AMERICA
Archæological work in the United States and in Central America was begun by Squier about the middle of the century, and the attention thus drawn to the subject has borne fruit in the more accurate and scientific explorations connected with the surveying and geological departments, and, above all, those of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology. The names of Whitney, Wright, Cyrus Thomas, Holmes, Fowke, Mindeleff, and others, will be familiar to all American readers by their work of the last twenty years, and need no introducing here.
The earliest remains of man in America—or perhaps in the world—are those beneath the great lava beds of California; since those were deposited the rivers have cut their beds through two thousand to four thousand feet of lava rock, implying an erosion during tens, or perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years. But little can be assigned, however, with any certainty to a date before the Christian era, though mounds of refuse on both ocean shores may probably belong to an age before any human history.
The most important studies have been those on the highest civilization of the continent, that of Central America. The destroying Spaniards preserved but little of native record, except incidentally, and the first collector of Aztec manuscripts was Benaduci (1736), of whose treasures but an eighth survived his imprisonments and persecutions, one of the greatest disasters to history. The first great publication of manuscripts was the magnificent work of Lord Kingsborough (1830); and almost at the same time appeared Prescott’s history. Though the later researches have shown that the land was divided into many small kingdoms, rather than under one power, as Prescott supposed, yet his account of the calendar and chronology of the Aztecs has been verified and added to, and far more has been done in reading the manuscripts than he supposed possible. Aubin, after years of work in Mexico, brought to Europe manuscripts of an entirely new kind, showing a fully developed system of phonetic writing, which he has largely deciphered with success, having analyzed over one hundred syllabic values correctly.
One of the most complete studies has been that of the Mayan Quiché peoples, and especially of the Mayans of Yucatan. In 1864 Landa’s work on Yucatan (written 1566) was rediscovered, and the account of the calendar has sufficed to enable Goodman to discover the meaning of a very large number of signs (1897); these enable the numerical documents to be translated, and show that a period of as much as eight thousand years was dealt with by the Mayans, perhaps belonging to mythical ages. The alphabetic signs of Landa have proved useless so far, and Goodman even disbelieves in any record except that of numbers. Seler has shown the identical origin of the signs used by Aztecs and Mayans for the days and months. Little had been done to make known these remains until the recent explorations, casts, and publications of Maudsley, who has worked magnificently for seventeen years at Copan, Palenque, and Chichen-Itza; these, however, are but three of innumerable cities of Guatemala and Yucatan that need exploration.
In New Mexico the many ruins from the Colorado to the Rio Grande have been proved to resemble those of the modern Pueblo Indians, and to have none of the characteristics of Central American architecture; there are no sculptures, and the rock inscriptions are too primitive to be interpreted. Nothing points to an Aztec occupation, and probably the ancestors of the present people were the builders.
The innumerable earthworks of the Mississippi valley were formerly supposed to belong to some vanished race. And the view that they were connected with the Central American civilization is favored by the pyramid mound, which was hardly known otherwise, and by the excellence of the minor sculpture. But there are great differences between the two civilizations. The mound-builders were far inferior in metal-working, and their burial customs are peculiar. The use of materials from both east and west coasts shows an extensive commerce. The best summing up of the researches is that by Prof. Cyrus Thomas, after his extensive excavations. He concludes that the remains of the mound-builders show no great antiquity; that they were formed by tribes like the existing Indians; that the builders were of the same culture as were the Indians when discovered; that such mounds continued to be made and used for burial during the European period, and that the principal builders were the Cherokees.
It will be seen now how totally our view of man’s history has been changed by the study of archæology, and how fundamentally this science affects our ideas of the past and our expectations for the future of our race. The main outlines have been dimly seen; but in every country the greater part yet remains to be done, and in Turkey, Persia, and China most important civilizations are as yet quite untouched by exploration. The new century will no doubt see a harvest from these lands; and it is to be hoped that what yet remains in the safe keeping of the earth may be found by able men, who will preserve it for instruction and enable posterity to trace the fortunes of our species.
[India and America are here treated with the assistance of Mr. J. S. Cotton and Mr. D. MacIver.]
W. M. Flinders Petrie.
ASTRONOMY
In looking back over a century’s work in the oldest of the sciences, one is struck not only by the enormous advance that has been made in those branches of the science dealing with the motions of the heavenly bodies which were cultivated at least eight thousand years ago by early dwellers in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, but with the fact that during the century that has just passed away a perfectly new science of astronomy arose. By annexing physics and chemistry astronomers now study the motions of the particles of which all celestial bodies are composed; a new molecular astronomy has now been firmly established side by side with the old molar astronomy which formerly alone occupied the thoughts of star-gazers.
Along this new line our knowledge has advanced by leaps and bounds, and the results already obtained in expanding and perfecting man’s views of nature in all her beauty and immensity are second to none which have been garnered during the last hundred years.