Even the head of the celebrated Guadaloupe skeleton forms no exception to the rule. The skeleton itself is well known to be in the British Museum, but wants the cranium, which however is supposed to have been recovered in the one more recently found in Guadaloupe by Mr. L’Hérminier, and brought by him to Charleston, South Carolina. Dr. Moultrie, who has described this very interesting relic, makes the following observations:—“Compared with the cranium of a Peruvian presented to Prof. Holbrook by Dr. Morton, in the museum of the state of South Carolina, the craniological similarity manifested between them is too striking to permit us to question their national identity. There is in both the same coronal elevation, occipital compression, and lateral protuberance accompanied with frontal depression, which mark the American variety in general.”[7-*]
There is additional proof of identity, not only of original conformation, but of conventional modification of the form of the head, which I may be excused from reverting to in this place, inasmuch as the materials I shall use have but recently come to my hands. The first of these subjects is represented by the subjoined wood-cut, ([fig. 2.]) It was politely sent me by Dr. John Houstoun, an intelligent surgeon of the British Navy, with the following memorandum: “From an ancient town called Chiuhiu, or Atacama Baja, on the river Loa, and on the western edge of the desert of Atacama. The bodies are nearly all buried in the sitting posture, [the conventional usage of most of the American nations from Patagonia to Canada,] with the hands either placed on each side of the head, or crossed over the breast.”[7-†]
This cranium (and another received with it) has that remarkable sugar-loaf form which renders them high and broad in front, with a short antero-posterior diameter, both the forehead and occiput bearing evidence of long continued compression. They correspond precisely with the descriptions given by Cieza, Torquemada and others among the earliest travellers in Peru, who saw the natives in various parts of the country with heads rounded precisely in this manner.[8-*]
The second head figured, ([fig. 3],) is that of a Natchez Indian,[8-†] obtained from a mound not far from that city by the late Mr. James Tooley, Jr., and by him presented to me. The face in this, as in the former instance, has all the characteristics of the native Indian; and the cranium has undergone precisely the same process of artificial compression, although these tribes were separated from each other by the vast geographical distance of four thousand miles!
Could we discover the cranial remains of the older Mexican nations, we should doubtless find many of them to possess the same fanciful type of conformation;[8-‡] for if either of the skulls figured above could be again clothed in flesh and blood, would we not have restored to us the very heads that are so abundantly sculptured on the monuments of Central America, and so graphically described by Herrera, when he tells us that the people of Yucatan flattened their heads and foreheads?
The following diagrams are copied, on an enlarged scale, from Mr. Stephens’s Travels,[8-§] and will serve in further illustration of this interesting subject. They are taken from bas-reliefs in the Palace at Palenque. The personage [fig. 4], (whose head-dress we have partly omitted,) appears to be a king or chieftain, at whose feet are two suppliants, naked and cross-legged, of whom we copy the one that preserves the most perfect outline, ([fig. 5.])