CHAPTER IV
AMERICAN ARCHEOLOGY
Long before the time of Columbus and the Spanish conquest there existed on the table-land of Mexico two great races or nations, as has already been shown, both highly civilized, and both akin in language, art, and religion. Ethnologists and antiquaries are not agreed as to their origin or the development of their civilization. Many recent critics have held the theory that there had been a previous people from whom both races inherited their extinct civilization, this previous race being the "Toltecs," whom we have repeatedly mentioned in the preceding chapter. To that previous race some attribute the colossal stonework around Lake Titicaca, as well as other survivals of long-forgotten culture. Some would even class them with the "mound-builders" of the Ohio Valley. Other recent antiquaries, however, while fully admitting the Aztec-Tescucan civilization to be real and historical, treat the Toltec theory as partly or entirely mythical. One writer alleges, after the manner of Max Müller, that the Toltecs are "simply a personification of the rays of light" radiating from the Aztec sun-god.
Leaving abstract theories, we shall devote this chapter to the principal facts of American archeology—especially as regards the races and the monuments of their long extinct civilizations. Throughout many parts of both North and South America, and over large areas, the red-skinned natives continued their generations as their ancestors had done through untold centuries, scarcely rising above the state of rude, uncultured sons of the soil living as hunters, trappers, fishers, as had been done immemorially
When wild in woods the noble savage ran,
as Dryden puts it. But in Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America, Colombia, and Peru there were men of the original redskin race who had distinctly attained to civilization for unknown generations before the time of Columbus. Not only so, but in many centers of wealth and population the process of social improvement and advance had been continuous for unrecorded ages; and in certain cases a long extinct civilization had over-laid a previous civilization still more remotely extinct. Some works constructed for supplying water, for example, could only have been applied to that purpose when the climate or geological conditions were quite different from what they have always been in historical times!
Who is the red man? Compared in numbers with the yellow man, the white man, or even the black, he is very unimportant, being only one-tenth as great as the African race.[12] In American ethnology, however, the red man is all-important. Primeval men of this race undoubtedly formed the original stock whence during the centuries were derived all the numerous tribes of "Indians" found in either North or South America. Throughout Asia and Africa there is great diversity in type among the races that are indigenous; but as to America, to quote Humboldt:
The Indians of New Spain [i. e., Mexico] bear a general resemblance to those who inhabit Canada, Florida, Peru, and Brazil. We have the same swarthy and copper color, straight and smooth hair, small beard, squat body, long eye, with the corner directed upward toward the temples, prominent cheek-bones, thick lips, and expression of gentleness in the mouth, strongly contrasted with a gloomy and severe look.
Whence the original red men of America were derived it is impossible to say. The date is too remote and the data too few. From fossil remains of human bones, Agassiz estimated a period of at least ten thousand years; and near New Orleans, beneath four buried forests, a skeleton was found which was possibly fifty thousand years old. If, therefore, the redskins branched off from the yellow man, it must have been at a period which lies utterly beyond historic ken or calculation.