In America, however (where the Atlantic coast, at least, does not afford caverns like those of Western Europe), the evidence all goes to show that palæolithic men were in continuous possession of the region from the time when they first appeared until driven northward by the Indians, perhaps close upon the retreat of the great glacier. Returning to the Abbott collection, we shall find that it contains a large quantity of rude arrow-points, scrapers, and other forms of stone implements, some of which are much better than any of the "turtle-backs" or other palæoliths from the lower gravels. These are found in the upper part of the drift, resting upon them and buried in the humus above: in the latter position they are, of course, more or less intermixed with the jasper and quartz relics of the modern Indian; but these are always made of argillite, are ruder, are much weather-worn, and never occur in the "open-air workshops" of the Indians, where quantities of flint-flakes and unfinished implements of jasper and quartz and of superior pattern are found lying together within a limited space. These argillite points and scrapers seem to belong to the palæolithic man toward the end of his "age," manifesting a higher stage of culture reached by gradual improvement. It thus appears that while in Europe the rude-stone age was divided into two eras,—the River-drift and the Cave,—in Eastern America the aboriginal Eskimos held sway without interruption, and slowly bettered themselves through unnumbered centuries, until at last they were driven into icy exile by merciless conquerors, where, no doubt, they lost much of the advancement they had gained under more gracious conditions.
It will be observed that we were obliged to go to another part of the building in order to see what remains came from palæolithic Europe and make our comparisons. This is in accordance with the plan of the museum, which arranges its treasures according to locality, and not according to shape, utility, relative age, degree of finish, or any other style of classification. All the objects found in a particular spot—taken from one grave or a single shell-heap, or, in wider range, belonging to the same geographical region—are kept together, no matter how dissimilar the associated articles may be. Arrangement on any other plan must necessarily become to a greater or less extent the exponent of the views of the one man or clique that controls the matter,—must involve a theory, and hence prove an obstacle to the student who seeks an unbiassed interpretation of the truth. If it does nothing more, it destroys the proper perspective. For example, one of the cases in this museum contains the contents of graves opened in an Indian cemetery on Santa Catalina Island, California, comprising native work, mortars and pots of stone,—for no native pottery occurs in the Californian graves,—beads, flint arrow-heads, etc., together with Spanish swords, stirrups, glass, and other articles of European manufacture. Separate these associated articles,—put the arrow-heads and stone pots with a vast number of other arrow-heads and stone pots,—and there would have been nothing to show, except at the expense of long study, that their date of use was no older than the Spanish invasion of California, or, in the case of the iron-ware, that it had belonged to Indians who yet clung to many of their native customs and manufactures. Shown together as they were collected, one perceives at a glance, and the brain appreciates in true perspective, the picture of life on Santa Catalina Island when those graves were dug, perhaps three centuries ago. The importance and value of this plan become more and more apparent as the student advances. In the publications of the museum, and elsewhere, the curator draws such conclusions as seem to him just from the materials he possesses; but he regards it as due to the public that the specimens themselves shall be exhibited as found, for the verification of his explanations and the investigation of those who come afterward. The first and foremost object of this museum—as it should be of every such institution—is the preservation of historical evidence; the second, the making it accessible in its original aspect for study. Ornamental display, when in the least degree inconsistent with scientific uses, has no place in any of the rooms. Nothing is put up because it is pretty; and if the history of any specimen is at all doubtful, it is kept out of sight, or else its label contains the proper cautions and queries.
Having scanned the relics of that far-away time which seems to have preceded the coming even of the red men into the United States, let us now see what the museum has to show of the arts and industries and amusements of those "Indians" who were found in possession when Europeans came to the New World.
The whole continent was inhabited by what was substantially the same race of men, divided into many language-stocks, subdivided into a still greater number of more or less cohesive tribes, and segregated into innumerable bands or villages. As they varied in dialect, organization, and environment, so were they greatly diversified in mental accomplishments and in outward customs and belongings. In subordinate points the characteristics of some divisions contrasted most pointedly with those of others; yet in certain cardinal aspects the whole population known in historic times from Tierra del Fuego to Eskimo-land was a unit. All were red-skinned Americans, "tarred with the same stick."[1] Moreover, it has been supposed that no race other than these red men has ever permanently occupied any portion of the United States between the departure of the palæolithic Eskimos and the advent of Europeans,—the "Mound-Builders" not excepted.
To the prehistoric relics and the modern manufactures of these natives of America the Peabody Museum is chiefly devoted. The material preserved was obtained by its original collectors in a variety of ways. Much of it was gathered in farm-fields, where it had been turned up under the plough one piece at a time. All parts of the United States are represented, but some regions more plentifully than others, not only because one district may contain more persons interested in the matter, but because of the comparative scarcity of relics in some parts. One of the most densely populated districts in the whole Union in Indian life was the Atlantic slope of the Alleghanies; and the valleys of the fishing-rivers draining this slope have yielded an enormous quantity of examples of primitive wares, in the shape of architecture, pottery, weapons, tools, and ornaments of stone, shell, horn, and metal.
No one point, probably, has yielded more than the farm and immediate neighborhood of Dr. C. C. Abbott (heretofore referred to), at Trenton, New Jersey. This farm occupies a bluff and wide meadows facing the Delaware River. It was a location unexcelled in advantages for the mild-mannered, sunshine-loving Leni-Lenapé. On the dry high ground they could build their lodges underneath great trees and find themselves upon the highway of travel, while the rich bottom-lands gave them never-exhausted planting-ground for their fields of maize. Better than all, they could overlook not only these fields, but far away down the river, and scan the approach of strangers, or watch the approach of the returning parties of hunters and fishermen, whose canoes came up the creeks to moorings at the very foot of the bluff. That this spot was long tenanted by an Indian village there seems ample proof. Almost every species of Indian handiwork, in stone, bone, and clay, known to the Atlantic coast has been found in and about this farm during the past ten years, and the total yield of a square mile in that locality has been nearly twenty-five thousand specimens. The great majority of these are now in the Peabody Museum, and they have furnished Dr. Abbott with the material for our most valuable book on the stone age in North America, entitled "Primitive Industry" (George A. Bates, Salem, 1881). They consist of varied series of axes, celts, hammers, bolas, knives, drills, scrapers, mortars and pestles, food-vessels and agricultural tools, fishing- and hunting-implements, spear- and arrow-points, club-heads, daggers, and other weapons, pipes and gaming-stones, ceremonial and ornamental objects,—all of stone,—besides a deal of pottery (chiefly in fragments), bone-work, and implements of copper, probably procured from other tribes.
Then there is another source of supply,—the shell-heaps. It was the custom of all the aborigines who lived anywhere near the sea to go to the shore in summer—the whole band or a group of families together—and camp there for weeks or months. Certain spots were resorted to annually, just as we go year after year to our favorite sea-side hotel. The time there was spent chiefly in catching and eating salt-water food, and, most of all, oysters and clams. Our "clam-bake" is a survival of their feasts on the beach. Of course under such circumstances extended heaps of castaway shells and fish-bones would accumulate, and become of dimensions which seem extraordinary only when we forget the lapse of time since they were begun. Many objects, some castaway, some lost, would become intermixed with the loose surface shells and be rapidly buried beyond further disturbance. Thus an exploration of these heaps of refuse might be expected to disclose, and really does show, a great variety of indestructible indications of the people around whose summer-lodges they were formed,—how they lived, what they fed upon, and the degree of skill and culture to which they had attained. Scores of these shell-heaps from Maine to Texas have been excavated by private persons or by the agency of the museum, and the yield of each, however miscellaneous, is accessible to us. We may make out from the bones a list of the animals upon which the makers fed, we may tell from the stone implements how the men hunted and fished, from the awls, needles, skin-dressers, etc., of bone and horn with what skill the women worked, and largely what materials they used, while the bits of baked clay mark their position in the ceramic scale,—a well-accepted standard of progress. Nor are these things mixed and confused when deposited in the museum. All from each shell-heap are kept together, and specimens may thus be compared with one another all along the coast-line; or the visitor may go to another room, where the great Rose collection from Denmark is displayed, and compare them with the relics from the shell-heaps (Kjoëkken-mœdings) and village-sites of Jutland, where a parallel life was lived and the monuments of savage homesteads line the Baltic beaches.
Similarly the sites of villages, towns, and cities have contributed largely to this collection of native antiquities. This is especially true of the Southwest, of Central America, and the Andean region, where the Aztec, the Maya, the Quichuas, the Aymaras, and other highly-organized nations held sway over wide regions. The greatest remains of these people lie in their architecture, the ruins of which astonish the traveller in Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru. Beyond fragments of carving, this, of course, is unavailable to a museum; but beside the images and fragments of representative ornament engraved in stone that have been brought from these ruins hang pictures of the entire building or city, so that the visitor's memory is refreshed, and he is enabled to place the relics in their proper relation to the whole.
In regard to the remarkable remains of the ancient "cliff-dwellers," who inhabited the cañons along the south-western boundary of Colorado, and are considered the ancestors of the pueblo-building Indians whose terraced community-houses crown isolated buttes in the midst of the Arizona deserts and along the Rio Grande, a more effective mode of representation has been adopted. Upon several of the large hall-tables will be seen, under glass, models in plaster, colored with exactness, of those great houses and all their externals. These models were made by Messrs. Jackson and Holmes, of the United States Geological Survey, and are wonderfully truthful and instructive. A similar plan has been adopted in a few other cases to show savage architecture, and it has proved so effective and interesting that its use should be extended. The little model of a lacustrine village restored from the vestiges discovered in the Swiss lakes gives one a better notion of how the lake-dwellers really conducted their peaceful life and guarded themselves against their savage enemies of the forest and mountains than any amount of verbal description could do.
Beyond any one of these in importance as a source of mementos illustrating the life and art of the aborigines is the burial-place. Not only do well-recognized graves and cemeteries yield valuable material whenever explored, but a large part of that gathered in ploughed fields and on ancient town-sites was undoubtedly put there with the dead, or as a subsequent offering. Nothing is more fortunate for the science of archæology than that the primitive Americans held the notions they did respecting death and the hereafter; for through these theories and the practices to which they gave rise an enormous amount of material has been preserved to us which otherwise would have been lost. It is not too much to say, I feel sure, that were all other traces of prehistoric America obliterated from our knowledge and possession save that which has been and may be derived from burial-places, we might still reconstruct nearly as complete a picture as can now be outlined.