Archæological work in the United States and in Central America was
begun by Squier about the middle of the century, and the attention
thus drawn to the subject has borne fruit in the more accurate and
scientific explorations connected with the surveying and geological
departments, and, above all, those of the Smithsonian Bureau of
Ethnology. The names of Whitney, Wright, Cyrus Thomas, Holmes, Fowke,
Mindeleff, and others, will be familiar to all American readers by
their work of the last twenty years, and need no introducing here.
The earliest remains of man in America—or perhaps in the world—are
those beneath the great lava beds of California; since those were
deposited the rivers have cut their beds through two thousand to four
thousand feet of lava rock, implying an erosion during tens, or perhaps
hundreds, of thousands of years. But little can be assigned, however,
with any certainty to a date before the Christian era, though mounds of
refuse on both ocean shores may probably belong to an age before any
human history.
The most important studies have been those on the highest civilization
of the continent, that of Central America. The destroying Spaniards
preserved but little of native record, except incidentally, and the
first collector of Aztec manuscripts was Benaduci (1736), of whose
treasures but an eighth survived his imprisonments and persecutions,
one of the greatest disasters to history. The first great publication
of manuscripts was the magnificent work of Lord Kingsborough (1830);
and almost at the same time appeared Prescott’s history. Though the
later researches have shown that the land was divided into many small
kingdoms, rather than under one power, as Prescott supposed, yet his
account of the calendar and chronology of the Aztecs has been verified
and added to, and far more has been done in reading the manuscripts
than he supposed possible. Aubin, after years of work in Mexico,
brought to Europe manuscripts of an entirely new kind, showing a fully
developed system of phonetic writing, which he has largely deciphered
with success, having analyzed over one hundred syllabic values
correctly.
One of the most complete studies has been that of the Mayan Quiché
peoples, and especially of the Mayans of Yucatan. In 1864 Landa’s work
on Yucatan (written 1566) was rediscovered, and the account of the
calendar has sufficed to enable Goodman to discover the meaning of a
very large number of signs (1897); these enable the numerical documents
to be translated, and show that a period of as much as eight thousand
years was dealt with by the Mayans, perhaps belonging to mythical ages.
The alphabetic signs of Landa have proved useless so far, and Goodman
even disbelieves in any record except that of numbers. Seler has shown
the identical origin of the signs used by Aztecs and Mayans for the
days and months. Little had been done to make known these remains until
the recent explorations, casts, and publications of Maudsley, who
has worked magnificently for seventeen years at Copan, Palenque, and
Chichen-Itza; these, however, are but three of innumerable cities of
Guatemala and Yucatan that need exploration.
In New Mexico the many ruins from the Colorado to the Rio Grande have
been proved to resemble those of the modern Pueblo Indians, and to have
none of the characteristics of Central American architecture; there
are no sculptures, and the rock inscriptions are too primitive to be
interpreted. Nothing points to an Aztec occupation, and probably the
ancestors of the present people were the builders.
The innumerable earthworks of the Mississippi valley were formerly
supposed to belong to some vanished race. And the view that they were
connected with the Central American civilization is favored by the
pyramid mound, which was hardly known otherwise, and by the excellence
of the minor sculpture. But there are great differences between the two
civilizations. The mound-builders were far inferior in metal-working,
and their burial customs are peculiar. The use of materials from both
east and west coasts shows an extensive commerce. The best summing up
of the researches is that by Prof. Cyrus Thomas, after his extensive
excavations. He concludes that the remains of the mound-builders show
no great antiquity; that they were formed by tribes like the existing
Indians; that the builders were of the same culture as were the Indians
when discovered; that such mounds continued to be made and used for
burial during the European period, and that the principal builders were
the Cherokees.
It will be seen now how totally our view of man’s history has been
changed by the study of archæology, and how fundamentally this science
affects our ideas of the past and our expectations for the future of
our race. The main outlines have been dimly seen; but in every country
the greater part yet remains to be done, and in Turkey, Persia, and
China most important civilizations are as yet quite untouched by
exploration. The new century will no doubt see a harvest from these
lands; and it is to be hoped that what yet remains in the safe keeping
of the earth may be found by able men, who will preserve it for
instruction and enable posterity to trace the fortunes of our species.
[India and America are here treated with the assistance of Mr. J. S.
Cotton and Mr. D. MacIver.]