The American Race / A Linguistic Classification and Ethnographic Description of the Native Tribes of North and South America

by Daniel G. Brinton

Few of these names are found in the older writers. In the Taparros we recognize the “Zaparas,” who, in the last century, lived in contiguity to the Goajiros of the adjacent peninsula.[239] The Mucuchis gave their name to an early settlement of that name in the province of Mérida.[240] The prefix muco or moco, which is very common in place-names of that region, is believed by Lares to have a locative significance. Such names give approximately the extent of the dialects at the settlement of the country.

In the highlands near the present city of Caracas, and in the fertile valleys which surround the beautiful inland lake of Valencia to the southeast, were at the discovery a number of tribes whose names, Arbacos, Mariches, Merigotos, etc., give us no information as to their affinities. They are now extinct, and nothing of their languages has been preserved. All the more store do we set by the archæology of the district, about which valuable information has been contributed by Dr. G. Marcano.[241] He opened a number of burial mounds where the bones of the dead, after having been denuded of flesh, were interred, together with ornaments and utensils. These were in stone, bone and terra cotta, the only metal being gold in small quantity. The character of the work showed the existence of a culture belonging to the highest stage of polished stone. Many of the skulls were artificially deformed to a high degree, the frontal obliquity in some cases being double the normal. Add to this that there was present an almost unexampled prognathism, and we have crania quite without similars in other parts of the continent. When not deformed they were brachycephalic, and both series gave a respectable capacity, 1470 c. c.

2. The Chibchas.

Most of the writers on the Chibchas have spoken of them as a nation standing almost civilized in the midst of barbarous hordes, and without affinities to any other. Both of these statements are erroneous. The Chibchas proper, or Muyscas, are but one member of a numerous family of tribes which extended in both directions from the Isthmus of Panama, and thus had representatives in North as well as South America. The Chibcha language was much more widely disseminated throughout New Granada at the time of the discovery than later writers have appreciated. It was the general tongue of nearly all the provinces, and occupied the same position with reference to the other idioms that the Kechua did in Peru.[242] Indeed, most of the tribes in New Granada were recognized as members of this stock.[243] Nor were they so much above their neighbors in culture. Many of these also were tillers of the soil, weavers and spinners of cotton, diggers of gold in the quartz lodes, skilled in moulding and hammering it into artistic shapes, and known widely as energetic merchants.

No doubt the Chibchas had carried this culture to the highest point of all the family. Their home was on the southern confines of the stock, in the valleys of Bogota and Tunja, where their land extended from the fourth to the sixth degree of north latitude, about the head-waters of the Sogamoso branch of the Magdalena. Near the mouth of this river on its eastern shore, rises the Sierra of Santa Marta, overlooking the open sea, and continuing to the neck of the peninsula of Goajira. These mountains were the home time out of mind of the Aroacos, a tribe in a condition of barbarism, but not distantly related in language to the Chibchas.

When the Spaniards first undertook the conquest of this Sierra, they met with stubborn resistance from the Tayronas and Chimilas, who lived among these hills. They were energetic tribes, cultivating fields of maize, yucca, beans and cotton, which latter they wove and dyed for clothing. Not only were they versed in stratagems, but they knew some deadly poison for their arrows.[244]

In later generations the Tayronas disappear entirely from history, but I think the suggestion is well founded that they merely became merged with the Chimilas, with whom they were always associated, and who still survive in the same locality as a civilized tribe. We have some information about their language.[245] It shows sufficient affinity with the Chibcha to justify me in classing the Tayronas and Chimilas in that group.

An imperfect vocabulary of the native residents of Siquisique in the state of Lara, formerly the province of Barquisimetro, inclines me to unite them with the Aroac branch of this stock, though their dialect is evidently a mixed one.[246]

A still more interesting extension of this stock was that which it appears to have had at one time in the northern continent. A number of tribes beyond the straits, in the states of Panama and Costa Rica, were either filially connected or deeply influenced by the outposts of the Chibcha nation. These were the Guaymis in Veraguas, who possessed the soil from ocean to ocean, and the Talamancas of Costa Rica, who in a number of small sub-tribes extended quite to the boundaries of the present state of Nicaragua. It has been recently shown, and I think on satisfactory evidence, that their idioms contain a large number of Chibcha words, and of such a class that they could scarcely have been merely borrowed, but point to a prolonged admixture of stocks.[247] Along with these terms are others pointing to a different family of languages, perhaps, as has long been suspected, to some of the Carib dialects; but up to the present time they must be said not to have been identified.

Thus Lucien Adam has pointed out that the two groups of the Guaymi dialects differ as widely, as follows: