of the successive eras of geological change with the accompanying
modifications of animal life, down to the appearance of man, and the
deciphering of geological chroniclings as a coherent disclosure of the
past history of the earth, are largely due to Sir Charles Lyell. In 1841
he visited America, and then estimated with cautious conservatism some
of the evidences adduced for the assumed antiquity of American man. But
subsequent observations led him to modify his views; and at length, in
1863, he “read his recantation” of earlier opinions; and—so far at
least as Europe is concerned,—gave the full weight of his authority to
the conclusions relative to the antiquity of man based on the discovery
of flint implements associated with bones of extinct mammalia at
Abbeville and in the valley of the Thames. The peculiar geological
conditions accompanying the earliest evidence of the presence of
palæolithic man in Europe proved, when rightly interpreted, to be no
less convincing than the long-familiar sequence of more recent
archæological indices by which antiquarian speculation has proceeded
step by step back towards that prehistoric dawn in which geology and
archæology meet on common ground. The chalk and the overlying
river-drift, abounding with flint nodules, left no room for question as
to the source of the raw material from which the primitive implements
were manufactured. The flint is still abundant as ever, in nodules of a
size amply sufficient for furnishing the largest palæoliths, in the
localities both of France and England where such specimens of primitive
art have been recovered by thousands. But there also other disclosures
tell no less conclusively of many subsequent stages of progress, alike
in prehistoric and historic times.
Sir John Evans, in his _Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain_,
purposely begins with the more recent implements, including those of the
Australian and other modern savage races, and traces his way backward,
“ascending the stream of time,” and noting the diverse examples of
ingeniously fashioned and polished tools of the Neolithic age which
preceded that palæolithic class, of vast antiquity and rudest
workmanship, which now constitute the earliest known works of man; if
they are not, indeed, examples of the first infantile efforts of human
skill. But alike in Britain, and on the neighbouring continent, a
chronological sequence of implements in stone and metal, with pottery,
personal ornaments, and other illustrations of progressive art, supplies
the evidence by means of which we are led backward—not without some
prolonged interruptions, as we approach the Palæolithic age,—from
historic to the remotest prehistoric times.
The relative chronology of the European drift may be thus stated: first,
and most modern, the superficial deposits of recent centuries with their
mediæval traces of Frank and Gaul; and along with those, the tombs, the
pottery, and other remains of the Roman period, scarcely perceptibly
affected in their geological relations by nearly the whole interval of
the Christian era; next, in the alluvium, seemingly embedded by natural
accumulation at an average depth of fifteen feet, occur remains of a
European Stone period, corresponding in many respects to those of the
pfahlbauten, or pile villages of the Swiss Lakes; and, underlying such
accumulations exceeding in their duration the whole historical period,
we come at length to the tool-bearing drift, imbedding, along with the
fossil remains of many extinct mammals, the implements of palæolithic
man, fashioned seemingly when the rivers were only beginning the work of
excavating the valleys which give their present contour to the
landscapes of France and England.
There, as elsewhere, we recognise progression from the most artless
rudeness of tool manufacture, belonging to an epoch when the process of
grinding flint or stone to an edge appears to have been unknown; through
various stages of the primitive worker in stone, bone, ivory, and the
like natural products; and then the discovery and gradual development of
the metallurgic arts. Yet at the same time it must not be lost sight of
that mere rudeness of workmanship is no evidence of antiquity. Nothing
can well be conceived of more artless than some of the stone implements
still in use among savage tribes of America. Moreover, it is to be noted
that it is not amid the privations of an Arctic winter, with its
analogies so suggestive of a condition of life corresponding to that of
the men of Europe’s Palæolithic age, but in southern latitudes, with a
climate which furnishes abundant resources for savage man, that the
crudest efforts at tool-making now occur. In a report of the _United
States Geological Survey_ for 1872, Professor Joseph Leidy furnishes an
interesting account of numerous implements, rude as any in the Drift,
observed by him while engaged on a survey at the base of the Unitah
Mountains in Southern Wyoming. “In some places,” he remarks, “the stone
implements are so numerous, and at the same time are so rudely
constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider them as
natural or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.”[47] But
with these, others are mingled of fine finish. The Shoshones who haunt
the region seem to be incapable of such skill as the latter imply; and
express the belief that they were a gift of the Great Spirit to their
ancestors. Yet many are fresh in appearance; though others are worn and
decomposed on the surface, and may, as Professor Leidy assumes, have
lain there for centuries. The tendency is now, even among experienced
archæologists, to assume that they are actually palæolithic. Mr. Thomas
Wilson remarks, in his _Report_ of 1887: “Dr. Leidy did not know these
implements to be what they really were, that is implements of the
Palæolithic period.”[48] But in view of Dr. Leidy’s whole narrative, his
assumption seems to be more consistent with the observed data. In the
same narrative he describes a stone scraper, or _teshoa_, as the
Shoshones call it, employed by them in the dressing of buffalo-skins,
but of so simple a character that he says, “had I not observed it in
actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or
horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I would have viewed
it as an accidental spawl.” When illustrating the characteristics of a
like class of stone implements and weapons of Great Britain, Sir John
Evans figures and describes an axe, or war-club, procured from the
Indians of Rio Frio in Texas. Its blade is a piece of trachyte, so
rudely chipped that it would scarcely attract attention as of artificial
working, but for the club-like haft, evidently chopped into shape with
stone tools, into which it is inserted. Nothing ruder has been brought
to light in any drift or cave deposit.[49] Another modern Texas
implement, in the Smithonnia collections at Washington,[50] is a
rudely-fashioned flint blade, presenting considerable resemblance to a
familiar class of oval implements of the river-drift.
So far, therefore, as unskilled art and the mere rudeness of workmanship
are concerned, it might be assumed that the aborigines of America are
thus presented to our study in their most primitive stage. They had
advanced in no degree beyond the condition of the European savage of the
River-Drift period, when, at the close of the fifteenth century, they
were brought into contact with modern European culture; and nothing in
their rude arts seemed to offer a clue to their origin, or any evidence
of progression. So far as anything could be learned from their work,
they might have entered on the occupation of the northern continent,
subsequent to the visits of the Northmen in the tenth century; and,
indeed, American archæologists generally favour the opinion that the
_Skrælings_, as the Northmen designated the New England natives whom
they encountered, were not Red Indians but Eskimo. But whatever may have
been the local distribution of races at that date, geological evidence,
which has proved so conclusive in relation to European ethnology, has at
length been appealed to by American investigators, with results which
seem to establish for their continent also its primeval Stone period,
and remote prehistoric dawn.
The _Report of the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology_
for 1877, gave the first publicity to a communication from Dr. Charles
C. Abbott, setting forth the data from which he was led to assume that
man existed on the American continent during the formation of the great
glacial deposit which extends from Labrador as far south as Virginia.
The scene of his successful research is in the valley of the Delaware,
near Trenton, New Jersey. Though the relative antiquity of the Trenton
gravel beds is modern compared with some subsequent disclosures, his
discoveries have a special interest as foremost among those of
implement-bearing gravels in the New World. In the gravel, deposited by
the Delaware river in the process of excavating the valley through which
its course now lies, Dr. Abbott’s diligent search has been rewarded by
finding numerous specimens of rudely chipped implements of a peculiar
type, to which he has given the name of “turtle-back celts.” They are
fashioned of a highly indurated argillite, with a conchoidal fracture,
and have been recovered at depths varying from five to upwards of twenty
feet below the overlying soil, in the undisturbed gravel of the bluff
facing the Delaware river, as well as in railway cuttings and other
excavations.
Here, to all appearance, intelligent research had at length been
rewarded by the discovery of undoubted traces of the American
palæolithic man; and Dr. Abbott, not unnaturally, gave free scope to his
fancy, as he realised to himself the preoccupation of the river valley
with “the village sites of pre-glacial man.” There is a fascination in
such disclosures which, especially in the case of the original
discoverer, tempts to extreme views; and both in France and England, at
the present time, the more eager among the geologists and archæologists
devoted to this inquiry are reluctantly restrained from assuming as a
scientific fact the existence of man in Southern England and in France
under more genial climatic influences, prior to the great Ice age which
wrought such enormous changes there. The theory which Dr. Abbott formed
on the basis of the evidence first presented to him by the disclosures
of the Trenton gravel may be thus stated. Towards the close of the great
Ice age, the locality which has rewarded his search for specimens of
palæolithic art marked the termination of the glacier on the Atlantic
coast. Here, at the foot of the glacier, a primitive people, in a
condition closely analogous to that of the Eskimo of the present day,
made their home, and wandered over the open sea in the vicinity, during
the accumulation of the deposit from the melting glacier. But this
drift-gravel was modified by subsequent action. According to Dr.
Abbott’s conclusions, it was deposited in open water, on the bed of a
shallow sea. But the position of the large boulders, and the absence of
true clay in the mass, suggest that it has undergone great changes since
its original deposition as glacial debris; and if this is to be
accounted for by subsequent action of water, the unpolished surfaces of
the chipped implements are inconsistent with such a theory of their
origin. Huge boulders, of the same character as those which abound in
the underlying gravel, occur on the surface; and their presence there
was referred to by Dr. Abbott as throwing light upon “the occurrence of
rude implements identical with those found in the underlying gravels,
inasmuch as the same ice-raft that bore the one, with its accompanying
sand and gravel, might well gather up also stray relics of this
primitive people, and re-deposit them where they are now found.”
Accordingly, seeking in fancy to recall this ancient past, he says in
his first report: “In times preceding the formation of this gravel bed,
now in part facing the Delaware river, there were doubtless localities,
once the village sites of pre-glacial man, where these rude stone
implements would necessarily be abundant,” and he accordingly asks “May
not the ice in its onward march, gathering in bulk every loose fragment
of rock and particle of soil, have held them loosely together, and,
hundreds of miles from their original site, left them in some one
locality such as this, where the river has again brought to light rude
implements that characterise an almost primitive people? But, assuming
that the various implements fashioned by a strictly pre-glacial people
have been totally destroyed by the crushing forces of the glacier, and
that the specimens now produced were not brought from a distance, may
they not be referred to an early race that, driven southward by the
encroaching ice, dwelt at the foot of the glacier, and during their
sojourn here these implements were lost?”[51]
The opinions thus set forth in the first published account of Dr.
Abbott’s discoveries, have since been considerably modified, in so far
as the geological age of the tool-bearing gravel of the Delaware valley
is concerned. In his earlier publications he assumed, as no longer
questionable, the existence of inter-glacial, if not pre-glacial, man on
the continent. In his more matured views, as set forth in his _Primitive
Industry_, he speaks of “having been seriously misled by the various
geological reports that purport to give, in proper sequence, the
respective ages of the several strata of clay, gravel, boulders, and
sand, through which the river has finally worn its channel to the ocean
level”;[52] so that he has probably ascribed too great an antiquity to
the peculiar class of stone implements brought to light in the
river-gravels of New Jersey. Dr. Abbott, accordingly, states as his more
matured conclusion, confirmed by the reports of some of the most
experienced geological observers, on whose judgment he relies, that the
Trenton gravel, in which alone the turtle-back celts have thus far been
found, is a post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river
was larger than at present; and is the most recent of all the formations
of the Delaware.[53] Here, however, the term “recent” is employed
altogether relatively; and although Dr. Abbott no longer claims in the
discovery of the stone implements of the gravel beds near Trenton, New
Jersey, evidence of the existence of man on the American continent
before the close of the Glacial period, he still refers the Trenton
gravel tool-makers to an era which, at the lowest computation, precedes
by thousands of years the earliest historical glimpses of Assyria,
Egypt, or wherever among the most ancient nations of the Old World the
beginnings of history can be traced.
The disclosures of Dr. Abbott claim a special importance among the
fruits of archæological investigation on the American continent, not
only from the fact that they furnish the first well-authenticated
results of systematic research based on the scientific analogies of
European archæology, but these later results have included the remains
of man himself. When Dr. Usher of Mobile contributed to _The Types of
Mankind_ an account of the discovery of a human skeleton at New Orleans,
found under circumstances from which the existence of man in the delta
of the Mississippi was deduced well nigh sixty thousand years ago, it
was scarcely calculated to win the reader’s acceptance of that
assumption when it was added that “the type of the cranium was, as might
have been expected, that of the aboriginal American race.” Nor is this
the only example of skull of a strictly modern Indian type from which
the inference has been drawn that the same unchanging form has prevailed
from the era of pre-glacial American man till now. Three human crania
found in the Trenton gravel are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge
(Harvard). All are of the same type, but it differs essentially from
that of the Red Indian skull. They are of small size, oval, and present
a striking contrast to all other skulls in the Peabody collection. Their
value is due to the fact of their discovery in the implement-bearing
gravel, in proximity to the characteristic examples of what are assumed
to be palæolithic celts. For it is well for us to bear in remembrance
that the evidences of the antiquity of man in Europe do not rest on any
number of chance disclosures. It is a simple procedure to dig into a
Celtic or Saxon barrow, and find there the implements and pottery of its
builders lying alongside of their buried remains. But archæologists have
learned to recognise the palæolithic implements as not less
characteristic of certain post-pliocene deposits than the palæontology
of the same geological formation. The river-drift and cave deposits are
characterised by traces of contemporaneous life, as shown in the
examples of primitive art from which they receive the name of the
tool-bearing drift or gravel; just as older geological formations have
their characteristic animal and vegetable fossils. The specific
character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French Drift having been
determined, geologists and archæologists have sought for flint
implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the
fossils of the same period, and with like success. Palæolithic
implements have been recovered in this manner in Suffolk, Bedford,
Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, and other districts in the south of
England. So entirely indeed has the man of the Drift passed beyond the
province of the archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed
up his _Notes on Further Discoveries of Flint Implements in Beds of
Post-Pleiocene Gravel and Clay_, with a list of forty-one localities
where gravel and clay pits or gravel beds occur, as some of the places
in the south of England where he thought flint implements might also by
diligent search possibly be found; and subsequent discoveries confirmed
his anticipations. It has been by the application of the same principle
to the drift and river-valley gravels of the New World that a like
success has been achieved. The result of a careful study of the
tool-bearing gravel of the Delaware may be thus summarised from recent
reports of trustworthy scientific observers. The Trenton gravel is a
post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river was larger
than its present volume. It represents apparently the latest of the
surface deposits of the upper Delaware valley;[54] and Dr. Abbott
remarks of it: “The melting of a local glacier in the Cattskill
Mountains would probably result, at the headwaters of the Delaware, in a
continued flood of sufficient volume, if supplemented by the action of
floating ice, to form the Trenton gravels.”[55] But these gravels are
now recognised as the youngest of the series of ancient
implement-bearing deposits. Underneath lies the older Columbia gravel,
which has also yielded—though in much fewer numbers,—palæoliths of
primitive types. The researches of Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson in the State
of Delaware have already been referred to; and from those results, as
well as from similar disclosures in Ohio and Indiana, it is no longer
doubted that reliable traces have been recovered of American man
contemporary with the mammoth and the mastodon; and—like the old
cave-dwellers of Cro-Magnon,—a hunter of the reindeer in the valley of
the Delaware.
American archæologists have undoubtedly been repeatedly deceived by the
misleading traces of comparatively modern remains in deposits of some
geological antiquity; as in instances already referred to in the
California gravel beds. In these, indeed, ground and polished
instruments of stone, including a “plummet” of highly polished syenite,
“an exhibition of the lapidary’s skill superior to anything yet
furnished by the Stone age of either continent,”[56] are produced from
time to time from the same post-pliocene formation where the remains of
the elephant and mastodon abound. Dr. Abbott did not overlook the danger
to which the archæologist is thus exposed on a continent which, so far
as its aborigines are concerned, has scarcely yet emerged from its Stone
age. He accordingly remarked in his original report: “The chance
occurrence of single specimens of the ordinary forms of Indian relics,
at depths somewhat greater than they have usually reached, even in
constantly cultivated soils, induced me, several years since, to
carefully examine the underlying gravels, to determine if the common
surface-found stone implements of Indian origin were ever found therein,
except in such manner as might easily be explained, as in the case of
deep burials by the uprooting of large trees, whereby an implement lying
on the surface, or immediately below it, might fall into the gravel
beneath, and subsequently become buried several feet in depth; and
lastly, by the action of the water, as where a spring, swollen by spring
freshets, cuts for itself a new channel, and carrying away a large body
of earth, leaves its larger pebbles, and possibly stone implements of
late origin, upon the gravel of the new bed of the stream.” But there is
little difficulty in separating chance-buried neolithic or modern
implements from the genuine palæolithic celts or hatchets abundantly
present in the undisturbed gravel beds, from which they have been taken
on their first exposure.
Professor Henry C. Lewis, of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, states
that “at the localities on the Pennsylvania Railroad, where extensive
exposures of these gravels have been made, the deposit is undoubtedly
undisturbed. No implement could have come into this gravel except at a
time when the river flowed upon it, and when they might have sunk
through the loose and shifting material. All the evidence points to the
conclusion that at the time of the Trenton gravel flood, Man, in a rude
state, with habits similar to those of the river-drift hunter of Europe,
and probably under a climate similar to that of more northern regions,
lived upon the banks of the ancient Delaware, and lost his stone
implements in the shifting sands and gravel of the bed of that
stream.”[57] To this Dr. Abbott adds: “At just such a locality as
Trenton, where the river widens out, traces of man, had he existed
during the accumulation of the gravel, would be most likely to occur.
This is true not only because there is here the greatest mass of the
gravel, and the best opportunities for examining it in section, but the
locality would be one most favourable for the existence of man at the
time. The higher ground in the immediate vicinity was sufficiently
elevated to be free from the encroachments of the ice and water, and the
climate, soil, and fauna are all such as to make it possible for man to
exist at this time in this locality.”[58] In 1878 the tusk of a mastodon
was found under partially stratified gravel at a depth of fourteen feet;
and Dr. Abbott states that, within a few yards of this, palæolithic
implements have been gathered, one at the same and three at greater
depths. Now that an intelligent interest has been awakened in the
subject, numerous labourers are enlisted in its elucidation. To this a
coherent unity has been given by the archæologists of the Peabody Museum
at Harvard, and the curators of the National Museum at Washington. The
results of a systematic inquiry by the latter into the localities and
numbers of examples of supposed palæolithic works of art already
recovered, have disclosed abundant confirmatory evidence. Special
attention was invited to the occurrence of surface-finds, as well as to
the depth and the geological indications of age in those recovered from
excavations or chance exposures under the surface. Of the superficial
examples the proof of the occurrence of stone implements of palæolithic
types over widely diffused areas, from New England to Texas, is
abundant. Much caution is required in the conclusions derived from such
implements found exposed, or in superficial deposits, on a continent
where weapons and implements of stone are still in frequent use. But
after the elimination of all doubtful examples, abundant evidence
remains of the presence of man on the American continent in a
Palæolithic as well as an early Neolithic age. An interesting _résumé_
of recent evidence is embodied in the “Results of an Inquiry as to the
Existence of Man in North America during the Palæolithic Period of the
Stone Age,” by Mr. Thomas Wilson of the National Museum at
Washington.[59]