Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

To this imitative skill we owe other works which have an important significance in relation to ethnological problems affecting the ancient population of the New World. Reference has already been made to the curious collection of stone pipes, recovered from one of the smaller tumuli of “Mound City.” They included some of the sculptured human heads; but the bowls of most of them were carved into figures of beasts, birds, and reptiles. On these the ancient sculptors appear to have lavished their artistic skill with a degree of care bestowed on none other of the less perishable works, from which alone we can now judge of their intellectual development. “Not only,” as Messrs. Squier and Davis observe, “are the features of the various objects represented faithfully, but their peculiarities and habits are in some degree exhibited. The otter is shown in a characteristic attitude, holding a fish in his mouth; the heron also holds a fish; and the hawk grasps a small bird in its talons, which it tears with its beak. The panther, the bear, the wolf, the beaver, the otter, the squirrel, the racoon, the hawk, the heron, crow, swallow, buzzard, the paroquet, toucan, and other indigenous and southern birds; the turtle, the frog, toad, rattlesnake, etc., are recognised at first glance”;[^[106]] and in addition to those, the jaguar or panther, the cougar, the elk, the opossum, the alligator, and numerous land and water birds, including several varieties of the owls, herons, and other species, have all been recognised among more recent disclosures. Many of those are represented in characteristic attitudes, and with much skill and fidelity of portraiture. The exuberant fancy of the ancient sculptors also displays itself at times in humorous masks, and incongruous devices, such as a goose’s head cut in a hard black stone, which on looking to the back becomes a human skull. Some of those works appear to have been executed, like the sportive sketches of the modern artist, with no other object than the carver’s own gratification.

Unfinished carvings show the process by which they were wrought. A toad, in a characteristic attitude, but only roughly shaped out, “very well exhibits the mode of workmanship. While the general surface appears covered with striæ running in every direction, as if produced by rubbing, the folds and lines are clearly cut with some sort of graver. The marks of the implement, chipping out portions a fourth of an inch in length, are too distinct to admit the slightest doubt that a cutting tool was used in the work.” Again, in another pipe-head, blocked out into the form of a bird, “the lines indicating the feathers, grooves of the beak, and other more delicate features, are cut or graved on the surface at a single stroke. Some pointed tool appears to have been used, and the marks are visible where it has occasionally slipped beyond the control of the engraver. Indeed, the whole appearance of the specimen indicates that the work was done rapidly by an experienced hand, and that the various parts were brought forward simultaneously. The freedom of the strokes could only result from long practice; and we may infer that the manufacture of pipes had a distinct place in the industrial organisation of the Mound-Builders.” But this, though full of interest, need not surprise us, since the art of the arrow-maker, which required both skill and experience, was pursued among the forest-tribes as a special craft; nor is that of the pipe-maker even now wholly abandoned.

Fig. 80.—Manatee, Pipe-Sculpture.

So far, therefore, we are enabled by such means to look back into that remote past. We see the industrious sculptor at his task; and holding silent converse with him over his favourite works, we learn somewhat of his own physical aspect, of the range of his geographical experience, his mental capacity and intellectual development. The pottery of the mounds, in like manner, adds to our knowledge of the art and civilisation of the age in which it was produced. But, next in importance to the evidence thus furnished, the miniature sculptures of the mounds derive their chief value from indications they supply of the extent and nature of the geographical relations of their owners. By the fidelity of the representations of so great a variety of subjects copied from animal life, they furnish evidence of a knowledge in the Mississippi Valley of fauna peculiar not only to southern but to tropical latitudes, extending beyond the Isthmus into the southern continent: and suggestive either of arts derived from a foreign source, and intercourse maintained with regions where the civilisation of ancient America attained its highest development; or else indicating migration into the northern continent of the race of the ancient graves of Central and Southern America, bringing with them the arts of the tropics, and models derived from animals familiar to their fathers in the parent-land of the race.

Of one of the most interesting of those exotic models, the Lamantin or Manatee, seven sculptured figures have been taken from the mounds of Ohio. This phytophagous cetacean, which, when full-grown, measures from fifteen to twenty feet in length, is found only in tropical waters. Species haunt the estuaries and large rivers of Central and intertropical South America; as also those of both the eastern and western sides of tropical Africa: and sometimes ascend the rivers to a great distance from the sea. Examples were seen by Humboldt in the Rio Meta, a branch of the Orinoco, one thousand miles above its mouth. They are also found among the Antilles, and on the coast of the Florida peninsula. The most characteristic details in their form which chiefly attracted attention when the Manatee was first brought under the notice of Europeans, are faithfully reproduced in the Mound sculptures. Fancy helped to exaggerate the peculiarities of this strange animal to the earliest European voyagers, and from them it received the name of the Siren. But its most remarkable feature is the fore paw, occupying the usual place of the cetacean fin, but bearing so close a resemblance to a human hand that the name Manatee is generally supposed to have been conferred on it by the first Spanish explorers on this account.[^[107]] It is ranked according to ecclesiastical natural history as a fish; and its flesh is in special request at St. Christopher’s, Guadaloupe, Martinique, and in various South American localities, during Lent. Its form is therefore familiar to the natives of South America, and was once equally well known to those of the Antilles, and probably to the ancient coastmen of the Gulf. But we must account by other means for the discovery of accurate representations of it among the sculptures of the far-inland Ohio mounds; and the same remark applies to the jaguar or panther, the cougar, the toucan; to the buzzard possibly, and also to the paroquet. The majority of those animals are not known in the United States; some of them are totally unknown within any part of the North American continent. Others may be classed with the paroquet, which, though essentially a southern bird, and common around the Gulf, does occasionally make its appearance inland; and so might become known to the untravelled Mound-Builder in his northern home.

The importance of such evidence that the ancient dwellers in the Scioto Valley had some knowledge of tropical animals, and even of those confined exclusively to the southern continent, has not escaped the notice of the explorers of the mounds. It has even induced them to hesitate in assigning the name of the toucan to sculptures concerning the design of which there could be no other reasonable ground for doubt. Referring to the manatee sculptures, they remark: “These singular relics have a direct bearing upon some of the questions connected with the origin of the mounds. They are undistinguishable, so far as material and workmanship are concerned, from an entire class of remains found in them, and are evidently the work of the same hands with the other effigies of beasts and birds; and yet they faithfully represent animals found (and only in small numbers), a thousand miles distant upon the shores of Florida, or—if the birds seemingly belonging to the zygodactylous order be really designed to represent the toucan,—found only in the tropical regions of South America. Either the same race, possessing throughout a like style of workmanship, and deriving their materials from a common source, existed contemporaneously over the whole range of intervening territory, and maintained a constant intercommunication; or else there was at some period a migration from the south, bringing with it characteristic remains of the land from which it emanated. The sculptures of the manatees are too exact to have been the production of those who were not well acquainted with the animal and its habits.” Of the representations of the toucan, the accompanying woodcut (Fig. 81) will furnish a sufficient illustration. It is imitated with considerable accuracy, though inferior to some of the finest specimens of mound sculpture. The most important deviation from correctness of detail is, that it has three toes instead of two before, although the two are correctly represented behind. It is stooping its head to take food from a rudely outlined human hand; and as it is known that the brilliant plumage of the toucan leads to its being frequently tamed by the natives of Guiana and Brazil, this tends not only to confirm the idea of its representation by the sculptures in question: but to suggest that the Mound-Builders may have had aviaries, like those in which the Aztec caciques assembled birds of splendid plumage and beautiful form from every part of their Mexican empire.

Fig. 81.—Toucan, Pipe-Sculpture.

Unless we assume such a lapse of time as may suffice for important changes in the climate and fauna of the Ohio Valley, the evidence thus far adduced suggests the inference either that the whole extensive regions thus indicated were occupied at some remote period by a common race; or we must recognise in such indications of familiarity with the natural history of the tropics, and even of the southern continent, proof that that very people, who derived all their metal from the great northern regions of Lake Superior, had themselves migrated from southern latitudes rich in metallic ores.