J. W. Foster (Prehist. Races, ch. 8; Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci. Trans., 1872; and Amer. Naturalist, vi. 738) held to a lower type of skull, on this evidence, than Wilson (Prehist. Man, ii. ch. 20) contended for. There are examples of the wide difference of views (MacLean, 142), when some, like Morgan, connect them with the Pueblo skulls (No. Amer. Rev., cix., Oct., 1869), and others, like Morton, Winchell, Wilson, Brasseur, and Foster, find their correspondences in those of Mexico and Peru.[1745] Putnam, whose experience with mound skulls is greatest of all, holds to the southern short head and the northern long head (Rept. 1888). Probably we have no better enumeration of the variety of objects and relics found in the mounds, though much has since been added to the collection, than in Rau’s Catalogue of the Archæological Collection of the National Museum (Washington, 1876).[1746] Unfortunately he shows little or no discrimination between discoveries in the mounds and those of the surface. The interest in such collections has naturally brought prominently to the attention of every student of such collections the tricks of fraudulent imitators, and there are several well-known instances of protracted controversies on the genuineness of certain relics.[1747]
There remains in this survey of the literature of the mounds in all their varieties, to go over it, finally, in relation to their geographical distribution:[1748]—
New England is almost destitute of these antiquities. The one that has attracted some attention is what is described as a fortification in Sanbornton, in New Hampshire, which when found was faced with stone externally, and the walls were six feet thick and breast-high, when described about one hundred and fifteen years ago. There is a plan of it, with a descriptive account, preserved in the library of the American Antiq. Society,[1749] and another plan and description in M. T. Runnels’s Hist. of Sanbornton (Boston, 1882), i. ch. 4. Squier also figured it.
CINCINNATI TABLET.
After a cut in Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 274, engraved from a rubbing taken from the original. Wilson adds: “Mr. Whittlesey has included this tablet among his Archæological Frauds; but the result of inquiries made by me has removed from my mind any doubt of its genuineness.” Cf. other cuts in M. C. Read, Archæol. of Ohio (1888); Squier and Davis, fig. 195; Short, p. 45; MacLean, 107; and Second Rept. Bur. of Ethnol., pp. 133-34.
As we move westward, the mounds begin to be numerous in the State of New York, and particularly in the western part of it. One of the earliest descriptions of them, after that of the missionary Kirkland (about 1788), is in the “Journal of the Rev. John Taylor while on a mission through the Mohawk and Black River Country in 1802,” which was first printed, with plans of the works examined, in the Documentary Hist. New York (vol. iii. quarto ed.). In 1818 DeWitt Clinton published at Albany his Memoir on the Antiquities of the western part of New York, in which he attributes their origin to the Scandinavians.[1750] They were again described in David Thomas’s Travels through the western country in 1816 (Auburn, 1819). There is not much else to note for twenty-five years. In 1845, Schoolcraft made to the N. Y. Senate his Report on the Census of the Iroquois Indians (Albany and N. Y., 1846, 1847, 1848), which is better known, perhaps, in the trade edition, Notes on the Iroquois; or Contributions to the Statistics, Aboriginal History, Antiquities and General Ethnology of Western New York (N. Y. 1846). In 1850, the Third Report of the Regents of the University of the State of N. Y. contains F. B. Hough’s paper on the earthwork enclosures in the State, with cuts. The same year (1850) came the essential authority on the New York mounds, E. G. Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of the State of N. Y., comprising the results of original surveys and explorations, with an illustrative appendix (Washington, 1850), which the next year made part of the second volume of the Smithsonian Contributions.[1751] He enumerates in New York about 250 defensive structures, beside burial mounds and in his appendix describes those in New Hampshire and some in Pennsylvania.[1752] Some new explorations of the New York mounds were made in 1859 by T. Apoleon Cheney, who describes them, giving plans and cuts, in the Thirteenth Report of the Regents of the University.[1753]
ANCIENT WORKS ON THE MUSKINGUM.