Fig. 74.—Mask, Mexican Calendar Stone.
Fig. 74.—Mask, Mexican Calendar Stone.
points of correspondence between the central device on the Calendar Stone, and a mask, with widely expanded eyes and tongue hanging out, prominent in the curious sacrificial scene sculptured on the Casa de Piedra at Palenque. But the correspondence amounts to little more than this, that each is a gigantic mask with protruding tongue. That of the Calendar Stone is engraved here from a cast brought home by Mr. Bullock, and now in the Collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. The statues dug up along with it on the site of the great teocalli of Mexico, were buried in the court of the University, to place them beyond reach of the idolatrous rites which the Indians were inclined to pay to them. At the solicitation of Mr. Bullock they were again disinterred, to admit of his obtaining casts; and he furnishes this interesting account of the sensation excited by the restoration to light of the largest and most celebrated of the Mexican deities:—“During the time it was exposed, the court of the University was crowded with people, most of whom expressed the most decided anger and contempt. Not so, however, all the Indians. I attentively marked their countenances. Not a smile escaped them, or even a word. All was silence and attention. In reply to a joke of one of the students, an old Indian remarked, ‘It is very true we have three very good Spanish gods, but we might still have been allowed to keep a few of those of our ancestors!’ And I was informed that chaplets of flowers had been placed on the figure by natives who had stolen thither unseen in the evening.”[95]
Fig. 75.—Ticul Hieroglyphic Vase.
Fig. 75.—Ticul Hieroglyphic Vase.
The figure which thus reawakened patriotic sympathies in the descendants of Montezuma’s subjects is a rude disproportioned idol, strikingly contrasting with the elaborate hieroglyphical devices and well-proportioned figures and decorations which accompany the grotesque mask in the Casa de Piedra of Palenque. In the latter, the principal human figures present the remarkable profile of the ancient Central American race, as shown on a vase dug up among the ruins of Ticul (Fig. 75), with the prominent nose, retreating forehead and chin, and protruding under-lip, so essentially different from the features either of the Mexicans or northern Indians. The subject race on whom they tread are characterised by a diverse profile, with overhanging brows, a Roman nose, and a well-defined chin; while their costume is equally indicative of a different origin.
But the sculpture of the Mexican Calendar Stone embodies evidence of an amount of knowledge and skill not less interesting for us than the mysterious hieroglyphics of the Palenque tablets; and was believed by Humboldt to indicate unmistakable relations to the ancient science of south-eastern Asia. Mr. Stephens has printed a curious exposition of the chronology of Yucatan, derived from native sources by Don Juan Pio Perez. From the correspondence of their mode of computing time with that adopted by the Mexicans, he assumes that it probably originated with them; but at the same time he remarks that the inhabitants of Mayapan, as the Peninsula was called at the period of Spanish invasion, divided time by calculating it almost in the same manner as their ancestors the Toltecs, differing only in the particular arrangement of their great cycles. Their year commenced on the 16th of July, an error of only forty-eight hours in advance of the precise day in which the sun returns there to the zenith, on his way to the south, and sufficiently near for astronomers who had to make their observations with the naked eye. Their calendar thus presents evidence of native and local origin. According to Humboldt, the Mexican year began in the corresponding winter half of the year, ranging from the 9th to the 28th of January; but Clavigero places its commencement from the 14th to the 26th of February.
If my ideas as to a marked inferiority in the terra-cottas and sculptures of the Mexicans, and the very questionable proofs of their architectural achievements, are correct, they tend to confirm the inference, that not to the Aztecs, but to their more civilised Toltec predecessors, must be ascribed that remarkable astronomical knowledge in the arrangement of their calendar, which exhibits a precision in the adjustment of civil to solar time, such as only a few of the most civilised nations of the Old World had attained to at that date. But, so far as an indigenous American civilisation is concerned, it matters little whether it be ascribed to Toltec or Aztec origin. Of its existence no doubt can be entertained; and there is little more room for questioning, that among races who had carried civilisation so far, there existed the capacity for its further development, independently of all borrowed aid. The fierce Dane and Norman seemed to offer equally little promise of intellectual progress in their first encroachments on the insular Saxon. But out of such elements sprung the race which outstripped the Spaniard in making of the land of Columbus a New World; and, left to its own natural progress, the valley of Anahuac, with its mingling races, might have proved a source of intellectual life to the whole continent. But modern Mexico has displaced the ancient capital of Montezuma; cathedral, convents, and churches, have usurped the sites of Aztec teocallis; its canals have disappeared, and its famous causeways are no longer laved by the waters of the Tezcucan Lake. It is even denied by those who have personally surveyed the site, that the waters of the lake can ever have overflowed the marshes around the modern capital, or stood at a much nearer point to it than they do at present.[96]Fresh doubts seem to accumulate around its mythic story. The ruined masonry of its vanished palaces and temples may be assumed to have been all swallowed up in the edifices which combine to make of the modern capital so striking an object, amid the strange scenery of its elevated tropical valley. But Mexico was not the only city, nor even the only great capital, of the valley.
In attempting to trace back the history of the remarkable population found in occupation of the Mexican territory when first invaded by the Spaniards, we learn, by means of various sources of information already referred to, but chiefly on the authority of Ixtlilxochitl’s professed interpretations of picture-writings, no longer in existence; and of traditions of old men, concerning events reaching back from seven or eight, even to twelve centuries before their own time: that the Toltecs, advancing from some unknown region of the north, entered the territory of Anahuac, “probably before the close of the seventh century.” They were, according to their historian, already skilled in agriculture and the mechanical arts, familiar with metallurgy, and endowed with all the knowledge and experience out of which grew the civilisation of Anahuac in later ages. In the time of the Conquest, extensive ruins are said to have indicated the site of their ancient capital of Tula, to the north of the Mexican valley. The tradition of such ruined cities adds confirmation to the inferences derived from those more recently explored in regions to the south; and still the name of Toltec in New Spain is synonymous witharchitect: the mythic designation of a shadowy race, such as glances fitfully across the first chapters of legendary history among the most ancient nations of Europe. But subsequent to those Pelasgi of the New World, there followed from unknown regions of the north the Chichimecas, the Tepanecs, the Acolhuans or Tezcucans, the Aztecs of Mexicans, and other inferior tribes; so that, as we approach a more definite period of history, we learn of a league between the States of Mexico and Tezcuco and the kingdom of Tlacopan, under which the Aztec capital grew into the marvellous city of temples and palaces described by Cortes and his followers. But Don Fernando de Alva claimed descent on his mother’s side from the Imperial race of Tezcuco; and he has not failed to preserve, or to create the memorials of the glory of that imperial city of the laguna. It contained upwards of four hundred stately edifices for the nobles. The magnificent palace of the Tezcucan emperor “extended from east to west, twelve hundred and thirty-four yards, and, from north to south, nine hundred and seventy-eight. It was encompassed by a wall of unburnt bricks and cement, six feet wide and nine high for one-half of the circumference, and fifteen feet high for the other half. Within this enclosure were two courts. The outer one was used as the great market-place of the city, and continued to be so until long after the Conquest. The interior court was surrounded by the council-chambers and halls of justice. There were also accommodation there for foreign ambassadors; and a spacious saloon, with apartments opening into it, for men of science and poets, who pursued their studies in this retreat, or met together to hold converse under its marble porticoes.”[97]In this style the native historian describes the glory of ancient Tezcuco. A lordly pile, provided for the fitting accommodation of the sovereigns of Mexico and Tlacopan, contained three hundred apartments, including some fifty yards square. Solid materials of stone and marble were liberally employed both on this and on the apartments of the royal harem, the walls of which were incrusted with alabasters and richly tinted stucco, or hung with gorgeous tapestries of variegated feather-work. Some two leagues distant, at Tezcotzinco, was the favourite residence of the sovereign; on a hill, “laid out in terraces, or hanging-gardens, having a flight of five hundred and twenty steps, many of them hewn in the natural porphyry. In the garden on the summit was a reservoir of water, fed by an aqueduct carried over hill and valley for several miles on huge buttresses of masonry. A large rock stood in the midst of this basin, sculptured with hieroglyphics representing the years of Nezahualcoyotl’s reign, and his principal achievements in each. On a lower level were three other reservoirs, in each of which stood a marble statue of a woman, emblematic of the three estates of the empire. Another tank contained a winged lion,”—but here the modern historian grows incredulous, and appends a (?) before proceeding in accordance with his authorities to add—“cut out of the solid rock, bearing in his mouth the portrait of the emperor.”
The authority for all this wrote in the beginning of the seventeenth century; but his narrative receives some confirmation from architectural remains still visible on the hill of Tezcotzinco. They are referred to by Latrobe and Bullock as relics of an era greatly more remote than that of Aztec civilisation; and more recently Mr. Tylor describes the hill of Tezcotzinco as terraced, and traversed by numerous roads and flights of steps cut in the rock. It is connected with another hill by an aqueduct of immense size constructed with blocks of porphyry, and with its channel lined with a hard stucco, still very perfect. Baths also remain, cut out of the solid rock; and on the summit of the hill, overlooking the ancient city, sculptured blocks of stone furnish evidence that the tales of architectural magnificence are not wholly fabulous. Mr. Christy, his travelling companion, made excavations in the neighbouring mounds, and was rewarded by the discovery of some fine idols of hard stone, and “an infinitude of pottery and small objects.” But the spirit of Spanish romance still asserts its influence. Bullock, in hisSix Months in Mexico, describes the remains of the royal fountain of Tezcotzinco as a “beautiful basin, twelve feet long by eight wide, having a well five feet by four deep in the centre”; while Latrobe, in hisRambles in Mexico, reduces the dimensions of the royal bath to “perhaps two feet and a half in diameter, not large enough for any monarch bigger than Oberon to take a duck in!”
Of the great pyramid or teocalli of Huitzilopotchtli in old Mexico, no vestige now remains, unless such as is reputed to lie buried under the foundations of the cathedral which occupies its site. But time and fate have dealt more tenderly with the scarcely less famous pyramid of Cholula. The ancient city of that name, when first seen by Cortes, was said to include, within and without its walls, about forty thousand houses, or according to ordinary rules of computation, two hundred thousand inhabitants. But whatever its ancient population may have been, while the fruits of Spanish conquest have advanced it to the rank of capital of the republic of Cholula, they have left only sixteen thousand as the number of its occupants. Still, Cholula was unquestionably one of the most famous of the cities of the New World: a sacred Mecca for the pilgrims of Anahuac.
Quetzalcoatl, the milder god of the Aztec pantheon, whose worship was performed by offerings of fruits and flowers in their season, was venerated as the divine teacher of the arts of peace. His reign on earth was the golden age of Anahuac, when its people learned from him agriculture, metallurgy, and the art of government. But their benefactor, according to the tradition handed down to the Aztecs by an elder people whom they had superseded, incurred the wrath of another of the gods. As he passed on his way to abandon the land to the rule of the terrible Huitzilopotchtli, he paused at the city of Cholula; and while he tarried there, the great teocalli was reared and dedicated to his worship. But the benevolent deity could not remain within reach of the avenger. After spending twenty years among them, teaching the people the arts of civilisation, he proceeded onward till he reached the ocean; and there embarking in a vessel, made of serpents’ skins, his followers watched his retreating bark on its way to the sacred isle of Tlapallan. But the tradition lived on among the Mexicans that the bark of the good deity would revisit their shores; and this fondly cherished belief materially contributed to the success of the Spaniards, when their huge-winged ships bore the beings of another world to the mainland of the Mexican Gulf. The legend bears all the marks of anciently derived hero-worship, in which love for a lost benefactor framed for itself a deified embodiment of his virtues. This, however, is important to note, that Aztec traditions assigned the pyramid of Cholula to an older race and era than their own. It was there when they entered the plateau; and the arts of the divine metallurgist were taught, not to them but to the Toltecs, whom they superseded. Nevertheless, the deity shared in their worship; his image occupied a shrine on the summit of the pyramid of Cholula when the Spaniards first visited the holy city; and the undying flame flung its radiance far into the night, to keep alive the memory of the good deity, who was one day to return and restore the golden age.
The present appearance of the great teocalli very partially justifies the reference made by Prescott to it as “that tremendous mound on which the traveller still gazes with admiration as the most colossal fabric in New Spain, rivalling in dimensions, and somewhat resembling in form, the pyramidal structures of ancient Egypt.” If it ever was a terraced pyramid, time and the elements have nearly effaced the traces of its original outline. On the authority of Humboldt, it is described as a pyramidal mound of stone and earth, deeply incrusted with alternate strata of brick and clay, which “had the form of the Mexican teocallis, that of a truncated pyramid facing with its four sides the cardinal points, and divided by the same number of terraces.” But theadobeof the Mexican, which is frequently styled brick, is nothing more than a mass of unbaked clay, or even mud. If such, therefore, is the supposed brick which alternated with the other materials of the mound, we can the more readily reconcile the seeming contradictions of observers. One of the latest thus describes the impression produced on his mind: “Right before me, as I rode along, was a mass of trees, of evergreen foliage, presenting indistinctly the outline of a pyramid, which ran up to the height of about two hundred feet, and was crowned by an old stone church, and surmounted by a tall steeple. It was the most attractive object in the plain; it had such a look of uncultivated nature in the midst of grain fields. It would have lost half its attractiveness had it been the stiff and clumsy thing which the picture represents it to be.” It is accordingly described by Mr. R. A. Wilson, in hisMexico and its Religion, as no more than “the finest Indian mound on this continent,” rising to a height of about two hundred feet, and crowned by an old stone church. But careful examination satisfied Mr. Tylor that it still retains the traces of a terraced teocalli. The church on its summit, dedicated to Our Ladyde los Remedios, is served by a priest of the blood of the Cholulans; and the masonry and architectural skill which it displays have no doubt somewhat to do with their absence elsewhere; for if the clergy found the teocalli cased like the pyramidal terraces of Central America, with cut stone steps and facings, there can be little doubt they would go no further for a quarry for their intended church.
To the north of the Mexican valley ancient ruins arrest the gaze of the traveller, onward even to California. On the Rio Colorado and its tributaries, ruins of great extent, surveyed by recent exploring parties, are described as built with large stones, nicely wrought, and accurately squared. But nothing in their style of architecture suggests a common origin with the ruins of Mexico or Central America. They are large and plain structures, with massive walls, evidently built for defence, and with no traces of the ornamentation which abounds on the ruins of Yucatan. The Moqui Indians, the supposed remnant of the ancient builders, still construct their dwellings of stone with considerable art and skill. They are a gentle and intelligent race, small of stature, with fine black hair; and differ essentially from the Indians of the North-west. Their villages are included in one common stone structure, generally of a quadrangular form, with solid, unpierced walls externally, and accessible only by means of a ladder. These hive-like colonies are usually placed, for further defence, on the summits of the lofty plateaus, which in the region of New Mexico are detached by the broad cañons with which that remarkable region is intersected. By such means this ingenious people seek protection from the wild tribes with which they are surrounded. Thus permanently settled, while exposed to the assaults of marauders, the Moquis cultivate the soil, raise corn, beans, cotton, and more recently vegetables derived from intercourse with the Mexicans. They have also their flocks of sheep and goats; and weave their dyed wools into a variety of substantial and handsome dresses. But only a small remnant now survives, occupying seven villages on the range of the Rio del Norte.[98]
Throughout New California ruined structures of stone, and sometimes of clay abound. TheCasas grandes, as they are called, appear to have been defensive structures like the Moqui villages. Captain Johnston describes one, called the Casa de Montezuma, on the river Gila, which measured fifty feet by forty, and had been form storeys high. It is indeed worthy of note that while we find throughout the continent, from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic, scarcely a vestige of ante-Columbian stone architecture: traces of it increase upon us with every new exploration of the country that lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, and merges towards the south into the seats of ancient native civilisation and matured architectural skill.
But the Southern Continent had also its seat of a remarkable native civilisation; which, like that of Mexico, derived some of its most striking characteristics from the physical aspects of the country in which it originated. The peculiar natural advantages of Peru resulted from the settlement of a people on the lofty plateaus of the Andes, but within the tropics, where at each successive elevation a different climate was secured. Such products as the mercantile navies of Northern Europe gather from many distant shores, were there brought within the compass of an industrious population: who fed their flocks on the cold crests of the sierra; cultivated their gardens and orchards on its higher plateaus; and gathered the luxuriant products of the tropics from the country that for them lay, for the most part, beneath the clouds, and spread away from the lowest slopes of the Andes to the neighbouring shores of the Pacific. The character of the people, and the nature of the civilisation of this remarkable country, presented many striking contrasts to the customs and institutions of the Mexicans, and they have generally been assumed as of totally independent origin.
Peru has her historic traditions, no less than Mexico; and her native historian, Garcilasso de la Vega, a descendant, through his mother, from the royal line of the Incas: who plays for them the part which Fernando de Alva did for his Tezcucan ancestry. Seen through such a medium, the traditions of the Inca race expand into gorgeous pages of romance; and the institutions of European chivalry and medieval polity are grafted on the strange usages of an Indian nation, remarkable for its own well-matured commonwealth, and unique phases of native-born civilisation. Sabaism constituted the essential element of Peruvian religious faith, and gave form and colour to the national rites and traditions. Manco Capac and Mama Oello Huaco, their mythic instructors in the arts of agriculture, weaving, and spinning, were the Children of the Sun; their high religious festivals were determined by the solstices and equinoxes; and Quito, the holy city, which lay immediately under the Equator, had within it the pillar of the sun, where its vertical rays threw no shadow at noon, and they believed the god of light to seat himself in full effulgence in his temple. The sacred pillar stood in the centre of a circle described within the court of the great temple, traversed by a diameter drawn from east to west, by means of which the period of the equinoxes was determined; and both then, and at the solstices, the pillar was hung with garlands, and offerings of fruit and flowers were made to the divine luminary and parent of mankind. The title of the sovereign Inca was the Child of the Sun; and the territory of the empire was divided into three portions, of which one, constituting the lands of the Sun, maintained the costly ceremonial of public worship, with the temples and their numerous priests and vestal virgins. The national traditions pointed to the Valley of Cuzco as the original seat of native civilisation. There their mythic Manco Capac founded the city of that name; on the highlands around it a number of columns were reared which served for taking azimuths, and by measuring their shadows the precise time of the solstices were determined.
Besides the divine honours paid to the sun, the Peruvians worshipped the host of heaven, and dedicated temples to the thunder and lightning, and to the rainbow, as the wrathful and benign messengers of the supreme solar deity. It might naturally be anticipated that a nation thus devoted to astronomical observations, and maintaining a sacred caste exclusively for watching solar and stellar phenomena, would have attained to considerable knowledge in that branch of science. Apparently, however, the facilities which their equatorial position afforded for determining the few indispensable periods in their calendar, removed the stimulus to further progress; and not only do we find them surpassed in this respect by the Muyscas, occupying a part of the same great southern plateau, who regulated their calendar on a system presenting considerable points of resemblance to that of the Aztecs; but they remained to the last in ignorance of the true causes of eclipses, and regarded such phenomena with the same superstitious and apprehensive wonder as has affected the untutored savage mind in all ages. One historian, indeed, affirms that they recognised the actual length of the solar year, and regulated their chronology by a series of cycles of decades of years, centuries, and decades of centuries, the last of which constituted the grand cycle or great year of the sun.[99]This is only confuted by a reference to the silence of earlier authorities, and the absence of all evidence on the subject; and may serve to remind us how partial is the knowledge we possess of the intellectual development of this singularly interesting people, among whom science was essentially esoteric.
Prescott seeks to account for the very imperfect nature of the astronomical science of Peru, by the fact, that the Peruvian priesthood were drawn exclusively from the body of the Incas: a privileged order of nobility who claimed divine origin, and were the less tempted to seek in superior learning the exclusive rights of an intellectual aristocracy. But other reasons help to explain this singular intellectual condition of a nation, which had in so many other directions made remarkable progress in civilisation. The very fact that astronomy constituted, as it were, the national religion, placed it beyond the reach of scientific speculation, among a people with whom blasphemy against the sun, and malediction of the Inca, were alike punished with death. The impediments to Galileo’s astronomical discoveries were trifling compared with those which must have beset the presumptuous Inca priest who ventured to deny the diurnal revolution of the sun round the earth; or to explain, by the simple interposition of the moon between themselves and the sun, the mysterious and malign infirmities with which it constituted a part of the national creed to believe their supreme deity was afflicted during a solar eclipse. But another cause also tended to retard the progress of the Peruvians in the intelligent solution of astronomical phenomena. Among the ancient Egyptians we find the division of the year determined by the changes of the Nile; and their year regulated by applications of astronomical science, minutely interwoven with their sacred and civil institutions. But the phenomena of the seasons, which have fostered with every other civilised nation the accurate observation of the astronomical divisions of time, and the determination of the recurring festivals dependent on seed-time and harvest, were almost inoperative, where, among a people specially devoted to agriculture, each season and every temperature could be commanded by a mere change of elevation under the vertical sun of the equator.
The Peruvians, however, must be tried by their own standards of excellence. Manco Capac, their mythic civiliser, was no war-god, like the Mexitli of the ferocious Aztecs. Agriculture was the special art introduced by him; and husbandry was pursued among them on principles which modern science has only recently fully developed in Europe. There alone, in all the New World, the plough was in use; and the Inca himself, on one of the great annual festivals, consecrated the labours of the husbandman by turning up the earth with a golden ploughshare. Artificial irrigation was carried out on a gigantic scale by means of aqueducts and tunnels of great extent, the ruins of which still attest the engineering skill of their constructors. The virtues ofguano, which are now so well appreciated by the agriculturists of Europe, were familiar to the Peruvian farmer; and as the country of the Incas included, at its various levels, nearly all varieties of climate and production, from the cocoa and palm that fringed the borders of the Pacific, to the pasture of their mountain flocks on the verge of the high regions of perpetual snow: a systematic succession of public fairs, regulated, like all else, by the supreme government, afforded abundant opportunities for the interchange of their diverse commodities.
Such a country, if any, could dispense with commerce, and attain to considerable advancement without a representative currency or circulating medium. Gold, which was so abundant, served only for barbaric pomp and decoration. Silver was accessible in such quantities, that Pizarro found in it a substitute for iron to shoe the horses of his cavalry. Copper and tin in like manner abounded in the mountains; and the Peruvians had learned to alloy the copper both with tin and silver, for greater utility in its application to the useful arts. Bartholomew Ruiz, it will be remembered, found on board thebalsafirst met by him off the Peruvian coast, a pair of balances for weighing the precious metals; and the repeated discovery of well-adjusted silver balances in tombs of the Incas, confirms the evidence that they made use of weights in determining the value of their commodities. The Peruvians were thus in possession of a mode of exchange, which, for their purposes, was superior to that of the currency of the Mexicans, in the absence of any such means of ascertaining the exact apportionment of commodities produced for sale.
Progress in agriculture was accompanied by a corresponding development of the resources of a pastoral people. Vast flocks of sheep ranged the mountain pastures of the Andes, under the guidance of native shepherds; while the Peruvians alone, of all the races of the New World, had attained to that important stage in civilisation which precedes the employment of machinery, by their use of the lower animals in economising human labour. The llama, trained as a beast of burden, carried its light load along the steep paths of the Cordilleras, or on the great highways of Peru.
Fig. 76.—Peruvian Web.
Fig. 76.—Peruvian Web.
As the mythic Manco Capac was the instructor of the nation in agriculture, so also the divine daughter of the Sun introduced the arts of weaving and spinning. Such traditions serve at least to indicate the favourite directions of the national taste and skill, which were displayed in the manufacture of a variety of woollen articles of ingenious patterns and the utmost delicacy of texture. Numerous examples of the woven textures of the Peruvians have been recovered from their ancient graves at Atacama and elsewhere; though it cannot be assumed that in these we have specimens of the rare and costly fabrics which excited the wondering admiration of the early Spaniards. In the arid soil and tropical climate of the great desert of Atacama, articles which prove the most perishable in northern latitudes are found, after the lapse of centuries, in perfect preservation. Of these I had an opportunity of examining a collection recovered by Mr. J. H. Blake from ancient huacas explored by him, and now preserved in his cabinet at Boston. They include specimens of cloth, wrought in dyed woollen thread, and sewed in regular and ornamental designs. Each piece is woven of the exact size which was required for the purpose in view, and some of them furnish proofs of ingenious skill in the art of weaving. The threads consist of two or more strands of dyed llama-wool twisted together; and elaborate patterns are woven into a soft and delicate web. The accompanying figure, though grotesque, is a good specimen of a complicated feat achieved in dyed woollen threads on the ancient Peruvian loom. It was found in a grave at Atacama, along with many other relics described in a subsequent chapter. Mr. Blake remarks, in reference to the discoveries of this class which rewarded his researches:—“In forming an opinion of the degree of skill displayed in the arts of spinning and weaving, by these specimens, it should be borne in mind that the implements in use were of the simplest contrivance. The only ones which have been discovered are simple distaffs; and among the articles obtained from the Atacama graves were several formed of wood and stone, such as are still in use among the Indians of Peru at the present day. Weaving on the loom has not been introduced among them. The warp is secured by stakes driven into the ground, and the filling-in is inserted by the slow process of passing it by hand over and under each thread alternately.” It would be a grave error, however, to assume that we possess in such relics, recovered from the ordinary graves formed in the loose sand of the desert, the highest achievements of Peruvian skill. On the contrary, regarding them, as we must, as fair specimens of the common woollen tissues of the country, they confirm the probability that the costly hangings, and beautifully wrought robes of the Inca and his nobles, fully justified the admiration with which they are referred to by Spanish writers of the sixteenth century.
Marvellous specimens of ceramic art are also noted among the manufactures ascribed to the Peruvians before the conquest, surpassing anything found in the common cemeteries of the race; but the proofs which exist of the ingenuity expended by the ancient potter on utensils in daily use, render probable the accounts of such rarechef-d’œuvresexecuted by their cunningest workmen for the imperial service. So also we read of animals and plants wrought with wonderful delicacy, in gold and silver; and scattered with profuse magnificence about the apartments of the Peruvian nobles. Such specimens of goldsmiths’ work no longer survive; but still the huacas of the ancient race are ransacked for golden ornaments, which prove considerable metallurgic skill, and leave no room to doubt that gold and silver were moulded and graven into many ingenious forms. Science and art had indeed made wonderful advances among this remarkable people; though with them, as with the Chinese, they were more frequently expended in the gratification of a craving for display, than in realising triumphs of much practical value. Nevertheless, Peruvian civilisation had wrought out for itself many elements of progress adapted to its native soil. Its astronomical science admits, indeed, of no comparison with that of Mexico; and in lieu of the artistic picture-writing of the Mexicans, it employed the quipus, an artificial system of mnemonics not greatly superior to the Red Indian wampum, to which it bears considerable resemblance. In this it contrasts with the matured hieroglyphical inscriptions of Central America and Yucatan, which preserve evidences of progress in advance of the highest civilisation of the Aztecs and the Incas, and indeed of all but the most civilised nations of ancient or modern centuries. But this higher phase of intellectual development must be reserved for consideration in its relations to the psychology of the whole continent.
The remarkable system of national polity doubtless originated in part from the docile nature still manifested by the descendants of the Peruvian people; and, when viewed in this connection, it furnishes some key to the peculiar characteristics of their civilisation. Their government was a sacerdotal sovereignty, with an hereditary aristocracy, and a system of castes more absolute seemingly than that of the Egyptians or Hindus. Something of the partial and unprogressive development of the Chinese mingled in the ancient Peruvians along with numerous other traits of resemblance to that singular people. Unlike the Mexicans, we see in their whole polity, arts, and social life, institutions of indigenous growth. It would be difficult to limit the centuries during which such a people may have handed on from generation to generation the slowly brightening torch. Their own traditions, preserved with the help of quipus and national ballads, are valueless on this point. But their institutions reveal some remarkable evidences of a people preserving many traits of social infancy, alongside of such matured arts and habits as could only grow up together around the undisturbed graves of many generations. Offerings of fruits and flowers took the place of the bloody human sacrifices of Aztec worship; but the suttee rites, which disclose their traces everywhere in the sepulchral usages of primitive nations, were retained in full force. The simple solidity of megalithic art gave an equally primitive character to their architecture, notwithstanding its application to many practical purposes of life; and the precious metals, though existing in unequalled profusion, were retained to the last solely for their contribution to barbaric splendour. The habits of pastoral life, by means of which the foremost nations of the Old World appear to have emerged out of barbarism, were with them modified by the haunts of flocks peculiar to the strange region of mountain and plateau, where also they carried the next step in human progression, that of agriculture, to a degree of perfection probably never surpassed. They had advanced metallurgy through all its stages, up to that which preceded the use of iron; and with the help of their metal tools, displayed a remarkable skill in many mechanical arts. They did no more, because, under their peculiar local circumstances and the repressive influences of the mild despotism of Inca rule, they had achieved all that they required.
A gentle people found abundant occupation in tilling the soil, without being oppressed by a labour which was lightened by the frequently recurring festivals of a joyous, and, in some respects, elevating national faith. Nor is it difficult to conceive of such a people continuing to pursue the even tenor of their way, with scarcely perceptible progression, through all the subsequent centuries since their discovery to Europe: had not the hand of the conqueror ruthlessly overthrown the structure reared by many generations, and quenched the lamp of native civilisation. The conquerors of the sixteenth century have given expression to the astonishment with which they beheld everywhere evidences of order, contentment, and prosperity; and while the architectural magnificence of Montezuma’s capital has so utterly disappeared as to suggest the doubt if it ever existed: the traveller along the ancient routes of Peruvian industry still sees on every hand ruins, not only of temples, palaces, and strongholds, but of terraced declivities, military roads, causeways, aqueducts, and other public works, that astonish him by the solidity of their construction and the grandeur of their design. But between these two great divisions of the western hemisphere, in the curiously insulated region of Central America, traces of ancient civilisation abound, with evidences of a higher, if not longer enduring development than either. The closing annals both of Mexico and Peru have acquired a vivid interest from the incidents of Spanish conquest; and retain many romantic associations connected with the lustre of their conquerors. But the interest which attaches to Central America and Yucatan derives little value from history. There, under the luxuriant forests of that tropical region, may still be studied the monuments of a lettered people, and the sculptures and symbolic inscriptions of an extinct faith, amid ruins which appear to have been already abandoned to decay before Cortes explored the peninsula in his lust of conquest. Their basso-relievos preserve the physiognomy of a race essentially diverse from the Mexicans; and their sculptured hieroglyphics show a process of inscription very far in advance of the picture-writing of the Aztecs. The magnitude and solidity of the ruins of Peru still attest the practical aim of works wrought there on a grand scale, and for purposes of more obvious utility than those of the Central American peninsula; and the characteristics of some of the Peruvian crania suggest striking analogies with the peculiar physiognomy of the northern basso-relievos, such as are no longer recognisable when we turn to the Mexican race.
Nothing pertaining to the northern continent east of the Rocky Mountains presents any counterpart to Peruvian architecture, sculpture, or the ingenious modelling of the potter’s art; or suggests affinities in language or astronomical science, to Peru or Central America; unless it be the remarkable remains of the Mound-Builders. But with Mexico it is otherwise. In the region between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic the stock is to be sought, from which on many grounds it appears most reasonable to trace the predominant Mexican race of the era of the Conquest. They were inheritors, not originators of the civilisation of the plateau. But while the traditions of the Aztecs appear to point to a migration from the north, the Toltecs whom they displaced can be assigned on no tangible evidence to a similar origin. Amid many diversities recognisable among the nations of the New World, the forest and prairie tribes, now clustering chiefly in the North-west, are the representatives of one great subdivision, the source of which may be sought in that northern hive stretching westward towards Behring Strait and the Aleutian Islands, with possible indications of an Asiatic origin. But for the more intellectual nations whose ancient monuments lie to the south of the Rio Grande del Norte, the most probable source appears to be the southern plateaus of the Peruvian Cordilleras. In the copper regions of the north the abundant metal supplied all wants too readily to stimulate to further progress; but the southern region rises through every change of climate under the vertical rays of the equator; and its rocky steeps are veined with exhaustless treasures of metallic ores, in such a condition as to lead man on step by step from the infantile perception of the native metal as a ductile stone, to the matured intelligence of the metallurgist, mingling and fusing the contiguous ores into his most convenient and useful alloys. A branch of the same race, moving northward along the isthmus, may account for the abundant architectural remains of the central peninsula, consistently with its ethnographic traces; while beyond this, to the northward, we see in the conflicting elements of Mexican civilisation, the confluence of races from north and south, and the mingling of their diverse arts and customs under the favouring influences which the vale of Anahuac supplied.
[92]American Ethnological Society’s Transactions, vol. i. p. 162.
[92]
American Ethnological Society’s Transactions, vol. i. p. 162.
[93]Prescott’sConquest of Mexico,b. iii.ch. ix.
[93]
Prescott’sConquest of Mexico,b. iii.ch. ix.
[94]Anahuac, p. 147.
[94]
Anahuac, p. 147.
[95]Bullock’sSix Months in Mexico, p. 111.
[95]
Bullock’sSix Months in Mexico, p. 111.
[96]Topographical View of the Valley, Wilson’sNew History of Mexico, p. 452.
[96]
Topographical View of the Valley, Wilson’sNew History of Mexico, p. 452.
[97]Prescott’sConquest of Mexico,b. i.chap. vi.
[97]
Prescott’sConquest of Mexico,b. i.chap. vi.
[98]Dr. Latham speaks of the Moquis as a people that “no living writer seems to have seen.”—Varieties of Man, p. 394. But the above information communicated to me by Professor Newberry, is the result of his own personal observations. He showed me also specimens of their woven dresses, manifesting considerable skill, and exhibiting great taste in the arrangement of their bright colours. They have recently been greatly reduced by small-pox.
[98]
Dr. Latham speaks of the Moquis as a people that “no living writer seems to have seen.”—Varieties of Man, p. 394. But the above information communicated to me by Professor Newberry, is the result of his own personal observations. He showed me also specimens of their woven dresses, manifesting considerable skill, and exhibiting great taste in the arrangement of their bright colours. They have recently been greatly reduced by small-pox.
[99]Montesino’sMém. Antiquas MS., lib. ii. cap. 7; cited by Prescott.
[99]
Montesino’sMém. Antiquas MS., lib. ii. cap. 7; cited by Prescott.
CHAPTER XV.ART CHRONICLINGS.
IMITATIVE SKILL—ARCHAIC EUROPEAN ART—CONVENTIONAL ORNAMENTATION—IMITATIVE DESIGN—ANALOGIES IN RITES AND CUSTOMS—ALTAR RECORDS—SMELTING THE ORES—WISCONSIN PRAIRIE LANDS—THE RACE OF THE MOUNDS—MOUND CARVINGS—PORTRAIT-SCULPTURES—AMERICAN ICONOGRAPHY—DEDUCTIONS—NON-INDIAN TYPE—OTHER EXAMPLES—ANTIQUE ICONOGRAPHIC ART—PECULIAR IMITATIVE SKILL—ANIMALS REPRESENTED—EXTENSIVE GEOGRAPHICAL RELATIONS—KNOWLEDGE OF TROPICAL FAUNA—DEDUCTIONS—THE TOUCAN AND MANATEE—TRACES OF MIGRATION—ASSUMED INDICATIONS—ANALOGOUS SCULPTURES—PERUVIAN IMITATIVE SKILL—CARVED STONE MORTARS—NICOTIAN RELIGIOUS RITES—INDIAN LEGENDS—THE RED PIPE-STONE QUARRY—THE LEAPING ROCK—MANDAN TRADITIONS—SIOUX LEGEND OF THE PEACE PIPE—THE SACKED COCA PLANT—KNISTENEAUX LEGEND OF THE DELUGE—INDICATIONS OF FORMER MIGRATIONS—FAVOURITE MATERIAL—PWAHGUNEKA—CHIMPSEYAN CUSTOMS—CHIMPSEYAN ART—BABEEN CARVING—THE MEDICINE PIPE-STEM—INDIAN EXPIATORY SACRIFICES—NICOTIAN RITES OF DIVINATION.
In studying the elaborate sculptures of Central American architecture, one of the first of its peculiar characteristics to strike the eye is the predominance of representations of natural objects, alike in its decorative details and in the symbolism of its hieroglyphic tablets. The human form, the head, the heart, the skull, the hand and foot, along with familiar objects of animate and inanimate nature, supplied the readiest architectural devices, and the most suggestive signs for attributes and ideas. In the imitation involved in such a style of art, resemblances may be traced to the productions of many partially civilised nations both of ancient and modern times. But in reviewing the primitive art of the New World, whether pertaining to extinct nations, like the Mound-Builders of Ohio and the architects of Yucatan, or to Indian tribes still occupying their old hunting grounds, the critical observer can scarcely overlook many peculiar manifestations of imitative skill. Though by no means to be regarded as an exclusive distinction of the American races, this is a characteristic in which they present a striking contrast to the primitive races of Europe. Many of the implements and personal ornaments of the ante-Christian era of European art, designated the “Bronze Period,” are exceedingly graceful in form, and some of them highly ornamented, but there is rarely a trace of imitative design. So also, though the peculiar form of one primitive class of gold ornaments, found in the British Isles, has suggested a name derived from the calyx of a flower, which the cups of its rings seem in some degree to resemble, it is a mere fanciful analogy; for no example bears the slightest trace of ornament calculated to suggest that such similarity was present to the mind of the ancient goldsmith. Where incised or graven ornaments are wrought upon the flower-like forms, they are the same chevron, or herring-bone and saltire patterns, which occur on the rudest clay pottery, alike of northern Europe and of America: though executed on the finer gold work with considerable delicacy and taste.
The correspondence between the forms and ornamentation of the rudest classes of pottery of the Old and New World, appears, at first sight, remarkable; but it originates in the inartistic simplicity inseparable from all infantile art. The ornamentation is only an improvement on the accidents of manufacture. The first decorations of the aboriginal potters of Europe and America appear to have been an undesigned result of the twisted cords passed round the clay to retain its form before it was hardened in the fire. More complicated patterns were produced by plaited or knitted cords, or imitated in ruder fashion with the point of a bone-lance or bodkin. But it is only among the allophylian arts of Europe that such arbitrary patterns are perpetuated with improving taste and skill. The European vase and cinerary urn become more graceful in contour, and more delicate in material and construction, when they accompany the beautiful weapons and personal ornaments wrought in bronze. But no attempt is made to imitate leaf or flower, bird, beast, or any simple natural object; and when in the bronze work of the later Iron Period, imitative forms at length appear, they are chiefly the snake and dragon patterns, borrowed seemingly by Celtic and Teutonic wanderers, with the wild fancies of their mythology, from the eastern cradle-land of their birth.
This absence of every trace of imitation in the forms and decorations of the archaic art of northern Europe, is curious and noteworthy: for remarkable traces, already referred to, pertaining to its palæotechnic era, prove that it is by no means an invariable characteristic of primitive art. In the simplest forms of ancient weapons, implements, and pottery, mere utility was the aim. The rude savage, whether of Europe or America, had neither leisure nor thought to spare for decorative art. His æsthetic faculty had not begun to influence his constructive instincts. Art was the child of necessity, and borrowed its first adjuncts of adornment from the sources whence it had received its convenient but arbitrary forms. But the moment we get beyond this utilitarian stage, the contrast between the products of European and American art is exceedingly striking; and their value to the ethnologist and archæologist becomes great, from the insight they give into the aspects of mental expression, and the intellectual phases of social life, among unhistoric generations. The useful arts of the British allophylian progressed until they superinduced the decorative and fine arts. But the ornamentation was inventive, and not imitative; it was arbitrary, conventional, and singularly persistent in style. It wrought itself into all his external expressions of thought; and whatever his religious worship may have been, we look in vain for proofs of idolatry, among the innumerable relics which have been recovered from supposed Druidical fanes, or the older cromlechs and tumuli of the British Isles.[100]The very opposite characteristics meet the eye the moment we turn to the primitive arts of the New World. There, indications of imitative design meet us on every hand. The rude tribes of the North-west, though living in the simplest condition of savage life, not only copy the familiar animal and vegetable forms with which they are surrounded: but represent, with ingenious skill, novel objects of European art introduced to their notice. Even their plaited and woven grass and quill-work assume a pictorial aspect; and the pottery is not only ornamented with patterns derived from flowers and other natural objects, but more elaborated examples are occasionally moulded into the forms of animals. Still more is this the case with the tubes, masks, personal ornaments, and, above all, the pipe-heads, alike of the Mound-Builders, and of living races. Nor does it stop with such miniature productions of art. The same imitative faculty reappears in the great earthworks of Wisconsin and Ohio: where the artist has wrought out representations of natural objects on a colossal scale.
The chronicles recorded by such means are invaluable. The walls of Central American ruins are covered with voiceless hieroglyphics; and the costly folios of Lord Kingsborough’sMexican Antiquitieshave placed at the command of the scholars of both hemispheres the dubious ideography of native historians. But the artistic representations preserved alike in the bas-reliefs and statues of Palenque, or in the characteristic pipe-sculpture of the Ohio mounds, are as significant and easy of interpretation as those on the Ramesian tablets of Abbosimbul in Nubia, which demonstrate the existence, in the era of Rameses, of Semitic and Ethiopian races, with ethnical diversities as clearly defined as now.
Among the characteristics of ancient and modern nations discernible in peculiar rites and customs, or disclosed in their arts, there are some that indicate widely-diffused hereditary influences, and so furnish a clew to remote affinities of race. The practice of circumcision, for example, which prevails both in Asia and Africa, wherever the influence of Semitic nations can be traced, strikingly illustrates the value of such indices. Another ancient custom, that of systematic cranial distortion, was common to nations of both hemispheres, and is proved by the evidence of ancient sculpture to have been in use at the period of highest architectural art in Central America. The Indian war-trophy of the scalp, and its singular counterpart, the peace-pipe, are also significant usages of the New World; though the former appears to have been equally common among ancient Asiatic nations. Herodotus refers to scalping as one of the most characteristic war-customs of the Scythians, and to their hanging the scalp-trophies to the warrior’s bridle-rein. Hence the ἀποσκυθίζειν of Euripides, quoted by Rawlinson, when remarking on the resemblance of such ancient customs to those of the Red Indians. The correspondence is worthy of note, in connection with others afterwards referred to, as possibly indicative of something more than a mere American counterpart to Egyptian and Oriental accumulations of trophies of the slain—the skulls, the hands, the ears, or even the foreskins,—repeatedly referred to in the Old Testament Scriptures, and recorded with minute detail on the paintings of Egypt, and the sculptures of Nimroud and Khorsabad. But no such analogies throw light on the singular usage of the peace-pipe. The ethnical relations which it indicates belong exclusively to the New World, where it seems to perpetuate a significant symbolism derived from an extinct native civilisation. As such, it is worthy of study by the American ethnologist, as the most curious of the many practices connected with the use of the strange nicotian stimulant. The pipe appears to have been associated with solemn religious rites and civic ceremonials, both in ancient and modern times. It bore a prominent part in the worship of the old Mound-Builders; and still retains its place among the paraphernalia of the inspired medicine-man or priest, and the most sacred credentials of the ambassador or war-chief.
The implements designed for the use of tobacco or other narcotic herbs, occupy a prominent place among the works of art of which the sacrificial mounds are the principal depositories. In accordance with the almost universal custom of barbarous and semi-civilised nations, the Mound-Builders devoted to their dead whatever had been most prized in life, or was deemed valuable for some talismanic charm. Hence the Mississippi mounds, and the ancient tombs of Mexico and Peru, disclose the same kind of evidence of the past as Wilkinson has deduced from the catacombs of Egypt, or Dennis from the sepulchres of Etruria. But in addition to this, the remarkable religious rites of the American Mound-Builders have preserved not only their altars, but the offerings laid upon them. The perishable garments of the dead have necessarily disappeared; and of instruments or utensils of wood or other combustible materials it is vain to expect a trace, where even metal has melted, and the stone been calcined in the blaze of sacrificial fires; but articles of copper and stone, of fictile ware, and even of shell, ivory, and bone, have escaped the destructive flame, and withstood the action of time. In such enduring characters inscriptions are legibly graven upon the altars of the Mound-Builders. Let us try to translate their records into the language of modern thought.
What such relics record in reference to metallurgy has already been seen. The Mound-Builders were acquainted with several of the metals. They had both the silver and lead of Iowa and Wisconsin in use. Implements and personal ornaments of copper abound on their altars; and the mechanical combination of silver with the native copper of which those are made, indicates that they derived their supplies from Lake Superior, where alone the metals have hitherto been found in the singular mechanico-chemical combination of crystals of silver in a copper matrix. Their sacrificial fires have in some cases fused the metallic offerings on the altars into a mass of molten metal, so that the Mound-Builders had thus presented to them this all-important lesson of metallurgy. Mr. F. S. Perkins, of Burlington, Wisconsin, whose collection of native copper implements numbers upwards of sixty specimens, has arrived at the conclusion that some of those from the ancient mounds have been cast in moulds; and Mr. J. W. Foster concurs in the belief that the Mound-Builders had learned to smelt the ores.[101]This still requires further proof. At Cincinnati, I saw in the collection of Mr. Cleneay, a choice specimen of a copper axe, found on the banks of Hog Creek, a tributary of the Great Miami. It measures fifteen inches long, and weighs 5 lb. 5½ oz.; but though well-proportioned, and finished with unusual care, it is entirely the work of the hammer. Only in one case, of an axe from the Lockport Mound, have I seen indications which seem to suggest a process of casting. But specimens of accidentally melted copper repeatedly occur; and Mr. Jas. B. Skinner, of Cincinnati, showed me a melted mass of pure silver, of 4 lb. weight, found lying on a heap of charcoal, in cutting through the embankment surrounding a large mound at Marietta. Nothing further was needed than the practical sagacity by which similar accidents have been turned to account, to lead the Mound-Builders one step beyond this, to the use of the crucible and the mould. It would not, therefore, surprise me to find partial traces of the use of both. Their imitative skill, and ability in modelling, had already taught them the use of the mould when working in clay. But they had, at best, a very rudimentary knowledge of metallurgy; they do not appear to have acquired, by barter or otherwise, any specimens of the alloyed metals; and only mechanically combined their copper with silver. Hematite, though prized by them, was used simply as a stone. They were familiar with silver, and shaped it into many personal ornaments. The sulphuret of lead was also known to them; and was turned to account both for use and ornamentation.
Thus far, then, it appears that the Mound-Builders shared in the metallurgic wealth of the great copper region. We are reminded, accordingly, that the broad undulating prairie-lands of Wisconsin, with their remarkable symbolic earthworks, lie directly between the shores of Lake Superior and the region occupied by the Mound-Builders. The monuments of the latter abound with examples of their builders’ arts; and are surrounded with varied proofs of settled occupation, civic and religious structures, and permanent defensive military works. Throughout Wisconsin, on the contrary, the symbolic mounds stand alone, and have hitherto been found, with a few rare exceptions, to contain no relics. Neither earthworks adapted to religious rites, nor military defences, attest that that region was occupied by a numerous population, such as its many natural advantages fitted it to sustain. Hence the conjecture that the mineral country on the southern shores of the Great Lake was the recognised source of supply for the whole population north of the Gulf of Mexico; and that different tribes throughout the vast basin of the Mississippi and its tributaries were wont to send working parties thither, as to a region common to all. Such an idea accords with the further conjecture that the symbolic mounds of Wisconsin may be memorials of sacred rites, or pledges of neutrality among nations from the various tributaries of the great river, as they annually met on this border-land of the common metallic storehouse. It is obvious that the Mound-Builders were a highly religious people. Their superstitious rites were of frequent occurrence, and accompanied with costly sacrifices; while in the numerous symbolic mounds of Wisconsin, labour alone is the sacrifice, and the external form preserves the one idea at which their builders aimed.
So far, this theory of a sacred neutral ground and common mineral region is conjectural. Nevertheless, it involves certain facts to be borne in view for comparison with others of a diverse kind. In the once densely peopled regions of Ohio and Illinois, where the works of the Mound-Builders abound, the river-valleys were occupied by an ingenious and industrious agricultural population: who, if not aggressive and war-like, employed their constructive skill on extensive works for military defence. Whencesoever the danger existed that they had thus to apprehend and guard against, there is no trace of its localisation within the region lying immediately to the south of Lake Superior, through which their path lay to the great copper country. More probably offensive and defensive warfare was carried on between tribes or states of the Mound Race settled on different tributaries of the same great water-system. But the growing civilisation of the nations of the Mississippi valley was also exposed to the aggression of barbarian tribes of the North-west; for if the Mound-Builders differed in culture and race from the progenitors of the modern Red Indian, some of their arts and customs render it probable that the latter were not unknown to them.
So far, then, we connect the race of the Mounds with the shores of Lake Superior, and thus trace out for them a relation to regions of the North. But the objects wrought by their artistic skill reveal no less certainly their familiarity with animals of southern and even tropical latitudes; and the materials employed in their manufactures include mica of the Alleghanies, the obsidian of Mexico, and jade and porphyry derived probably from the same region, or from others still farther south. Such facts warn us against any hastily constructed hypothesis of migrations for a people to whom the resources of so many dissimilar regions were partially known. We see in them, however, proofs of an extensive traffic; and may assume, as at least exceedingly probable, the existence of widely extended relations among that singular race. It is not to be inferred from the use of terms specifically applied to modern trade, that they are intended to suggest the possession of a currency and exchanges, of banking agencies, or manufacturing corporations. But, without confounding the traces of a rudimentary civilisation with characteristics of its mature development, there are proofs sufficient to justify the inference that the Mound-Builders traded with the copper of Lake Superior for objects of necessity and luxury brought from widely-separated regions of the continent. Such exchanges may have been effected by many intermediate agencies, rather than by any direct traffic. But the river system of the Mississippi has furnished to the later forest tribes facilities for interchange under far less favourable circumstances; and such a systematic trade among an ingenious and settled people may have materially contributed to the progress of civilisation in the populous valleys of the Ohio.
Turning next to the carvings in stone recovered from the mounds, they include objects of singular interest, some of which, at least, fully merit the designation of works of art. Compared, indeed, with the sculptures in porphyry and the great Calendar Stone of Mexico; the elaborate façades and columned terraces of Uxmal, Zayi, and Kabah; and the colossal statues, basso-relievos and hieroglyphics of Copan and Palenque: the art of the Mound-Builders, which expended its highest efforts on the decoration of a tube, or the sculpture of a pipe-bowl, may appear insignificant enough. But the imagination is apt to be impressed by mere size, and requires to be reminded of the superior excellence of a Greek medal or a Roman gem to all the colossal grandeur of an Egyptian Memnon. The architecture and sculpture of Central America preserve to us the highest intellectual efforts of the New World, and are animated by a historical significance which cannot be overestimated. Nevertheless, examples among the miniature works of art of the Ohio Valley admit of comparison with them in some essential elements of artistic skill. Apart, indeed, from the significance of the hieroglyphics with which the colossal statues of Copan are graven, they might rank with the monstrous creations of Hindu art; whereas some of the objects taken from altars of “Mound City” furnish specimens of imitative design and portrait-sculpture full of character and individuality.
The simplicity, variety, and minute expression in many of the miniature mound-sculptures, their delicacy of execution and imitative skill, render them just objects of interest. But foremost in every trait of value for the elucidation of the history or characteristics of their workers, are the human heads, which, when the accuracy of many of the miniature sculptures of animals is considered, it can scarcely be doubted, perpetuate faithful representations of the ancient people by whom they were executed. Equally well-authenticated portraiture of Umbrian, Pelasgian, or other mythical races of Europe would be invaluable to the ethnologist. It would solve some of the knottiest problems of his science, better than all the obscure disquisitions to which the aboriginal population of Greece and Italy has given rise. American ethnologists, accordingly, have not failed to turn such iconographic evidence to even more account than legitimate induction will sustain, in support of their favourite argument for an indigenous unity of the whole ancient and modern races of the New World.
By means of such artistic relics we can determine the physical characteristics of the Mound-Builders, and of contemporary tribes or nations known to them. We also learn the character of fauna, native and foreign to the region occupied by them, with which they were familiar. I have had an opportunity of carefully inspecting the valuable collection of mound-sculptures in the possession of Dr. E. H. Davis of New York.[102]In some cases, perhaps, their artistic merits have been overrated. Nevertheless the minute accuracy with which many of the objects of natural history have been copied is remarkable; and confirms the reliance to be placed on the ethnical portraiture perpetuated in their representations of the human head.