Industrial. Let us now turn to the industrial activity of the American race, and see whether it will furnish us other data concerning the pre-historic life of the New World. We may reasonably look in this direction for aid, since it is now universally conceded that at no time did man spring into being fully armed and equipped for the struggle for existence, but everywhere followed the same path of painful effort from absolute ignorance and utter feebleness to knowledge and power. At first, his only weapons or tools were such as he possessed in common with the anthropoid apes: to wit, an unshapen stone and a broken stick. Little by little, he learned to fit his stone to his hand and to chip it to an edge, and with this he could sharpen the end of his stick, thus providing himself with a spear and an axe.
It was long before he learned to shape and adjust the stone to the end of the stick, and to hurl this by means of a cord attached to a second and elastic stick—in other words, a bow; still longer before he discovered the art of fashioning clay into vessels and of polishing and boring stones. These simple arts are landmarks in the progress of the race: the latter divides the history of culture into the palæolithic or rough stone period, and the neolithic or polished stone period; while the shaping of a stone for attachment to a handle or shaft marks the difference between the epoch of compound implements and the earlier epoch of simple implements, both included in the older or palæolithic age.[[16]] With these principles as guides, we may ask how far back on this scale do the industrial relics in America carry us?
I have spoken of the great antiquity of some of the American shell-heaps, how they carry us back to the diluvial epoch, and that of numerous extinct species. Yet it is generally true that in the oldest hitherto examined in Brazil, Guiana, Costa Rica and Florida, fragments of pottery, of polished stone, and compound implements, occur even in the lowest strata.[[17]] Venerable though they are, they supply no date older than what in Europe we should call the neolithic period. The arrow-heads which have been exhumed from the loess of the ancient lake-beds of Nebraska, the net-sinkers and celts which have been recovered from the auriferous gravels of California, prove by their form and finish that the tribes who fashioned them had already taken long strides beyond the culture of the earlier palæolithic age. The same is true, though in a less degree, of the chipped stones and bones which Ameghino exhumed from the lacrustine deposits of the Pampas, although he proves that these relics were the products of tribes contemporary with the extinct glyptodon and mylodon, as well as the fossil horse and dog. In the very oldest station which he examined, there appears to have been found a quartz arrow-head; yet he argues that this station dated from the pliocene division of the tertiary, long anterior to the austral glacial epoch.[[18]] This leaves another such open conflict between geology and the history of culture, as Professor Rau has already pointed out as existing in Californian archæology.
There is, however, one station in America which has furnished an ample line of specimens, and among them not one, so far as I know, indicating a knowledge of compound implements. This is that of the “Trenton gravels,” New Jersey. There we appear to be in face of a stage of culture as primitive as that of the stations of Chelles and St. Acheul in France, absolutely without pottery, without polished stone, without compound implements.[[19]]
Assuming that these post-glacial gravels about Trenton supply one of the earliest authentic starting points in the history of culture on this continent, the later developments of industry will furnish a number of other data. This first date was long before the extinction of the native American horse, the elephant, the mammoth, and other animals important to early man. There is nothing unlikely therefore in the reported discoveries of his pointed flints or his bones in place along with the remains of these quadrupeds.
Not only the form but the material of implements supplies us data. If man in his earliest stage was, as some maintain, quite migratory, it is certain that he did not carry his stone implements with him, nor did he obtain by barter or capture those of other tribes. All the oldest implements are manufactured from the rocks of the locality. When, therefore, we find a weapon of a material not obtainable in the vicinity, we have a sure indication that it belongs to a period of development considerably later than the earliest. When the obsidian of the Yellowstone Park is found in Ohio, when the black slate of Vancouver’s Island is exhumed in Delaware, it is obvious we must assume for such extensive transits a very noticeable æsthetic and commercial development.
I can but touch in the lightest manner on the data offered by the vast realm of industrial activity. The return it offers is abundant, but the harvesting delicate. In the dissemination of certain kinds of arts, certain inventions, certain decorative designs and æsthetic conceptions from one tribe to another, we have a most valuable means of tracing the pre-historic intercourse of nations: but we must sedulously discriminate such borrowing from the synchronous and similar development of independent culture under like conditions.
In one department of industry we shall be largely free from this danger, that is, in the extension of agriculture. One of America’s ablest ethnologists, Dr. Charles Pickering, as the result of a lifetime devoted to his science, finally settled upon the extension of cultivated plants as the safest guide in the labyrinth of pre-historic migrations. Its value is easily seen in America when we reflect that the two tropical plants, maize and tobacco, extended their area in most remote times from their limited local habitat about the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the north as far as the St. Lawrence river and to the south quite to the Archipelago of Chiloe. Their presence is easily traced by the stone or earthen-ware implements required for their use. How many ages it must have required for these plants to have thus extended their domain, amid hostile and savage tribes, through five thousand miles of space! The squash, the bean, the potato and the mandioca, are native food-plants offering in a less degree similar material for tracing ancient commerce and migration. Humboldt and others have claimed as much for the banana (Musa paradisiaca), but the recent researches of Dr. Karl von den Steinen have removed that valued fruit from the list of native American plants. Both species of banana (M. paradisiaca and M. sapientium) were undoubtedly introduced into the New World after the discovery.[[20]] Indeed, summing up the reply to an inquiry which has often been addressed to the industrial evolution of the indigenes of our continent, I should say that they did not borrow a single art or invention nor a single cultivated plant from any part of the Old World previous to the arrival of Columbus. What they had was their own, developed from their own soil, the outgrowth of their own lives and needs.
Linguistic. This individuality of the race is still more strongly expressed in their languages. You are all aware that it is upon linguistic data almost exclusively that American ethnology has been and must be based. The study of the native tongues becomes therefore of transcendent importance in the pre-historic chronology of the Continent. But to obtain its best results, this study must be conducted in a much more thorough manner than has hitherto been the custom.
In America we are confronted with an astonishing multiplicity of linguistic stocks. They have been placed at about eighty in North and one hundred in South America. It is stated that there are that many radically diverse in elements and structure. To appreciate the vista in time that this fact opens to our thoughts, we must recognize the tenacity of life manifested by these tongues. Some of them have scores of dialects, spoken by tribes wandering over the widest areas. Take the Athapascan or Tinné, for example, found in its greatest purity amid the tribes who dwell on the Arctic sea, and along the Mackenzie river, in British America, but which is also the tongue of the Apaches who carried it almost to the valley of Mexico. The Algonkin was spoken from Hudson Bay to the Savannah river and from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains. The Guarani of the Rio de la Plata underlies dialects which were current as far north as Florida.