Prehistoric Structures of Central America: Who Erected Them?

Transcriber’s Note
A LECTURE, BY MARTIN INGHAM TOWNSEND, OF TROY, NEW YORK.
TROY, N. Y.: T. J. HURLEY, PRINTER, HARMONY HALL BUILDING. 1895.

It was not a long period after 1492, when the great Italian navigator with his Spanish crew made their first discoveries upon the central portion of America, that the Europeans, who had followed the footsteps of Christopher Columbus, began to fall in with structures of great magnitude and architectural beauty scattered widely throughout Mexico, Guatemala and Yucatan, &c.; and when the conquest of Peru was achieved, artificial highways and water courses were found there, such as could have owed their existence to no people but one with advanced knowledge of science as well as of the arts of civilized life. No people existed then upon this continent capable of doing the work which so astonished the world.
Thinking men and dreaming men have, from the earliest of these discoveries, been busying themselves to find out when, and by what people, these early monuments to human efforts were constructed.
Norwegian discoverers and Welsh emigrants have been pressed into the service. Our own Donnelly has changed the place where God and history had located the origin of the human race in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, to a suppositious island in the Atlantic Ocean, and led out the nations of the earth from there to Asia, Africa and western Europe, until he had no further need of the island and then sunk it in “the bottom of the sea.”
A whole people have been pressed into the service of explaining this mystery. The convenient “Lost ten tribes of the House of Israel” have been set to do this work, as their fathers were compelled to “make brick without straw” in the Land of Egypt, and then suffered to escape to some land where search for them would be in vain.
The following treatise is written for the purpose of showing—
First.—That the lands where these structures exist were known to commercial people and to many of the scholars of the countries about the Mediterranean Sea for at least a thousand years before the Christian Era.