Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885

by Various

This first room holds what is regarded by the curator as the most important series of objects ever brought together illustrative of that ancient people who built the mounds and the singular stone graves of the southern and central portions of the United States. The contents of each mound and grave are arranged by themselves, so that as one passes from case to case a picture of the human life of the past is presented as nearly perfect as can be constructed out of that part of the handiwork of the people which has escaped decay. Here can be seen and studied the many singular results of the potter's art, simple and complex in form and varied in style of ornament; carvings in stone, shell, and bone; implements and ornaments of stone, shell, bone, mica, clay, copper, and other substances; fragments of cloth and twine twisted from vegetable fibres, which have been preserved through charring. One case in this room is devoted to a collection of objects from caves in Kentucky and Tennessee, and contains many interesting fabrics, including a large piece of cloth woven from bark-fibre, shoes formed by braiding leaves of the cat-tail rush, and many other things kept for us in the dry air of the caves through uncounted centuries. In the gallery are grouped several collections from Mexico and Central America, which are especially rich in pottery.

In the room, on the second floor, over this one are stored the most ancient—most primitive—evidences of man's presence yet discovered in the Atlantic States,—evidences in the shape not only of chipped stones of his fashioning, but relics of his very frame, which incontestably extend the period of human occupation along our Atlantic coast back at least to the glacial era. I refer to the palæolithic remains exhumed by Dr. C. C. Abbott from the terraces of river-drift in the valley of the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. These deposits of pebbles and sand owe their origin to the continental glacier, whose front reached in solid mass almost to that locality; through them was worn the bed of the present river, and whatever is contained in their undisturbed mass can belong to no more recent date than the later days of the glacial period.

In these gravels near his home, when cut through by railway-building and the wearing of the river-bank, Dr. Abbott found his palæoliths under such circumstances as left no doubt that they were quite as old as the formation of the bed itself. If you are inexperienced, and take in your hand one of these specimens by itself, it may seem to you simply a small, broken boulder or a fragment from some ledge; but the trained eye sees (what observation and experiment confirm) that fractures like those on these specimens are not such as are made by accident; and when a hundred specimens are displayed before you, all doubt as to their origin vanishes at a glance.

Some of these relics are deeply eroded by the weather, others much less so; some are pebbles that have required only a slight chipping to adapt them to their owner's need, others sharp-edged, elaborately flaked, "turtle-backed" weapons, similar in shape to much of the more modern and finished work in flint. With few exceptions, however, these are made of argillite, and in many cases they have lost the fineness of edge and angle by weathering and by attrition against the gravel in which they were rolled under glacial floods. They bear about the same relation in their roughness and shapelessness to the carefully-worked relics of the red Indian found on the surface, or in the accumulation of soil resulting from the decay of countless generations of forest and herbage which everywhere covers the old gravels, as the matchlock of the Pilgrim Fathers bears to our target-rifle. But they are of human origin, and assert the presence of humanity on the Atlantic coast of America at the close of the glacial period just as logically as the teeth in the green-sand argue sharks in the Cretaceous sea.

In these gravels are entombed scattered bones of the mastodon and other extinct mammals, but it was long before there appeared any relic of a human frame concerning which there could be no misapprehension. At last, quite recently, Dr. Abbott exhumed a tooth, worn and washed and sunken deep in the undisturbed drift,—a tooth of a contemporary of the mastodon and of one of the makers of the argillite implements that presupposed him; a man who never got beyond the palæolithic stage,—the earliest rudiments of a culture far beneath any savagery of historic times in the Atlantic States. This silent witness of man's antiquity in America is among the treasures of this museum which are unique and priceless.

Who were these earliest men? and what has the museum to show similar to this from other parts of the world? are questions that naturally present themselves.

The only attempt at an answer to the first, with which I am acquainted, is suggested by Dr. Abbott in chapter xxxii. of his "Primitive Industry." After showing that during the last glacial epoch there were no climatic conditions southward of the actual ice-cap which would preclude the existence of men, since they would gradually become used to the slow change (as did so many surviving forms of animal and vegetable life), Dr. Abbott further clears the way by demonstrating that a strong line of demarcation exists between the remains of these people and the earliest traces of the "red Indian" race which Europeans found in possession of the body of the continent; this gap is not one of stratification, or, perhaps, of time, but is shown by a strong distinctness in the character of the worked stones forming the weapons and implements of each people in respect to both material and degree of perfection. Considering further the probability (from known evidence) that the Innuit (Eskimos) once occupied all the interior of the continent, together with the ascertained fact that on the Atlantic coast this people quite recently extended as far south as Cape Cod, and comparing the drift-implements with the exceeding rudeness of the stone implements possessed by the Eskimos when first seen by the whites, Dr. Abbott concludes that in the palæolithic men we have the ancestors of the Innuit, who were driven to Arctic fastnesses by a new and more powerful race of invaders, who retained possession of the great mass of the continent, and whose descendants remain among us yet.

Now, to examine what the Old World has to show, if anything, similar to these rudiments of civilization, we must go to the opposite gallery, where we shall find, in the collections from the river-drift of England and Southern France, implements equally rude and old-looking, but made of flint instead of the inferior argillite with which the American autochthones contented themselves. Next, a little better on the whole than these, we shall see the relics of stone and bone—the latter not only whittled and broken, but often ornamentally carved—which came from caves in England and Southern Europe: some have been dug from beneath thick layers of stalagmite.

In Europe, then, palæolithic man is separately considered as the River-drift man and the Cave man, the former believed to be much the older people, and known by the series of simplest patterns of stone implements found in the late Pleistocene river-beds. This River-drift man wandered over the greater part of Europe and Asia, leading a nomadic, feral life,—a hunter of very low order, like the modern Australian. The Cave man, on the contrary, seems to have been restricted in his range, which of itself is considered indicative of different age and race, and he was far in advance of the River-drift man in the variety and workmanship of his weapons and implements. Between both, or rather between the era of the latter and that of the men who made implements of polished stone and chipped flint, there is just such a broad distinction as obtains in the United States between the traces of palæolithic and those of neolithic man.

The exact parallelism of the palæolithic ages in the Eastern and Western hemispheres is still more or less disputed by anthropologists, but the general opinion seems to be this: If not two peoples, the River-drift men and the Cave men were certainly distinct sections of the same race which found their way into Europe at widely-separated times, the former having far the higher antiquity. It is believed by Dr. Boyd Dawkins (from whose celebrated cave-explorations in Great Britain has been derived a representative series of specimens for the museum) "that the River-drift man is as completely extinct at the present time as the woolly rhinoceros or the cave bear" which he fed upon; but all authors identify the men of the caves with the Eskimos, who there, as well as here, were forced to retreat by the pressure of a race of new-comers, superior in prowess and cultivation, whose traces we call neolithic.