The question has been often raised how long a savage tribe, ignorant of writing, is likely to retain the memory of past deeds. From a great many examples in America and elsewhere, it is probable that the lapse of five generations, or say two centuries, completely obliterates all recollection of historic occurrences. Of course, there are certain events of continuous influence which may be retained in memory longer—for example, the federation of prominent tribes; and perhaps a genealogy may run back farther. My friend, Dr. Franz Boas, informs me that some tribes on Vancouver’s Island pretend to preserve their genealogies for twelve or fifteen generations back; but he adds that the remoter names are clearly of mythical purport.
It appears obvious that all efforts to establish a pre-historic chronology by means of the legends of savage tribes, are and must be vain.
The case is not much better with those semi-civilized American nations, the Mayas and Nahuas, who possessed a partially phonetic alphabet, or with the Quichuas, who preserved their records by the ingenious device of the quipu. Manco Capac, the alleged founder of the Peruvian state, floats before us as a vague and mythical figure, though he is placed in time not earlier than the date when Leif, the son of Erik, anchored his war-ship on the Nova Scotian coast.[[5]] Historians are agreed that the long lists of Incas in the pages of Montesinos, extending about two thousand years anterior to the Conquest, are spurious, due to the imagination or the easy credulity of that writer.
The annals of Mexico fare no better before the fire of criticism. It is extremely doubtful that their earliest reminiscences refer to any event outside the narrow valley parcelled out between the petty states of Tenochtitlan, Tezcuco, and Tlacopan.[[6]] The only fact that bears out the long and mysterious journey from the land of the Seven Caves, Chicomoztoc, in the distant northwest, by the great water, is that the learned and indefatigable Buschmann has conclusively shown that the four languages of Sonora and all the dialects of the Shoshonian family reveal marks of continued and deep impressions of the Nahuatl tongue.[[7]] But the chronicles of Mexico proper contain no fixed date prior to that of the founding of the city of Tenochtitlan, in the year 1325 of our era.
I am aware that there are still some writers who maintain that both the Mexican and the Maya astronomic cycles assume a commencement for their records centuries, even thousands of years, before the beginning of our era. These opinions, however, have not obtained the assent of other students. We are too ignorant both of the astronomy and the methods of writing of these nations to admit such claims; and the facts advanced are capable of quite other interpretation.
It is, on the whole, rare for the American tribes to declare themselves autochthonous. The Mayas, on the peninsula of Yucatan, stated that their earliest ancestors came there from beyond the seas, some from the far east, others from the west. So the Toltecs, under Quetzalcoatl, were fabled to have entered Mexico from beyond the Eastern Ocean. The Creeks and Choctaws pointed to the west, the Algonkins generally to the east, as their primal home.[[8]] These legends are chiefly mythical, not much truer than those of other tribes who claimed to have climbed up from some under-world. Sifting them all, we shall find in them little to enlighten us as to the pre-historic chronology of the tribes, though they may furnish interesting vistas in comparative mythology.
That in which we may expect the legends of tribes to be of most avail is their later history, the record of their wars, migrations and social development within a few generations. The spirit of the uncivilized man is, however, very careless of the past. We have means of testing the exactness of such traditions in some instances, and the result is rarely such as to inspire confidence in verbal records. Those of you who were present at the last meeting will remember how diversely two able students of Iroquois tradition estimated its value. Even when remarkable events are not forgotten, the dates of their occurrence are generally vague. The inference, therefore, is that very few data, dependent on legendary evidence alone, can be accepted.
Monumental. When we turn to the monumental data, to the architecture and structural relics of the ancient Americans, we naturally think first of the imposing stone-built fortresses of Peru, the massive pyramids and temples of Yucatan and Mexico, and the vast brick-piles of the Pueblo Indians.
It is doubtful if any of these notable monuments supply pre-historic dates of excessive antiquity. The pueblos, both those now occupied and the vastly greater number whose ruins lie scattered over the valleys and mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, were constructed by the ancestors of the tribes who still inhabit that region, and this at no distant day. Though we cannot assign exact dates to the development of this peculiar civilization, there are abundant reasons, drawn from language, physical geography and the character of the architecture, to include all these structures within the period since the commencement of our era.[[9]]
There is every reason to suppose that the same is true of all the stone and brick edifices of Mexico and Central America. The majority of them were occupied at the period of the Conquest; others were in process of building; and of others the record of the date of their construction was clearly in memory and was not distant. Thus, the famous temple of Huitzilopochtli at Tenochtitlan, and the spacious palace—or, if you prefer the word, “communal house”—of the ruler of Tezcuco, had been completed within the lifetime of many who met the Spaniards. To be sure, even then there were once famous cities fallen to ruin and sunk to oblivion in the tropical forests. Such was Palenque, which could not have failed to attract the attention of Cortes had it been inhabited. Such also was T’Ho, on the site of the present city of Mérida, Yucatan, where the earliest explorers found lofty stone mounds and temples covered with a forest as heavy as the primitive growth around it.[[10]] But tradition and the present condition of such of these old cities as have been examined, unite in the probability that they do not antedate the Conquest more than a few centuries.