Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Throughout New California ruined structures of stone, and sometimes of clay abound. The Casas grandes, as they are called, appear to have been defensive structures like the Moqui villages. Captain Johnston describes one, called the Casa de Montezuma, on the river Gila, which measured fifty feet by forty, and had been form storeys high. It is indeed worthy of note that while we find throughout the continent, from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic, scarcely a vestige of ante-Columbian stone architecture: traces of it increase upon us with every new exploration of the country that lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, and merges towards the south into the seats of ancient native civilisation and matured architectural skill.

But the Southern Continent had also its seat of a remarkable native civilisation; which, like that of Mexico, derived some of its most striking characteristics from the physical aspects of the country in which it originated. The peculiar natural advantages of Peru resulted from the settlement of a people on the lofty plateaus of the Andes, but within the tropics, where at each successive elevation a different climate was secured. Such products as the mercantile navies of Northern Europe gather from many distant shores, were there brought within the compass of an industrious population: who fed their flocks on the cold crests of the sierra; cultivated their gardens and orchards on its higher plateaus; and gathered the luxuriant products of the tropics from the country that for them lay, for the most part, beneath the clouds, and spread away from the lowest slopes of the Andes to the neighbouring shores of the Pacific. The character of the people, and the nature of the civilisation of this remarkable country, presented many striking contrasts to the customs and institutions of the Mexicans, and they have generally been assumed as of totally independent origin.

Peru has her historic traditions, no less than Mexico; and her native historian, Garcilasso de la Vega, a descendant, through his mother, from the royal line of the Incas: who plays for them the part which Fernando de Alva did for his Tezcucan ancestry. Seen through such a medium, the traditions of the Inca race expand into gorgeous pages of romance; and the institutions of European chivalry and medieval polity are grafted on the strange usages of an Indian nation, remarkable for its own well-matured commonwealth, and unique phases of native-born civilisation. Sabaism constituted the essential element of Peruvian religious faith, and gave form and colour to the national rites and traditions. Manco Capac and Mama Oello Huaco, their mythic instructors in the arts of agriculture, weaving, and spinning, were the Children of the Sun; their high religious festivals were determined by the solstices and equinoxes; and Quito, the holy city, which lay immediately under the Equator, had within it the pillar of the sun, where its vertical rays threw no shadow at noon, and they believed the god of light to seat himself in full effulgence in his temple. The sacred pillar stood in the centre of a circle described within the court of the great temple, traversed by a diameter drawn from east to west, by means of which the period of the equinoxes was determined; and both then, and at the solstices, the pillar was hung with garlands, and offerings of fruit and flowers were made to the divine luminary and parent of mankind. The title of the sovereign Inca was the Child of the Sun; and the territory of the empire was divided into three portions, of which one, constituting the lands of the Sun, maintained the costly ceremonial of public worship, with the temples and their numerous priests and vestal virgins. The national traditions pointed to the Valley of Cuzco as the original seat of native civilisation. There their mythic Manco Capac founded the city of that name; on the highlands around it a number of columns were reared which served for taking azimuths, and by measuring their shadows the precise time of the solstices were determined.

Besides the divine honours paid to the sun, the Peruvians worshipped the host of heaven, and dedicated temples to the thunder and lightning, and to the rainbow, as the wrathful and benign messengers of the supreme solar deity. It might naturally be anticipated that a nation thus devoted to astronomical observations, and maintaining a sacred caste exclusively for watching solar and stellar phenomena, would have attained to considerable knowledge in that branch of science. Apparently, however, the facilities which their equatorial position afforded for determining the few indispensable periods in their calendar, removed the stimulus to further progress; and not only do we find them surpassed in this respect by the Muyscas, occupying a part of the same great southern plateau, who regulated their calendar on a system presenting considerable points of resemblance to that of the Aztecs; but they remained to the last in ignorance of the true causes of eclipses, and regarded such phenomena with the same superstitious and apprehensive wonder as has affected the untutored savage mind in all ages. One historian, indeed, affirms that they recognised the actual length of the solar year, and regulated their chronology by a series of cycles of decades of years, centuries, and decades of centuries, the last of which constituted the grand cycle or great year of the sun.[^[99]] This is only confuted by a reference to the silence of earlier authorities, and the absence of all evidence on the subject; and may serve to remind us how partial is the knowledge we possess of the intellectual development of this singularly interesting people, among whom science was essentially esoteric.

Prescott seeks to account for the very imperfect nature of the astronomical science of Peru, by the fact, that the Peruvian priesthood were drawn exclusively from the body of the Incas: a privileged order of nobility who claimed divine origin, and were the less tempted to seek in superior learning the exclusive rights of an intellectual aristocracy. But other reasons help to explain this singular intellectual condition of a nation, which had in so many other directions made remarkable progress in civilisation. The very fact that astronomy constituted, as it were, the national religion, placed it beyond the reach of scientific speculation, among a people with whom blasphemy against the sun, and malediction of the Inca, were alike punished with death. The impediments to Galileo’s astronomical discoveries were trifling compared with those which must have beset the presumptuous Inca priest who ventured to deny the diurnal revolution of the sun round the earth; or to explain, by the simple interposition of the moon between themselves and the sun, the mysterious and malign infirmities with which it constituted a part of the national creed to believe their supreme deity was afflicted during a solar eclipse. But another cause also tended to retard the progress of the Peruvians in the intelligent solution of astronomical phenomena. Among the ancient Egyptians we find the division of the year determined by the changes of the Nile; and their year regulated by applications of astronomical science, minutely interwoven with their sacred and civil institutions. But the phenomena of the seasons, which have fostered with every other civilised nation the accurate observation of the astronomical divisions of time, and the determination of the recurring festivals dependent on seed-time and harvest, were almost inoperative, where, among a people specially devoted to agriculture, each season and every temperature could be commanded by a mere change of elevation under the vertical sun of the equator.

The Peruvians, however, must be tried by their own standards of excellence. Manco Capac, their mythic civiliser, was no war-god, like the Mexitli of the ferocious Aztecs. Agriculture was the special art introduced by him; and husbandry was pursued among them on principles which modern science has only recently fully developed in Europe. There alone, in all the New World, the plough was in use; and the Inca himself, on one of the great annual festivals, consecrated the labours of the husbandman by turning up the earth with a golden ploughshare. Artificial irrigation was carried out on a gigantic scale by means of aqueducts and tunnels of great extent, the ruins of which still attest the engineering skill of their constructors. The virtues of guano, which are now so well appreciated by the agriculturists of Europe, were familiar to the Peruvian farmer; and as the country of the Incas included, at its various levels, nearly all varieties of climate and production, from the cocoa and palm that fringed the borders of the Pacific, to the pasture of their mountain flocks on the verge of the high regions of perpetual snow: a systematic succession of public fairs, regulated, like all else, by the supreme government, afforded abundant opportunities for the interchange of their diverse commodities.

Such a country, if any, could dispense with commerce, and attain to considerable advancement without a representative currency or circulating medium. Gold, which was so abundant, served only for barbaric pomp and decoration. Silver was accessible in such quantities, that Pizarro found in it a substitute for iron to shoe the horses of his cavalry. Copper and tin in like manner abounded in the mountains; and the Peruvians had learned to alloy the copper both with tin and silver, for greater utility in its application to the useful arts. Bartholomew Ruiz, it will be remembered, found on board the balsa first met by him off the Peruvian coast, a pair of balances for weighing the precious metals; and the repeated discovery of well-adjusted silver balances in tombs of the Incas, confirms the evidence that they made use of weights in determining the value of their commodities. The Peruvians were thus in possession of a mode of exchange, which, for their purposes, was superior to that of the currency of the Mexicans, in the absence of any such means of ascertaining the exact apportionment of commodities produced for sale.

Progress in agriculture was accompanied by a corresponding development of the resources of a pastoral people. Vast flocks of sheep ranged the mountain pastures of the Andes, under the guidance of native shepherds; while the Peruvians alone, of all the races of the New World, had attained to that important stage in civilisation which precedes the employment of machinery, by their use of the lower animals in economising human labour. The llama, trained as a beast of burden, carried its light load along the steep paths of the Cordilleras, or on the great highways of Peru.

Fig. 76.—Peruvian Web.