[985] Ibid. 222.
[986] Morgan says of his predecessors, “they learned nothing and knew nothing” of Indian society.
[987] Ibid. 223.
[988] In this he of course assumes that the ruins in Spanish America are of communal edifices.
[989] Bandelier’s papers are in the second volume of the Reports of the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. He contends in his “Art of Warfare among the Ancient Mexicans,” that he has shown the non-existence of a military despotism, and proved their government to be “a military democracy, originally based upon communism in living.” A similar understanding pervades his other essay “On the social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans.” Morgan and Bandelier profess great admiration for each other,—Morgan citing his friend as “our most eminent scholar in Spanish American history” (Houses, etc., 84), and Bandelier expresses his deep feeling of gratitude, etc. (Archæolog. Tour, 32). This affectionate relation has very likely done something in unifying their intellectual sympathies. The Ancient Society, or researches in the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization (N. Y. 1877), of Morgan is reflected very palpably in these papers of Bandelier. The accounts of the war of the conquest, as detailed in Bancroft’s Mexico (vol. i.), and the views of their war customs (Native Races, ii. ch. 13), contrasted with Bandelier’s ideas,—who finds in Parkman’s books “the natural parallelism between the forays of the Iroquois and the so-called conquests of the Mexican confederacy” (Archæol. Tour, 32), and who reduces the battle of Otumba to an affair like that of Custer and the Sioux (Art of Warfare),—give us in the military aspects of the ancient life the opposed views of the two schools of interpreters.
[990] Being vol. iv. of the Contributions to No. Amer. Ethnol. in Powell’s Survey of the Rocky Mt. Region. Some of Morgan’s cognate studies relating to the aboriginal system of consanguinity and laws of descent are in the Smithsonian Contributions, xvii., the Smithsonian Misc. Coll. ii., Amer. Acad. Arts and Sci. Trans. vii., and Am. Assoc. Adv. Sci. Proc., 1857.
[991] Morgan in this, his last work, condenses in his first chapter those which were numbered 1 to 4 in his Ancient Society, and in succeeding sections he discusses the laws of hospitality, communism, usages of land and food, and the houses of the northern tribes, of those of New Mexico, San Juan River, the moundbuilders, the Aztecs, and those in Yucatan and Central America. Among these he finds three distinct ethnical stages, as shown in the northern Indian, higher in the sedentary tribes of New Mexico, and highest among those of Mexico and Central America. S. F. Haven commemorated Morgan’s death in the Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Apr., 1880.
[992] Cf. Bandelier on “the tenure of lands” in Peabody Mus. Repts. (1878), no. xi., and Bancroft in Nat. Races, ii. ch. 6, p. 223.
[993] Bandelier (Peabody Mus. Repts. ii. 391) points out that when Martin Ursúa captured Tayasál on Lake Petin, the last pueblo inhabited by Maya Indians, he found “all the inhabitants living brutally together, an entire relationship together in one single house,” and Bandelier refers further to Morgan’s Ancient Society, Part 2, p. 181.
[994] Bandelier (Peabody Mus. Repts. ii. 673) accepts the views of Morgan, calling it “a rude clannish feast,” given by the official household of the tribe as a part of its daily duties and obligations.