the Mound-builders? is one that still remains
open in American archæology. Among the most recent expressions of
opinion I may quote Prof. John T. Short, who thinks that one or two
thousand years may have elapsed since they deserted the Ohio valley, and
probably eight hundred since they finally retired from the Gulf
coast.[46] Mr. J. P. MacLean continues to believe them to have been
somehow related to the “Toltecs.”[47] Dr. J. W. Foster, making a
tremendous leap, connects them with a tribe “who, in times far remote,
flourished in Brazil,” and adds: “a broad chasm is to be spanned before
we can link the Mound-builders to the North American Indians. They were
essentially different in their form of government, their habits and
their daily pursuits. The latter were never known to erect structures
which should survive the lapse of a generation.”[48]
On the other hand, we have the recent utterance of so able an
ethnologist as Major J. W. Powell to the effect that, “With regard to
the mounds so widely scattered between the two oceans, it may be said
that mound-building tribes were known in the early history of discovery
of this continent, and that the vestiges of art discovered do not excel
in any respect the arts of the Indian tribes known to history. There is,
therefore, no reason for us to search for an extralimital origin through
lost tribes for the arts discovered in the mounds of North America.”[49]
Between opinions so discrepant the student in archæology may well be at
a loss, and it will therefore be worth while to inquire just how far the
tribes who inhabited the Mississippi valley and the Atlantic slope at
the time of the discovery were accustomed to heap up mounds, excavate
trenches, or in other ways leave upon the soil permanent marks of their
occupancy.
Beginning with the warlike northern invaders, the Iroquois, it clearly
appears that they were accustomed to construct burial mounds. Colden
states that the corpse was placed in a large round hole and that “they
then raise the Earth in a round Hill over it.”[50] Further particulars
are given by Lafitau: the grave was lined with bark, and the body roofed
in with bark and branches in the shape of an arch, which was then
covered with earth and stones so as to form an _agger_ or _tumulus_.[51]
In these instances the mound was erected over a single corpse; but it
was also the custom among the Hurons and Iroquois, as we are informed by
Charlevoix, to collect the bones of their dead every ten years, and
inter them in one mass together.[52] The slain in a battle were also
collected into one place and a large mound heaped over them, as is
stated by Mr. Paul Kane,[53] and that such was an ancient custom of the
Iroquois tribes, is further shown by a tradition handed down from the
last century, according to which the Iroquois believed that the Ohio
mounds were the memorials of a war which in ancient times they waged
with the Cherokees.[54] Mr. E. G. Squier, who carefully examined many of
the earthworks in the country of the ancient Iroquois, was inclined at
first to suppose the remains he found there were parts of “a system of
defence extending from the source of the Allegheny and Susquehanna in
New York, diagonally across the country through central and northern
Ohio to the Wabash,” and hence drew the inference that “the pressure of
hostilities [upon the mound-builders] was from the north-east.”[55] This
opinion has been repeated by some recent writers; but Mr. Squier himself
substantially retracted it in a later work, and reached the conviction
that whatever ancient remains there are in Western New York and
Pennsylvania are to be attributed to the later Indian tribes and not to
the Mound-builders.[56]
The neighbors of the Iroquois, the various Algonkin tribes, were
occasionally constructors of mounds. In comparatively recent times we
have a description of a “victory mound” raised by the Chippeways after a
successful encounter with the Sioux. The women and children threw up the
adjacent surface soil into a heap about five feet high and eight or ten
feet in diameter, upon which a pole was erected, and to it tufts of
grass were hung, one for each scalp taken.[57]
Robert Beverly, in his _History of Virginia_, first published in 1705,
describes some curious constructions by the tribes there located. He
tells us that they erected “pyramids and columns” of stone, which they
painted and decorated with wampum, and paid them a sort of worship. They
also constructed stone altars on which to offer sacrifices.[58] This
adoration of stones and masses of rocks—or rather of the genius which
was supposed to reside in them—prevailed also in Massachusetts and other
Algonkin localities, and easily led to erecting such piles.[59]
Another occasion for mound-building among the Virginian Indians was to
celebrate or make a memorial of a solemn treaty. On such an occasion
they performed the time honored ceremony of “burying the hatchet,” a
tomahawk being literally put in the ground, “and they raise a pile of
stones over it, as the Jews did over the body of Absalom.”[60]
I am not aware of any evidence that the Cherokees were mound-builders:
but they appreciated the conveniences of such structures, and in one of
their villages William Bartram found their council house situated on a
large mound. He adds: “But it may be proper to observe that this mount
on which the rotunda stands is of a much ancienter date than the
building, and perhaps was raised for another purpose.”[61] Lieutenant
Timberlake is about our best early authority on the Cherokees, and I
believe he nowhere mentions that they built upon mounds of artificial
construction. Adair, however, states that they were accustomed to heap
up and add to piles of loose stones in memory of a departed chief, or as
monuments of important events.[62]
The tribes who inhabited what we now call the Gulf States, embracing the
region between the eastern border of Texas and the Atlantic Ocean south
of the Savannah River, belonged, with few and small exceptions, to the
great Chahta-Muskokee family, embracing the tribes known as Choctaws,
Chikasaws, Muskokees or Creeks, Seminoles, Allibamons, Natchez and
others. The languages of all these have numerous and unmistakable
affinities, the Choctaw or Chahta presenting probably the most archaic
form. It is among them, if anywhere within our limits, that we must look
for the descendants of the mysterious “Mound-builders.” No other tribes
can approach them in claims for this distinction. Their own traditions,
it is true, do not point to a migration from the north, but from the
west; nor do they contain any reference to the construction of the great
works in question; but these people seem to have been a building race,
and to have reared tumuli not contemptible in comparison even with the
mightiest of the Ohio Valley.
The first explorer who has left us an account of his journey in this
region was Cabeza de Vaca, who accompanied the exposition of Pamfilo de
Narvaez in 1527. He, however, kept close to the coast for fear of losing
his way, and saw for the most part only the inferior fishing tribes.
These he describes as generally in a miserable condition. Their huts
were of mats erected on piles of oyster shells (the shell heaps now so
frequent along the southern coast). Yet he mentions that in one part,
which I judge to be somewhere in Louisiana, the natives were accustomed
to erect their dwellings on steep hills and around their base _to dig a
ditch_, as a means of defence.[63]
Our next authorities are very important. They are the narrators of
Captain Hernando de Soto’s famous and ill starred expedition. Of this we
have the brief account of Biedma, the longer story of “the gentleman of
Elvas,” a Portuguese soldier of fortune, intelligent and clear-headed,
and the poetical and brilliant composition of Garcilasso de la Vega. In
all of these we find the southern tribes described as constructing
artificial mounds, using earthworks for defence, excavating ditches and
canals, etc. I quote the following passage in illustration:
“The town and the house of the Cacique Ossachile are like those of the
other caciques in Florida. * * * The Indians try to place their villages
on elevated sites; but inasmuch as in Florida there are not many sites
of this kind where they can conveniently build, they erect elevations
themselves in the following manner: They select the spot and carry there
a quantity of earth which they form into a kind of platform two or three
pikes in height, the summit of which is large enough to give room for
twelve, fifteen or twenty houses, to lodge the cacique and his
attendants. At the foot of this elevation they mark out a square place
according to the size of the village, around which the leading men have
their houses. * * * To ascend the elevation they have a straight passage
way from bottom to top, fifteen or twenty feet wide. Here steps are made
by massive beams, and others are planted firmly in the ground to serve
as walls. On all other sides of the platform, the sides are cut
steep.”[64]
Later on La Vega describes the village of Capaha:
“This village is situated on a small hill, and it has about five hundred
good houses, surrounded with a ditch ten or twelve cubits (brazas) deep,
and a width of fifty paces in most places, in others forty. The ditch is
filled with water from a canal which has been cut from the town to
Chicagua. The canal is three leagues in length, at least a pike in
depth, and so wide that two large boats could easily ascend or descend
it, side by side. The ditch which is filled with water from this canal
surrounds the town except in one spot, which is closed by heavy beams
planted in the earth.”[65]
Biedma remarks in one passage, speaking of the provinces of Ycasqui and
Pacaha: “The caciques of this region were accustomed to erect near the
house where they lived very high mounds (_tertres très-elevèes_), and
there were some who placed their houses on the top of these mounds.”[66]
I cannot state precisely where these provinces and towns were situated;
the successful tracing of De Soto’s journey has never yet been
accomplished, but remains as an interesting problem for future
antiquaries to solve. One thing I think is certain; that until he
crossed the Mississippi he at no time was outside the limits of the wide
spread Chahta-Muskokee tribes. The proper names preserved, and the
courses and distances given, both confirm this opinion. We find them
therefore in his time accustomed to erect lofty mounds, terraces and
platforms, and to protect their villages by extensive circumvallations.
I shall proceed to inquire whether such statements are supported by
later writers.
Our next authorities in point of time are the French Huguenots, who
undertook to make a settlement on the St. John River near where St.
Augustine now stands in Florida. The short and sad history of this
colony is familiar to all. The colonists have, however, left us some
interesting descriptions of the aborigines. In the neighborhood of St.
Augustine these belonged to the Timuquana tribe, specimens of whose
language have been preserved to us, but which, according to the careful
analysis recently published by Mr. A. S. Gatschet,[67] has no
relationship with the Chahta-Muskokee, nor, for that matter, with any
other known tongue. Throughout the rest of the peninsula a Muskokee
dialect probably prevailed.
The “Portuguese gentleman” tells us that at the very spot where De Soto
landed, generally supposed to be somewhere about Tampa Bay, at a town
called Ucita, the house of the chief “stood near the shore upon a very
high mound made by hand for strength.” Such mounds are also spoken of by
the Huguenot explorers. They served as the site of the chieftain’s house
in the villages, and from them led a broad, smooth road through the
village to the water.[68] These descriptions correspond closely to those
of the remains which the botanists, John and William Bartram, discovered
and reported about a century ago.
It would also appear that the natives of the peninsula erected mounds
over their dead, as memorials. Thus the artist Le Moyne de Morgues,
writes: “Defuncto aliquo rege ejus proviciæ, magna solemnitate
sepelitur, et ejus tumulo crater, e quo bibere solebat, imponitur,
defixis circum ipsum tumulum multis sagittis.”[69] The picture he gives
of the “tumulus” does not represent it as more than three or four feet
in height; so that if this was intended as an accurate representation,
the structure scarcely rises to the dignity of a mound.
After the destruction of the Huguenot colony in 1565, the Spanish
priests at once went to work to plant their missions. The Jesuit fathers
established themselves at various points south of the Savannah River,
but their narratives, which have been preserved in full in a historic
work of great rarity, describe the natives as broken up into small
clans, waging constant wars, leading vagrant lives, and without fixed
habitations.[70] Of these same tribes, however, Richard Blomes, an
English traveler, who visited them about a century later, says that they
erected piles or pyramids of stones, on the occasion of a successful
conflict, or when they founded a new village, for the purpose of keeping
the fact in long remembrance.[71] About the same time another English
traveler, by name Bristock, claimed to have visited the interior of the
country and to have found in “Apalacha” a half-civilized nation, who
constructed stone walls and had a developed sun worship; but in a
discussion of the authenticity of his alleged narrative I have elsewhere
shown that it cannot be relied upon, and is largely a fabrication.[72] A
correct estimate of the constructive powers of the Creeks is given by
the botanist, William Bartram, who visited them twice in the latter half
of the last century. He found they had “chunk yards” surrounded by low
walls of earth, at one end of which, sometimes on a moderate artificial
elevation, was the chief’s dwelling and at the other end the public
council house.[73] His descriptions resemble so closely those in La Vega
that evidently the latter was describing the same objects on a larger
scale—or from magnified reports.
Within the present century the Seminoles of Florida are said to have
retained the custom of collecting the slain after a battle and interring
them in one large mound. The writer on whose authority I state this,
adds that he “observed on the road from St. Augustine to Tomaka, one
mound which must have covered two acres of ground,”[74] but this must
surely have been a communal burial mound.
Passing to the tribes nearer the Mississippi, most of them of Choctaw
affiliation, we find considerable testimony in the French writers to
their use of mounds. Thus M. de la Harpe says: “The cabins of the
Yasous, Courous, Offogoula and Ouspie are dispersed over the country on
mounds of earth made with their own hands.”[75] The Natchez were mostly
of Choctaw lineage. In one of their villages Dumont notes that the cabin
of the chief was elevated on a mound.[76] Father Le Petit, a missionary
who labored among them, gives the particulars that the residence of the
great chief or “Brother of the Sun,” as he was called, was erected on a
mound (_butte_) of earth carried for that purpose. When the chief died,
the house was destroyed, and the same mound was not used as the site of
the mansion of his successor, but was left vacant and a new one was
constructed.[77] This interesting fact goes to explain the great number
of mounds in some localities; and it also teaches us the important truth
that we cannot form any correct estimate of the date when a
mound-building tribe left a locality by counting the rings in trees,
etc., because long before they departed, certain tumuli or earthworks
may have been deserted and tabooed from superstitious notions, just as
many were among the Natchez.
We have the size of the Natchez mounds given approximately by M. Le Page
du Pratz. He observes that the one on which was the house of the Great
Sun was “about eight feet high and twenty feet over on the surface.”[78]
He adds that their temple, in which the perpetual fire was kept burning,
was on a mound about the same height.
The custom of communal burial has been adverted to. At the time of the
discovery it appears to have prevailed in most of the tribes from the
Great Lakes to the Gulf. The bones of each phratry or gens—the former,
probably—were collected every eight or ten years and conveyed to the
spot where they were to be finally interred. A mound was raised over
them which gradually increased in size with each additional interment.
The particulars of this method of burial have often been described, and
it is enough that I refer to a few authorities in the note.[79] Indeed
it has not been pretended that such mounds necessarily date back to a
race anterior to that which occupied the soil at the advent of the white
man.
I have not included in the above survey the important Dakota stock who
once occupied an extended territory on the upper Mississippi and its
affluents, and scattered clans of whom were resident on the Atlantic
Coast in Virginia and Carolina. But, in fact, I have nowhere found that
they erected earthworks of any pretentions whatever.
From what I have collected, therefore, it would appear that the only
resident Indians at the time of the discovery who showed any evidence of
mound-building comparable to that found in the Ohio valley were the
Chahta-Muskokees. I believe that the evidence is sufficient to justify
us in accepting this race as the constructors of all those extensive
mounds, terraces, platforms, artificial lakes and circumvallations which
are scattered over the Gulf States, Georgia and Florida. The earliest
explorers distinctly state that such were used and constructed by these
nations in the sixteenth century, and probably had been for many
generations. Such too, is the opinion arrived at by Col. C. C. Jones,
than whom no one is more competent to speak with authority on this
point. Referring to the earthworks found in Georgia he writes: “We do
not concur in the opinion so often expressed that the mound-builders
were a race distinct from and superior in art, government, and religion,
to the Southern Indians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”
It is a Baconian rule which holds good in every department of science
that the simplest explanation of a given fact or series of facts should
always be accepted; therefore if we can point out a well known race of
Indians who, at the time of the discovery, raised mounds and other
earthworks, not wholly dissimilar in character and not much inferior in
size to those in the Ohio valley, and who resided not very far away from
that region and directly in the line which the Mound-Builders are
believed by all to have followed in their emigration, then this rule
constrains us to accept for the present this race as the most probable
descendants of the Mound Tribes, and seek no further for Toltecs,
Asiatics or Brazilians. All these conditions are filled by the Chahta
tribes.[80]
It is true, as I have already said, that the traditions of their own
origin do not point to the north but rather to the west or northwest;
but in one of these traditions it is noticeable that they claim their
origin to have been from a large artificial mound, the celebrated _Nanih
Waiya_, the Sloping Hill, an immense pile in the valley of the Big Black
River;[81] and it may be that this is a vague reminiscence of their
remote migration from their majestic works in the north.
The size of the southern mounds is often worthy of the descendants of
those who raised the vast piles in the northern valleys. Thus one in the
Etowah Valley, Georgia, has a cubical capacity of 1,000,000, cubic
feet.[82] The Messier Mound, near the Chatahoochee River, contains about
700,000 cubic feet.[83] Wholly artificial mounds 50 to 70 feet in
height, with base areas of about 200 by 400 feet, are by no means
unusual in the river valleys of the Gulf States.
With these figures we may compare the dimensions of the northern mounds.
The massive one near Miamisburg, Ohio, 68 feet high, has been calculated
to contain 311,350 cubic feet—about half the size of the Messier Mound.
At Clark’s Works, Ohio, the embankments and mounds together contain
about 3,000,000 cubic feet;[84] but as the embankment is three miles
long, most of this is not in the mounds themselves. Greater than any of
these is the truncated pyramid at Cahokia, Illinois, which has an
altitude of 90 feet and a base area of 700 by 500 feet. It is, however,
doubtful whether this is wholly an artificial construction. Professor
Spencer Smith has shown that the once famous “big mound” of St. Louis
was largely a natural formation; and he expresses the opinion that many
of the mounds in Missouri and Illinois, popularly supposed to be
artificial constructions, are wholly, or in great part, of geologic
origin.[85] There is apparently therefore no such great difference
between the earth structures of the Chahta tribes, and those left us by
the more northern mound-builders, that we need suppose for the latter
any material superiority in culture over the former when first they
became known to the whites; nor is there any improbability in assuming
that the Mound-builders of the Ohio were in fact the progenitors of the
Chahta tribes, and were driven south probably about three or four
hundred years before the discovery. Such is the conviction to which the
above reasoning leads us.
In the course of it, I have said nothing about the condition of the arts
of the Mound-builders compared with that of the early southern Indians;
nor have I spoken of their supposed peculiar religious beliefs which a
recent writer thinks to point to “Toltec” connections;[86] nor have I
discussed the comparative craniology of the Mound-builders, upon which
some very remarkable hypotheses have been erected; nor do I think it
worth while to do so, for in the present state of anthropologic science,
all the facts of these kinds relating to the Mound-builders which we
have as yet learned, can have no appreciable weight to the investigator.
[Investigations conducted since the above Essay was printed require some
modifications in its statements. The researches of Professor Cyrus
Thomas render it likely that the Cherokees were also Mound-builders, and
that they occupied portions of Western Pennsylvania and Western Virginia
less than two centuries ago. (See also my work _The Lenâpè and their
Legends_, pp. 16–18. Philadelphia, 1885.) Probably the Ohio Valley
Mound-builders were the ancestors of some of the Cherokees as well as of
the Chahta-Muskoki tribes. Craniologic data from the Ohio mounds are
still too vague to permit inferences from them.]
THE TOLTECS AND THEIR FABULOUS EMPIRE.
In the first addition of my _Myths of the New World_[87] published in
1868, I asserted that the story of the city of Tula and its inhabitants,
the Toltecs, as currently related in ancient Mexican history, is a myth,
and not history. This opinion I have since repeated in various
publications,[88] but writers on pre-Columbian American civilization
have been very unwilling to give up their Toltecs, and lately M. Charnay
has composed a laborious monograph to defend them.[89]
Let me state the question squarely.
The orthodox opinion is that the Toltecs, coming from the north (-west
or -east), founded the city of Tula (about forty miles north of the
present city of Mexico) in the sixth century, A. D.; that their State
flourished for about five hundred years, until it numbered nearly four
millions of inhabitants, and extended its sway from ocean to ocean over
the whole of central Mexico;[90] that it reached a remarkably high stage
of culture in the arts; that in the tenth or eleventh century it was
almost totally destroyed by war and famine;[91] and that its fragments,
escaping in separate colonies, carried the civilization of Tula to the
south, to Tabasco (Palenque), Yucatan, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Quetzalcoatl, the last ruler of Tula, himself went to the south-east,
and reappears in Yucatan as the culture-hero Cukulkan, the traditional
founder of the Maya civilization.
This, I say, is the current opinion about the Toltecs. It is found in
the works of Ixtlilxochitl, Veitia, Clavigero, Prescott, Brasseur de
Bourbourg, Orozco y Berra, and scores of other reputable writers. The
dispersion of the Toltecs has been offered as the easy solution of the
origin of the civilization not only of Central America, but of New
Mexico and the Mississippi valley.[92]
The opinion that I oppose to this, and which I hope to establish in this
article, is as follows:
Tula was merely one of the towns built and occupied by that tribe of the
Nahuas known as _Azteca_ or _Mexica_, whose tribal god was
Huitzilopochtli, and who finally settled at Mexico-Tenochtitlan (the
present city of Mexico); its inhabitants were called Toltecs, but there
was never any such distinct tribe or nationality; they were merely the
ancestors of this branch of the Azteca, and when Tula was destroyed by
civil and foreign wars, these survivors removed to the valley of Mexico
and became merged with their kindred; they enjoyed no supremacy, either
in power or in the arts; and the Toltec “empire” is a baseless fable.
What gave them their singular fame in later legend was partly the
tendency of the human mind to glorify the “good old times” and to merge
ancestors into divinities, and especially the significance of the name
Tula, “the Place of the Sun,” leading to the confounding and
identification of a half-forgotten legend with the ever-living
light-and-darkness myth of the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca.
To support this view, let us inquire what we know about Tula as an
historic site.
Its location is on one of the great ancient trails leading from the
north into the Valley of Mexico.[93] The ruins of the old town are upon
an elevation about 100 feet in height, whose summit presents a level
surface in the shape of an irregular triangle some 800 yards long, with
a central width of 300 yards, the apex to the south-east, where the face
of the hill is fortified by a rough stone wall.[94] It is a natural
hill, overlooking a small muddy creek, called the _Rio de Tula_.[95] Yet
this unpretending mound is the celebrated _Coatepetl_, Serpent-Mount, or
Snake-Hill, famous in Nahuatl legend, and the central figure in all the
wonderful stories about the Toltecs.[96] The remains of the artificial
tumuli and walls, which are abundantly scattered over the summit, show
that, like the pueblos of New Mexico, they were built of large sun-baked
bricks mingled with stones, rough or trimmed, and both walls and floors
were laid in a firm cement, which was usually painted of different
colors. Hence probably the name _Palpan_, “amid the colors,” which
tradition says was applied to these structures on the Coatepetl.[97] The
stone-work, represented by a few broken fragments, appears equal, but
not superior, to that of the Valley of Mexico. Both the free and the
attached column occur, and figure-carving was known, as a few
weather-beaten relics testify. The houses contained many rooms, on
different levels, and the roofs were flat. They were no doubt mostly
communal structures. At the foot of the Serpent-Hill is a level plain,
but little above the river, on which is the modern village with its
corn-fields.
These geographical particulars are necessary to understand the ancient
legend, and with them in mind its real purport is evident.[98]
That legend is as follows: When the Azteca or Mexica—for these names
were applied to the same tribe[99]—left their early home in Aztlan—which
Ramirez locates in Lake Chalco in the Valley of Mexico, and Orozco y
Berra in Lake Chapallan in Michoacan[100]—they pursued their course for
some generations in harmony; but at a certain time, somewhere between
the eighth and the eleventh century of our era, they fell out and
separated. The legend refers to this as a dispute between the followers
of the tribal god Huitzilopochtli and those of his sister
Malinalxochitl. We may understand it to have been the separation of two
“totems.” The latter entered at once the Valley of Mexico, while the
followers of Huitzilopochtli passed on to the plain of Tula and settled
on the Coatepetl. Here, says the narrative, they constructed houses of
stones and of rushes, built a temple for the worship of Huitzilopochtli,
set up his image and those of the fifteen divinities (gentes?) who were
subject to him, and erected a large altar of sculptured stone and a
court for their ball play.[101] The level ground at the foot of the hill
they partly flooded by damming the river, and used the remainder for
planting their crops. After an indeterminate time they abandoned Tula
and the Coatepetl, driven out by civil strife and warlike neighbors, and
journeyed southward into the Valley of Mexico, there to found the famous
city of that name.
This is the simple narrative of Tulan, stripped of its contradictions,
metaphors and confusion, as handed down by those highest authorities the
Codex Ramirez, Tezozomoc and Father Duran.[102] It is a plain statement
that Tula and its Snake-Hill were merely one of the stations of the
Azteca in their migrations—an important station, indeed, with natural
strength, and one that they fortified with care, where for some
generations, probably, they maintained an independent existence, and
which the story-tellers of the tribe recalled with pride and
exaggeration.
How long they occupied the site is uncertain.[103] Ixtlilxochitl gives a
list of eight successive rulers of the “Toltecs,” each of whom was
computed to reign at least fifty-two years, or one cycle; but it is
noteworthy that he states these rulers were not of “Toltec” blood, but
imposed upon them by the “Chichimecs.” This does not reflect creditably
on the supposed singular cultivation of the Toltecs. Probably the
warrior Aztecs subjected a number of neighboring tribes and imposed upon
them rulers.[104]
If we accept the date given by the _Codex Ramirez_ for the departure of
the Aztecs from the Coatepetl—A. D. 1168—then it is quite possible that
they might have controlled the site for a couple of centuries or longer,
and that the number of successive chieftains named by Ixtlilxochitl
should not be far wrong. The destructive battles of which he speaks as
preceding their departure—battles resulting in the slaughter of more
than five million souls—we may regard as the grossly overstated account
of some really desperate conflicts.
That the warriors of the Azteca, on leaving Tula, scattered over Mexico,
Yucatan and Central America, is directly contrary to the assertion of
the high authorities I have quoted, and also to most of the mythical
descriptions of the event, which declare they were all, or nearly all,
massacred.[105]
The above I claim to be the real history of Tula and its Serpent-Hill,
of the Toltecs and their dynasty. Now comes the question, if we accept
this view, how did this ancient town and its inhabitants come to have so
wide a celebrity, not merely in the myths of the Nahuas of Mexico, but
in the sacred stories of Yucatan and Guatemala as well—which was
unquestionably the case?
To explain this, I must have recourse to some of those curious
principles of language which have had such influence in building the
fabric of mythology. In such inquiries we have more to do with words
than with things, with names than with persons, with phrases than with
facts.
First about these names, Tula, Tollan, Toltec—what do they mean? They
are evidently from the same root. What idea did it convey?
We are first struck with the fact that the Tula I have been describing
was not the only one in the Nahuatl district of Mexico. There are other
Tulas and Tollans, one near Ococingo, another, now San Pedro Tula, in
the State of Mexico, one in Guerrero, San Antonio Tula in Potosi,[106]
etc. The name must have been one of common import. Herrera, who spells
it _Tulo_, by an error, is just as erroneous in his suggestion of a
meaning. He says it means “place of the tuna,” this being a term used
for the prickly pear.[107] But _tuna_ was not a Nahuatl word; it belongs
to the dialect of Haiti, and was introduced into Mexico by the
Spaniards. Therefore Herrera’s derivation must be ruled out.
Ixtlilxochitl pretends that the name Tollan was that of the first
chieftain of the Toltecs, and that they were named after him; but
elsewhere himself contradicts this assertion.[108] Most writers follow
the _Codex Ramirez_, and maintain that Tollan—of which Tula is but an
abbreviation—is from _tolin_, the Nahuatl word for rush, the kind of
which they made mats, and means “the place of rushes,” or where they
grow.
The respectable authority of Buschmann is in favor of this derivation;
but according to the analogy of the Nahuatl language, the “place of
rushes” should be _Toltitlan_ or _Tolinan_, and there are localities
with these names.[109]
Without doubt, I think, we must accept the derivation of Tollan given by
Tezozomoc, in his _Cronica Mexicana_. This writer, thoroughly familiar
with his native tongue, conveys to us its ancient form and real sense.
Speaking of the early Aztecs, he says: “They arrived at the spot called
Coatepec, on the borders of _Tonalan, the place of the sun_.”[110]
This name, Tonallan, is still not unusual in Mexico. Buschmann
enumerates four villages so called, besides a mining town,
_Tonatlan_.[111] “Place of the sun” is a literal rendering, and it would
be equally accurate to translate it “sunny-spot,” or “warm place,” or
“summer-place.” There is nothing very peculiar or distinctive about
these meanings. The warm, sunny plain at the foot of the Snake-Hill was
called, naturally enough, Tonallan, syncopated to Tollan, and thus to
Tula.[112]
But the literal meaning of Tollan—“Place of the Sun”—brought it in later
days into intimate connection with many a myth of light and of solar
divinities, until this ancient Aztec pueblo became apotheosized, its
inhabitants transformed into magicians and demigods, and the corn-fields
of Tula stand forth as fruitful plains of Paradise.
In the historic fragments to which I have alluded there is scant
reference to miraculous events, and the gods play no part in the sober
chronicle. But in the mythical cyclus we are at once translated into the
sphere of the supernal. The Snake-Hill Coatepetl becomes the Aztec
Olympus. On it dwells the great goddess “Our Mother amid the Serpents,”
_Coatlan Tonan_,[113] otherwise called “The Serpent-skirted,”
_Coatlicue_, with her children, The Myriad Sages, the _Centzon
Huitznahua_.[114] It was her duty to sweep the Snake-Hill every day,
that it might be kept clean for her children. One day while thus
engaged, a little bunch of feathers fell upon her, and she hid it under
her robe. It was the descent of the spirit, the divine Annunciation.
When the Myriad Sages saw that their mother was pregnant, they were
enraged, and set about to kill her. But the unborn babe spake from her
womb, and provided for her safety, until in due time he came forth armed
with a blue javelin, his flesh painted blue, and with a blue shield. His
left leg was thin and covered with the plumage of the humming-bird.
Hence the name was given to him “On the left, a humming-bird,”
Huitzilopochtli.[115] Four times around the Serpent-Mountain did he
drive the Myriad Sages, until nearly all had fallen dead before his
dart, and the remainder fled far to the south. Then all the Mexica chose
Huitzilopochtli for their god, and paid honors to the Serpent-Hill by
Tula as his birthplace.[116]
An equally ancient and authentic myth makes Huitzilopochtli one of four
brothers, born at one time of the uncreated, bi-sexual divinity, the God
of our Life, Tonacatecutli, who looms dimly at the head of the Aztec
Pantheon. His brothers were the black and white Tezcatlipoca and the
fair-skinned, bearded Quetzalcoatl. Yet a third myth places the
birthplace of Quetzalcoatl directly in Tula, and names his mother,
Chimalman, a virgin, divinely impregnated, like Coatlicue, by the
descending spirit of the Father of All.[117]
Tula was not only the birthplace, but the scene of the highest activity
of all these greatest divinities of the ancient Nahuas. Around the
Coatepetl and on the shores of the Tollanatl—“the Water of Tula”—as the
stream is called which laves the base of the hill, the mighty struggles
of the gods took place which form the themes of almost all Aztec
mythology. Tulan itself is no longer the hamlet of rush houses at the
foot of the Coatepec, surmounted by its pueblo of rough stone and baked
brick; it is a glorious city, founded and governed by Quetzalcoatl
himself, in his first avatar as Hueman, the strong-handed. “All its
structures were stately and gracious, abounding in ornaments. The walls
within were incrusted with precious stones or finished in beautiful
stucco, presenting the appearance of a rich mosaic. Most wonderful of
all was the temple of Quetzalcoatl. It had four chambers, one toward the
east finished in pure gold, another toward the west lined with turquoise
and emeralds, a third toward the south decorated with all manner of
delicate sea-shells, and a fourth toward the north resplendent with red
jasper and shells.”[118] The descriptions of other buildings, equally
wondrous, have been lovingly preserved by the ancient songs.[119] What a
grief that our worthy friend, M. Charnay, digging away in 1880 on the
Coatepec, at the head of a gang of forty-five men, as he tells us,[120]
unearthed no sign of these ancient glories, in which, for one, he fully
believed! But, alas! I fear that they are to be sought nowhere out of
the golden realm of fancy and mythical dreaming.
Nor, in that happy age, was the land unworthy such a glorious city.
Where now the neglected corn-patches surround the shabby huts of Tula,
in the good old time “the crops of maize never failed, and each ear was
as long as a man’s arm; the cotton burst its pods, not white only, but
spontaneously ready dyed to the hand in brilliant scarlet, green, blue
and yellow; the gourds were so large that they could not be clasped in
the arms; and birds of brilliant plumage nested on every tree!”
The subjects of Quetzalcoatl, the Toltecs, were not less marvelously
qualified. They knew the virtues of plants and could read the forecast
of the stars; they could trace the veins of metals in the mountains, and
discern the deposits of precious stones by the fine vapor which they
emit; they were orators, poets and magicians; so swift were they that
they could at once be in the place they wished to reach; as artisans
their skill was unmatched, and they were not subject to the attacks of
disease.
The failure and end of all this goodly time came about by a battle of
the gods, by a contest between Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli on the
one hand, and Quetzalcoatl on the other. Quetzalcoatl refused to make
the sacrifices of human beings as required by Huitzilopochtli, and the
latter, with Tezcatlipoca, set about the destruction of Tula and its
people. This was the chosen theme of the later Aztec bards. What the
siege of Troy was to the Grecian poets, the fall of Tula was to the
singers and story-tellers of Anahuac—an inexhaustible field for
imagination, for glorification, for lamentation. It was placed in the
remote past—according to Sahagun, perhaps the best authority, about the
year 319 before Christ.[121] All arts and sciences, all knowledge and
culture, were ascribed to this wonderful mythical people; and wherever
the natives were asked concerning the origin of ancient and unknown
structures, they would reply; “The Toltecs built them.”[122]
They fixedly believed that some day the immortal Quetzalcoatl would
appear in another avatar, and would bring again to the fields of Mexico
the exuberant fertility of Tula, the peace and happiness of his former
reign, and that the departed glories of the past should surround anew
the homes of his votaries.[123]
What I wish to point out in all this is the contrast between the dry and
scanty historic narrative which shows Tula with its Snake-Hill to have
been an early station of the Azteca, occupied in the eleventh and
twelfth century by one of their clans, and the monstrous myth of the
later priests and poets, which makes of it a birthplace and abode of the
gods, and its inhabitants the semi-divine conquerors and civilizers of
Mexico and Central America. For this latter fable there is not a vestige
of solid foundation. The references to Tula and the Toltecs in the
_Chronicles of the Mayas_ and the _Annals of the Kakchiquels_ are loans
from the later mythology of the Nahuas. It is high time for this talk
about the Toltecs as a mighty people, precursors of the Azteca, and
their instructors in the arts of civilization, to disappear from the
pages of history. The residents of ancient Tula, the Tolteca, were
nothing more than a sept of the Nahuas themselves, the ancestors of
those Mexica who built Tenochtitlan in 1325. This is stated as plainly
as can be in the Aztec records, and should now be conceded by all. The
mythical Tula, and all its rulers and inhabitants, are the baseless
dreams of poetic fancy, which we principally owe to the Tezcucan
poets.[124]