Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Various considerations tend to favour the idea of such a migration, rather than the maintenance of intercommunication and exchange, among a people of the same race, throughout regions so extensive and so geographically distinct. If the Mound-Builders had some of the arts and models, not only of Central but of Southern America: they also employed in their ingenious manufactures pearls and shells of the Gulf of Florida; obsidian from Mexico; mica believed to have been brought from the Alleghanies; jade, such as that described by Humboldt among the rare materials of ancient manufacture in Chili; the lead of Wisconsin; and the copper, and probably the silver, of Ontonagon and the Keweenaw peninsula. The fact indeed that some of their most elaborate carvings represent birds and quadrupeds belonging to latitudes so far to the south, naturally tends to suggest the idea of a central region where arts were cultivated to an extent unknown in the Mississippi Valley; and that those objects, manufactured where such models are furnished by the native fauna, remain only as evidences of ancient intercourse maintained between these latitudes and the localities where now alone such are known to abound. But in opposition to this, full value must be given to the fact that neither the relics, nor the customs which they illustrate, pertain exclusively to southern latitudes; nor are such found to predominate among the singular evidences of ancient and more matured civilisation which abound in Central and Southern America. The varied nature of the materials employed in the arts of the Mound-Builders, we must also remember, indicates a wide range of relations; though it cannot be assumed that these were maintained in every case by direct intercourse.

The earlier students of American archæology, like the older school of British antiquaries, gave full scope to a system of theorising which built up comprehensive ethnological schemes on the very smallest premises; but in the more judicious caution of later writers there is a tendency to run to the opposite extreme. Perhaps Messrs. Squier and Davis indulge at times in an exaggerated estimate of the merits of the remarkable works of art discovered and published as the result of their joint labours; but subsequent critics have either unduly depreciated them, or solved the difficulties attendant on such discoveries, by ascribing their manufacture to an undetermined foreign source. Mr. Schoolcraft specially manifested a disposition to underrate the artistic ability discernible in some of them; while Mr. Haven, who fully admits their skilful execution, derives from that very fact the evidence of foreign manufacture. After describing the weapons, pottery, and personal ornaments obtained from the mounds, the latter writer adds, “and, with these were found sculptured figures of animals and the human head, in the form of pipes, wrought with great delicacy and spirit from some of the hardest stones. The last-named are relics that imply a very considerable degree of art; and if believed to be the work of the people with whose remains they are found, would tend greatly to increase the wonder that the art of sculpture among them was not manifested in other objects and places. The fact that nearly all the finer specimens of workmanship represent birds, or land and marine animals belonging to a different latitude; while the pearls, the knives of obsidian, the marine shells, and the copper equally testify to a distant, though not extra-continental origin, may, however, exclude these from being received as proofs of local industry and skill.”[^[108]]

Fig. 82.—Peruvian Black Ware.

A reconsideration of the list already given of animals sculptured by the ancient pipe-makers, cannot fail to satisfy the inquirer that it is an over-statement of the case to say that nearly all belong to a different latitude. The real interest and difficulty of the question lie in the fact of discovering, along with so many sculptured figures of animals pertaining to the locality, others represented with equal spirit and fidelity, though belonging to diverse latitudes. To those familiar with early Scandinavian and British antiquities, such an assignment of the mound sculptures to a foreign origin, on account of their models being in part derived from distant sources, must appear a needless assumption which only shifts without lessening the difficulty. On the sculptured standing stones of Scotland—belonging apparently to the closing era of Paganism, and the first introduction of Christianity there,—may be seen the tiger or leopard, the ape, the camel, the serpent, and as supposed by some, the elephant and walrus, along with other representations or symbols, borrowed, not like the models of the Mound-Builders, from a locality so near as to admit of the theory of direct commercial intercourse, or recent migration, but from remote districts of Asia, or from Africa. The most noticeable difference between the imitations of foreign fauna on the Scottish monuments, and in the ancient American sculptures, is that the former occasionally betray, as might be expected, the conventional characteristics of a traditional type; while the latter, if they furnish evidence of migration, would in so far tend to prove it more recent, and to a locality not so distant as to preclude all renewal of intercourse with the ancestral birth-land. Traces of the same reproduction of unfamiliar objects are, indeed, apparent in the mound sculptures. The objects least truthfully represented, in some cases, are animals foreign to the region where alone such works of art have been found. But the South American toucan of the mound sculptor, figured on a previous page, is certainly not inferior to the accompanying specimens of the Peruvian modeller’s imitative skill, wrought on a vessel of black ware (Fig. 82), now in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland: though it will be remembered that the latter are the work of an artist to whom the original may be presumed to have been familiar. Several of the animals engraved in the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley fall far short of the fidelity of imitation ascribed to them in the accompanying text: but the characteristic individuality of others displays remarkable imitative power. The lugubrious expression given to more than one of the toads is full of humour; and some of the ruder human heads may be described as portrait-sketches in the style of Punch. But after making every requisite deduction from the exaggerations of enthusiastic observers, abundant evidence of artistic skill and ingenuity remains to justify the wonder that a people capable of executing such works should have left no large monuments of their art. While, however, this affords no sufficient ground for transferring their origin to another region, we may still look with interest for the discovery of analogous productions in some of the great centres of native American civilisation.

Fig. 83.—Peruvian Stone Mortars.

With one or two stray exceptions, objects precisely similar to the mound sculptures have not hitherto been met with, beyond the valleys where other traces of the Mound-Builders abound; but the points of resemblance between the sculptured mound-pipes and numerous miniature stone mortars found in Peru are too striking to be overlooked. Of the two examples given here (Fig. 83), the one is a llama, from Huarmachaco, in Peru, in the collection of the Historical Society of New York. It is cut in a close-grained black stone, and measures four inches long. The other, of darkish brown schist, is from a drawing made by Mr. Thomas Ewbank, while in Peru. The greater number of those seen by him represent the llama and its congeners, the alpaca, guanoco, and vicuna. They are all hollowed precisely like the bowl of the sculptured mound-pipes, but have no lateral perforation or mouth-piece. Their probable use was as mortars, in which the Peruvians rubbed tobacco into powder, working it with a small pestle until it became heated with the friction, when it was taken as snuff. The transition from this practice to that of inhaling the burning fumes is simple; and the correspondence between the ancient Peruvian tobacco-mortar and the stone pipe of the Mound-Builder is worthy of note, when taken into consideration along with the imitations of birds of the southern continent found among the sculptures of the mounds. Dr. Tschudi describes four of the Peruvian mortars preserved at Vienna, carved in porphyry, basalt, and granite; and he adds: “How the ancient Peruvians, without the aid of iron tools, were able to carve stone so beautifully, is inconceivable.”

The absence of any but such miniature carvings in the northern mounds may also merit notice when viewed in connection with the ideas of religious worship suggested by the contents of the mound altars. Idolatry, in its most striking, and also in some of its most barbarous forms, prevailed, as we know, among the nations of the Mexican Valley, at the period of the Conquest. The monuments of Yucatan and Central America leave no room to doubt that the worship of such visible impersonations of Divine attributes as their sculptors could devise formed a prominent part of their religious services. Reference has also been made in a previous chapter to rudely modelled and sculptured idols, accompanying other ancient remains, in sepulchral deposits in Tennessee. Others have been found in the huacals of Chiriqui, on the Isthmus of Panama, along with numerous gold relics and many fine specimens of pottery. Those facts render it the more singular that, amid so many traces of imitative sculpture, no relics obviously designed as objects of worship have been dug up in the mounds, or found in such circumstances as to connect them with the religious practices of the Mound-Builders. But the remarkable characteristics of the elaborately sculptured pipes, and their obvious connection with services accompanying some of the rites of sacrifice or cremation, may indicate their having played an important part in the religious solemnities of the ancient race; and on this the arts and customs of modern tribes help to throw some curious light.

So far as we can now infer from evidence furnished by relics connected with the use of the tobacco-plant, it seems to have been as familiar to the ancient tribes of the North-west, and the aborigines of the Canadian forests, as to those of the American tropics, of which the Nicotiana tabacum is a native. No such remarkable depositories indeed have been found to the north of the great lakes as those disclosed to the explorers of the tumuli in the Scioto Valley; but even now the tobacco-pipe monopolises the ingenious art of many tribes; and some of their most curious legends and superstitions are connected with the favourite national implement. Among them the dignity of time-honoured use has conferred on it a sacredness, which survives with much of its ancient force; and to this accordingly the student of American antiquities is justified in turning, as a link connecting the present with that ancient past. But it is worthy of note that the form of the mound-pipes differs essentially from the endless varieties of pattern wrought by Indian ingenuity. Some consideration, therefore, of the arts of the modern pipe-sculptor, and of native customs and traditions associated with the use of tobacco, is necessary, as a means of comparison between ancient and modern races of the New World.