Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8) / Aboriginal America

by Unknown

[1679] Haven, p. 86.

[1680] Cf. Florentino Amegluno’s La Antigüedad del Hombre en la Plata (Paris, 1880), and Howorth’s Mammoth and the Flood, 355, who cites Klee’s Le Déluge, p. 326, and enumerates other evidences of pleistocene man in South America, in connection with extinct animals.

[1681] The instances are not rare of mummies being found in caves of the Mississippi Valley; but there is no evidence adduced of any great age attaching to them. Cf. N. S. Shaler on the antiquity of the caverns and cavern life of the Ohio Valley, in Boston Soc. Nat. Hist. Mem., ii. 355 (1875); and on desiccated remains, see the Archæologia Amer., i. 359; Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula, App. ii. On the American caves see Nadaillac’s L’Amérique préhistorique, ch. 2.

[1682] Abbott’s Primitive Industry, ch. 30.

[1683] Lyell, Antiq. of Man, 4th ed. ch. 2; Lubbock, Prehist. Times, ch. 7; Nadaillac, Les premiers hommes, i. ch. 5; Joly, Man before Metals, ch. 4; Figuier, World before Deluge (N. Y., 1872), p. 477. Worsaae, the leading Danish authority, calls them palæolithic relics; Lubbock places them as early neolithic. Southall, of course, thinks they indicate the rudeness of the people, not their antiquity. (Recent Origin, etc., ch. 12; Epoch of the Mammoth, ch. 5.)

[1684] Am. Naturalist, ii. 397.

[1685] Cf. Lyell’s Second Visit.

[1686] All the general treatises on American archæology now cover the subject: Wilson, Prehist. Man, i. 132; Nadaillac, L’Amérique préhistorique, ch. 2; Short, No. Amer. Antiq., 106; Smithsonian Reports, 1864 (Rau), 1866, 1870 (J. Fowler); Bull. Essex Inst., iv. (Putnam); Peabody Mus. Reports, i., v., vii.; Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci. Proc. 1867, 1875; Phil. Acad. Nat. Sci. Proc. 1866; Pop. Science Monthly, x. (Lewis); Lyell’s Second Visit, i. 252; Stevens, Flint Chips, 194. For local observations: J. M. Jones in Smithsonian Ann. Report, 1863, on those of Nova Scotia. S. F. Baird in Nat. Museum Proc. (1881, 1882), on those of New Brunswick and New England. For those in Maine see Peabody Mus. Reports, xvi., xviii.; Central Ohio Sci. Assoc. Proc., i. 70; that at Damariscotta, in particular, is described in the Peabody Mus. Reports, xx. 531, 546; and in the Maine Hist. Soc. Col., v. (by P. A. Chadbourne) and vi. 349. Wyman’s studies are in the Amer. Naturalist, Jan., 1868, and Peabody Mus. Rept., ii. Putnam (Essex Inst. Bull., xv. 86) says that those at Pine Grove, near Salem, Mass., were examined in 1840. The map which is annexed of those on Cape Cod, taken from the Smithsonian Report (1883, p. 905), shows the frequency of them in a confined area, as observed; but the same region doubtless includes many not observed.

For those on the New Jersey coast see Cook’s Geology of New Jersey (Newark, 1868), and Rau in the Smithsonian Reports, 1863, 1864, 1865. The Lockwood collection from the heap at Keyport is in the Peabody Museum (cf. Rept., xxii. 43). Francis Jordan describes the Remains of an Aboriginal Encampment at Rehoboth, Delaware (Philad., 1880). Elmer R. Reynolds reported on “Precolumbian shell heaps at Newburg, Maryland, and the aboriginal shell heaps of the Potomac and Wicomico rivers” at the Congrès des Américanistes (Copenhagen, 1883, p. 292). Joseph Leidy describes those at Cape Henlopen in the Phil. Acad. Nat. Sci., 1866. Those on the Georgia coast, St. Simon’s Island, etc., are pointed out in C. C. Jones’s Antiquities of the Southern Indians; Smithsonian Repts., 1871 (by D. Brown); in Lyell’s Antiq. of Man, and in his Second Visit to the U. S. (N. Y., 1849), i. 252.

The shell heaps of Florida have had unusual attention. Wyman has indicated the absence of objects in them, showing Spanish contact. Dr. Brinton’s first studies of them were in his Notes on the Floridian Peninsula (Philad., 1859), ch. 6, and again in the Smithsonian Report (1866), p. 356. Prof. Wyman’s first reports (St. John River) were in The American Naturalist, Jan., Oct., Nov., 1868. He also described them in the Peabody Mus. Report, i., v., vii., and in his Fresh Water Shell Heaps of the St. John River, Florida (Salem, 1875), being no. 4 of the Memoirs of the Peabody Acad. of Science. There are other investigations recorded in the Smithsonian Reports, 1877, by S. P. Mayberry, on St. John River; 1879, by S. T. Walker, on Tampa Bay; also by A. W. Vogeler in Amer. Naturalist, Jan., 1879; by W. H. Dall in the American Journal of Archæology, i. 184; and by A. E. Douglass in the Amer. Antiquarian, vii. 74, 140. On those of Alabama, see Peabody Mus. Rept., xvi. 186, and Smithsonian Rept., 1877.