[Sidenote: Geology and Archaeology.]
The sciences of geology and archaeology, working side by side, have made
a wonderful progress in the past half a century. The one, seeking for
the history and transformations of the physical earth, and the other,
aiming to discover the antiquity, differences of race, and social and
ethnical development of man, have obtained results which we cannot
regard without amazement and more or less incredulity. The two sciences
have been faithful handmaidens the one to the other; but geology has
always led the way, and archaeology has been competed to follow in its
path.
[Sidenote: Four Eras of Civilization.]
Though we may doubt as to the exactness of the detailed data established
by the archaeologists, there are certain broad facts which we must
accept from them as established beyond doubt. These facts are of the
highest value and interest. The antiquary has been able, from discovered
remains of extinct civilizations, to reconstruct societies and peoples,
and to trace the occupancy of countries to periods far anterior to that
of which history takes cognizance. The general fact seems to be settled
that, in prehistoric times, Europe passed through four distinct eras.
These were the Rude Stone Age, when man was the contemporary in Europe
of the extinct hairy elephant and the cave bear; the Polished Stone Age;
the Bronze Age, when bronze was used for arms and utensils; and the Iron
Age, in which iron superseded bronze in the making of useful articles.
[Sidenote: Ancient America.]
In the same way it has been established that, on our own continent, the
oldest discoverable civilization was one in which rude stone implements
were used, and man lived contemporaneously with the megatherium and the
mastodon. Then polished and worked stone implements came into use; and
after the lapse of ages, copper. The researches of our antiquaries
have rendered it probable that America is as ancient, as an inhabited
continent, as Europe. Evidences have been brought to light, leading to
the conclusion that many thousands of years before the Christian era,
America was the seat of a civilization far from rude or savage. Groping
into the remains of the far past, we find skeletons, skulls, implements
of war, and even basket-work, buried in geological strata, which have
been overlaid by repeated convulsions and changes of the physical earth.
But so few are the relics of this dim, primeval period, that we can
only conclude its antiquity, and we can infer little or nothing of its
characteristics.
[Sidenote: Primeval Races.]
Advancing, however, another stage in research and discovery, we come
upon clear and overwhelming proofs of the existence on this continent of
a great, enterprising, skilful, and even artistic people, spread over an
immense area, and leaving behind them the most positive testimony, not
only of their existence, but of their manners and customs, their arts,
their trade, their methods of warfare, and their religion and worship.
Compared with this people, the Red Indians found here by the Pilgrims
and the Cavaliers were modern intruders upon the land. These ancient
Americans, indeed, were far superior in all respects to the Red Indian
of our historic acquaintance. When the Red Indians replaced them, the
civilization of the continent fell from a high to a much lower plane.
[Sidenote: The Mound-Builders.]
The great race of which I speak is known as "the Mound-Builders." Like
the "Wall-Builders" of Greece and Italy, they stand out, in the light
of their remains, as distinctly as if we had historical records of them.
The Mound-Builders occupied, often in thickly settled communities, the
region about our great Northern Lakes, the valleys of the Mississippi,
the Ohio, the Missouri, and the regions watered by the affluents of
these rivers, and a wide and irregular belt along the coast of the Gulf
of Mexico. There is little or no evidence that the same race inhabited
any part of the country now occupied by the Eastern and Middle States;
but some few traces of them are found in North and South Carolina.
[Sidenote: Ancient Mounds.]
The chief relics left by this comparatively polished race are the very
numerous mounds, or artificial hills, found scattered over the country.
These are sometimes ten, and sometimes forty and fifty, feet in height,
with widely varying bases. They present many forms; they are circular
and pyramidal, square and polygonal, and in some places are manifestly
imitations of the shapes of beasts, birds, and human beings. There are
districts where hundreds of these mounds appear within a limited area.
Sometimes--as at Aztalan, in Wisconsin, and at Newark, in the Licking
Valley--a vast series of earthwork enclosures is discovered, sometimes
with embankments twelve feet high and fifty broad, within which are
variously shaped mounds, definitely formed avenues, and passages and
ponds. These enclosures amply prove, aside from the geological evidences
of their antiquity, the existence of a race very different from the
Red Indians. They were clearly a people not nomadic, but with fixed
settlements, cultivators of the soil, and skilful in the art of military
defence.
[Sidenote: Altars and Temples.]
The excavations of the wonderful mounds have brought to light many
things more curious than the mounds themselves. It seems to be
established that the mounds were used for four distinct purposes. They
were altars for sacrifice, and, like the Persians, whose sacrificial
ceremonies strikingly resembled those of the Mound-Builders, they were
sun-worshippers. They offered up the most costly gifts, and even human
victims. The pyramidal mounds, with avenues leading to the summits,
were the sites of the stately sun and moon temples. Here, undoubtedly,
imposing ceremonies were often performed. The lower or "knoll" mounds
were used as the sepulchres of the dead. They yield up to the modern
antiquary numberless skulls, of a type distinctly different from those
of the Red Indians. The Mound-Builders buried their dead, most often,
in a sitting posture, adorned with shell beads and ivory ornaments.
Sometimes the dead were burned. Finally, the mounds were employed as
points of observation.
[Sidenote: Relics of the Mounds.]
[Sidenote: Early Arts.]
That the Mound-Builders were a far more civilized race than the Indians
is clearly revealed by the relics found in and about the mounds. They
have left behind them thousands of flint arrow-heads, many of beautiful
workmanship. They used spades, rimmers, borers, celts, axes, fleshers,
scrapers, pestles, and other implements whose use cannot now be
determined, made of various stones, such as porphyry, greenstone,
and feldspar. They knew well the use of tobacco, for among their
most artistic and elaborately carved remains are pipes, some of them
representing animals and human heads. It seems to be certain that they
had even attained the art of weaving cloth fabrics; for pieces of cloth,
of a material akin to hemp, have been found in the mounds, with uniform
and regularly spun threads, and every evidence that they were woven by
some deft invention or mechanical device. It is certain that the Red
Indian was ignorant of this valuable art.
[Sidenote: Primeval Mining.]
Among the highly wrought remains of the mounds are fanciful water-jugs,
well carved and symmetrical in shape, some of which were evidently
made to keep water cool. The human heads represented on these bear no
resemblance to the Indian types. Drinking cups with carved rims and
handles, sepulchral urns with curious ornaments, kettles and other
pieces of skilful pottery, copper chisels, axes, knives, awls, spear and
arrow heads, and even bracelets, come to light, here and there. There
is no doubt that the Mound-Builders were miners. For, on the southern
shores of Lake Superior, great excavations indicate an extensive and
skilful mining of copper at a very remote period. It is singular, on
the other hand, that no iron implement has ever been discovered in the
mounds. The builders used iron-ore as a stone, but never learned the art
of moulding it into weapons or utensils.
Thus the fact that vast areas of what are now the United States were
once occupied by an active, skilful, imaginative, and progressive race,
seems fully established. Not less certain is it that in their physical
type, in their government, in their arts, habits, and daily pursuits,
they were separated by a wide gap from the Red Indians whom our
ancestors found in possession of the continent. The Indian was roving,
and hunted for subsistence. The Mound-Builders were sedentary, and
undoubtedly cultivated maize as their chief article of food.
[Sidenote: Origin of the Mound-Builders.]
But how remote the Mound-Builders were from the era of European
settlement, whence they came; how, whither, and when they
vanished,--these are questions before which science stands harassed,
impotent to answer positively. There are those who, marking certain
apparent resemblances between the implements, religious rites and
customs, and cranial formations, of the Mound-Builders, and those of
the Asiatic Mongols, conclude that the former were originally Asiatic
hordes, who, crossing Behring Straits, when, perhaps, the two continents
were united at that point, formed a new home and established a new
empire here. Others, with more proof, connect them with that great
Toltec race which occupied Central America and Mexico, before they were
driven out by the ruder and more warlike Aztecs.
[Sidenote: The Aztecs.]
The Toltecs have left ample records of their existence and gorgeous
civilization, in noble monuments and very numerous though till recently
undecipherable inscriptions; and many similarities lend weight to the
theory that the empire of the Mound-Builders, in the Ohio, Mississippi,
and Missouri valleys, was the result of a great Toltec migration from
Central America, which they left to Aztec dominion. Thus while we call
our continent the "New World," it is not improbable that we may be
living in a country which was alive with art, splendor, invention,
and power, when Europe was a dreary waste, over which the now extinct
monsters roamed unmolested by man.