SHELL HEAPS ON CAPE COD.
There has been as yet little found in America from which to develop the evidence of early man from any lake or river dwellings, while so much has been done in Europe.[1687] In some parts of Florida the Indians are reported to have built houses on piles; and in South America tree-houses and those on platforms are well known. Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson has reported (Peabody Mus. Rept., xxii. for 1888) the discovery of pile ends in the Delaware River, and has shown that two of these river stations are earlier than the third, as is evident from the rude implements of argillite found in the two when compared with those discovered in the third, where implements of jasper and quartz and fragments of pottery were associated with those of argillite.
PUEBLO REGION.
From a map, “Originalkarte der Urwohnsitze der Azteken und Verwandten Pueblos in New Mexico, zusammengestellt von O. Loew,” in Petermann’s Mittheilungen über wichtige neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesammtgebiete der Geographie, xxii. (1876), table xii. The small dotted circles stand for inhabited pueblos; those with a perpendicular line attached are ruins; and when this perpendicular line is crossed it is a Mexicanized pueblo. See the map in Powell’s Second Rept. Bur. Ethnol. (1880-81) p. 318, which marks the several classes: inhabited, abandoned, ruined pueblos, cavate houses, cliff houses, and tower houses.
The earliest discoveries of the cliff houses of the Colorado region were made by Lieut. J. H. Simpson, and his descriptions appeared in his Journal of a Military Reconnoissance, in 1849.[1688] No considerable addition was made to our knowledge of the cliff dwellers till in 1874-75, when special parties of the Hayden Geological Survey were sent to explore them (Hayden’s Report, 1876), whence we got accounts of those of southwestern Colorado by W. H. Holmes, including the cavate-houses and cliff-dwellers of the San Juan, the Mancos, and the ruins in the McElmo cañon.[1689] W. H. Jackson gives a revised account of his 1874 expedition in the Bulletin of the Survey (vol. ii. no. 1), adding thereto an account of his explorations of 1875. Jackson also gives a chapter on the ruins of the Chaco cañon.[1690]
In coming to the class of ruins lying in a few instances just within, but mostly to the north of, the Mexican line, we encounter the Pueblo race, whose position in the ethnological chart is not quite certain, be their connection with the Nahuas and Aztecs,[1691] or with the moundbuilders,—red Indian if they be,—or with the cliff-dwellers, as perhaps is the better opinion. Their connection with savage nations farther north is not wholly determinable, as Morgan allows, on physical and social grounds, and perhaps not as definitely settled by their architecture as Cushing seems to think.[1692]
The Spaniard early encountered these ruins,[1693] and perhaps the best summary of the growth of our knowledge of them by successive explorations is in Bancroft’s Nat. Races, iv. ch. 11.[1694] In the century after the Spanish conquest, we have one of the best accounts in the Memorial of Fray Alonso Benavides, published at Madrid in 1630.[1695] The most famous of the ruins of this region, the Casa Grande of the Gila Valley in Arizona,[1696] is supposed to have been seen (1540) by Coronado, then in a state of ruin; but we get no clear description till that given by Padre Mange, who accompanied Padre Kino to see the ruins in 1697.[1697]