Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Among the barbarous races of the northern continent, the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, though scarcely rising above the hunter stage, offer a subject of study of peculiar value in reference to the ethnology of the New World. In the great valley of the St. Lawrence, at the period of earliest European contact with its native tribes, we find this confederacy of Indian nations in the most primitive condition as to all knowledge of progressive arts; but full of energy, delighting in military enterprise, and amply endued with the qualities requisite for effecting permanent conquests over a civilised but unwarlike people. Nor did the primitive arts of the Iroquois prevent the development of incipient germs of civilisation among them. Agriculture was systematically practised; and their famous league, wisely established, and maintained unbroken through very diversified periods of their history, exhibits a people advancing in many ways towards the initiation of a self-originated civilisation, when the intrusion of Europeans abruptly arrested its progress, and brought them in contact with elements of foreign progress pregnant for them only with sources of degradation and final destruction.

The historian of the Iroquois,[^[71]] when describing their simple arts and manufactures, remarks, that in the western mounds rows of arrow-heads or flint-blades have been found lying side by side, like teeth, the row being about two feet long. “This has suggested the idea that they were set in a frame, and fastened with thongs, thus making a species of sword.”[^[72]] In this description we cannot fail to recognise the mahguahuitl, or native sword of Mexico and Yucatan. In the large canoe with its armed crew, first met off the latter coast, Herrera tells us the Indians had “swords made of wood, having a gutter in the forepart, in which were sharp-edged flints strongly fixed with a sort of bitumen and thread.” Among the Mexicans this toothed blade was armed with the itzli, or obsidian, capable of taking an edge like a razor; and the destructive powers of this formidable weapon are frequently dwelt upon by the early Spaniards. Among the ruins of Kabah, in Yucatan, the attention of Stephens was attracted by the protruding corner of a huge sculptured slab, the basso-relievos on which consist of an upright figure having a lofty plume of feathers falling to his heels; while another figure kneels before him holding in his hands the very same weapon, with its flint or obsidian blades projecting from the wooden socket. The idea it suggests is not necessarily that assumed by Stephens: that the sculptors and architects of the great ruins of Central America and Yucatan were the same people whom the Spaniards found there on their landing. The sculpture may be of a greatly older date. On its lower compartment is a row of hieroglyphics; and the suppliant attitude of the armed figure is rather suggestive of a record of conquest over some barbarian chief of Mexican or more northern tribes, of whom the flint-edged sword-blade was the most typical characteristic. Nevertheless, there is a singular interest in the simple chain of evidence, thus confirmatory of the Aztec traditions of original migration, and the subjugation of the elder civilised race of Anahuac by northern warriors: which leads us, step by step, from such rude arts as those of the Iroquois, and relics of other barbarous tribes in western sepulchral mounds, to the Mexican armature of the era of the conquest, and artistic records of the lettered architects of Yucatan.

The history of the Iroquois and their simple arts, illustrates with peculiar aptness the unwritten chronicles of the New World. In their rude state they achieved a remarkable civil and military organisation, and acquired more extensive and enduring influence than any nation of native American lineage, excepting the civilised Mexicans and Peruvians. Their own traditions pointed to an era when they migrated from the northern shores of the St. Lawrence into that region to the south and east of Lake Ontario, where they dwelt through all the period of their authentic history; though two members of the league, the Senecas and Onondagas, claimed to be autochthones, sprung from the soil of that Iroquois territory. The league embraced the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Mohawks, all united in a strictly federal union; and to this the Tuscaroras were admitted, on their expulsion from North Carolina in 1715. The claim of a common origin advanced by a people occupying territory so far to the south, throws an interesting light on the migrations of Indian tribes. It is confirmed by the character of their language, and received practical recognition in the assignment of a portion of the Oneida territory for their occupation. In the seventeenth century the Iroquois were the great aggressive nationality of the continent to the north of Mexico. In the very beginning of that century, Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia, encountered their canoes on the upper part of the Chesapeake Bay, bearing a band of them to the territories of the Powhattan confederacy. The Shawnees, Susquehannocks, Nanticokes, Miamis, Delawares, and Minsi, were, one after another, reduced by them to the condition of dependent tribes. Even the Canarse or Long-Island Indians found no protection from them in their sea-girt home beyond the Hudson; and their power was felt from the St. Lawrence to Tennessee, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

How long before the discovery of this vast region by Europeans, it had been in occupation by those who claimed to be its autochthones, we have no other knowledge than their own traditions of migration. But so far as arts are any evidence of national progress, they were then in their infancy. The region they occupied offered no advantages for the inauguration of a copper or bronze era, such as those of Lake Superior or the Southern Andes supplied to their ancient possessors. Of working in metals they knew nothing; and only supplemented their primitive implements, wrought in stone, flint, horn, bone, and wood, by barter with the European intruders. Nevertheless, for nearly two centuries, the Indians of the Five Nations, as they were called before the addition of the Tuscaroras, presented a sturdy and unbroken front to the encroachments alike of Dutch, French, and British colonists. But their hostility was concentrated in opposition to the French nation; and as the rival colonies of France and England were long nearly balanced, it is not unjustly affirmed by the historian of the Iroquois, that France owed the final overthrow of her magnificent schemes of colonisation in North America to their uncompromising antagonism.

Among the Mexicans the arts of a true stone-period had been carried to the highest perfection, along with a development of those of their bronze age. On the northern frontier of Mexico, towards the head-waters of the Great Barauca, is the Cerro de Navajas, the “Hill of Knives,” where, before the conquest, obsidian was mined for manufacturing purposes: like the chert and hornstone of the Flint Ridge pits of Kentucky and Ohio. Examples of elaborately-worked obsidian and flint, and of polished implements and ornaments of stone, executed by Mexican artificers, rival the finest specimens recovered among the relics of Europe’s neolithic period. The Christy collection is specially rich in objects of this class. One flame-shaped arrow-head chipped with the nicest art, is evidently executed as a display of lapidary skill. Another fine spear-blade, made of a semi-opalescent chalcedony which occurs as concretions in the trachytic lavas of Mexico, measures eight inches long, and is supposed to have served as a state halberd, as it is much too delicate for actual warfare. But it is obvious that a finer material than usual frequently tempted the worker in flint or obsidian to an unwonted display of his art. In various private collections in Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, I have seen choice specimens of spear and arrow-heads, and other objects, made of jasper, milky-quartz, and rock crystal; some of them wrought into fantastic or purely ornamental forms.

A state battle-axe in the Christy collection made of green quartzose avanturine, measures 11 inches in length. It is a thick wedge, with the upper part carved as the head of a Mexican idol or king, and the arms outlined on the blade. Jade, green serpentine, grey granite, agate, and obsidian of different colours, were all worked into various shapes for ornament or use, with a care often prompted by the attractive character of the material, and with a skill no longer known to the native Mexican artificers.

Fig. 60.—Honduras serrated Implement.

In the southern continent also examples of mastery in the manufacture of flint and stone implements survive, in some cases as the sole memorials of races which have perished; and traces of the arts of savage tribes in the primitive condition of a purely stone-period lie everywhere outside of the remarkable centres of Peruvian civilisation. Three such relics from the Bay of Honduras are deserving of special notice, from their unusually large size and peculiar forms. They were found, along with other implements, about the year 1794, in a cave between two and three miles inland. One of them is now preserved in the British Museum, and the others have been repeatedly exhibited at meetings of the Archæological Institute. The accompanying illustrations will best convey an idea of their peculiar forms. One (Fig. 60) is a serrated weapon, pointed at both ends, and measuring sixteen and a half inches long. Another (Fig. 61), in the form of a crescent, with projecting points, measuring 17 inches in greatest length, may have served as a weapon of parade, like the state partisan or halberd of later times. The third, which is imperfect, is shown in Fig. 62. The whole are examples of flint implements of unusually large proportions, and chipped with extraordinary regularity and skill. A well-executed head of a warrior, in terra-cotta, obtained about the same period, if not indeed along with these implements, was presented to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1798, and is figured on a subsequent page. The unwonted size of those Honduras implements attracted special notice when first produced; but this ceases to excite surprise when it is seen that blocks of flint or hornstone adequate for the largest of them are readily procurable throughout extensive regions of North America, as in Ohio and Kentucky. To the north of Ohio, where the material is rare, flint implements and weapons are mostly of small size. The larger implements are of stone; and among the Iroquois, the Hurons, the Chippewas, and other tribes on the shores of the great lakes, the copper of Lake Superior seems to have been recognised, and sought for, as a fitter material for large hatchets and spear-heads.