ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN THE UNITED STATES. volved, will deal only with the normal activities and social and economic life, etc., of the pre-Columbian aborigines of the United States (and certain parts of Canada) and their descendants, particularly with regard to their influence upon the civilization of their European supplanters. There is, perhaps, sufficient material of a reliable character now extant to justify a preface of this nature to a history of the United States and those other sections of North America necessarily belonging with it. For anthropological, ethnological, philological and other details concerning the aborigines, for which, obviously, no place can be found here, the reader may be referred to the author's monograph on the North American Indians in the last (eleventh) edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Antiquity of Man and of Human Civilization in the United States, Etc. As Professor W. H. Holmes has pointed out,* speculation as to the origin of the American Indians began with the general acceptance of the view of their comparatively recent derivation from some part of the Old World (e. g. from Asia, by way of Behring Straits), and this theory led sometimes to quite fantastic and impossible assumptions of the settlement or colonization of the New World by Egyptians, Carthaginians, *Handbook of American Indians, pt. i., p. 62. 66 57 the Lost Ten Tribes," Hindus, the Pueblo Indians, past and present, the Cliff-Dwellers, and all other possible occupants of the Southwest in pre-historic times fall far short of this; and all alleged discoveries of "Aztec cities" in the West must be dismissed as altogether fanciful. In pure intellect some of the Iroquoian tribes, among whom arose the great League, may have been the equals of the ancient Mexicans, Mayas, and Peruvians, but the institutions of their culture and the conditions of their progress toward "higher civilization" were of much less account. Nowhere north of the Rio Grande do we meet with anything like the approach to a syllabary or an alphabetic form of writing made by the Aztecs and the Mayas anterior to the Spanish conquest. Maize and tobacco, the two most important of the cultivated plants in pre-Columbian North America, must have been introduced as domesticated plants from the South. The shell, copper and pottery objects of the Southeast (including some of the so-called "Mound-Builders' " products), suggest influence from Mexico, the West Indies, etc.; but all this by way of occasional borrowing, and not as the result of direct colonization on the part of peoples of those regions. It is safe to say, considering the geological data as to topographical changes since his occupation of the country, the development of so great a diversity of languages, and so many local varieties of culture, that man has inhabited the United States and Canada for thousands of years. But all attempts to fix even an approximate date for his earliest appearance, above all, to establish a chronological scale of his development from " mere savagery " to "higher barbarism," as some term it, have, as yet, failed to make a lasting impression upon the best and most conscientious investigators of the problems involved. The famous "Nampa image," the "Calaveras skull," etc., are no longer looked upon as convincing evidence, and nearly all of the finds, depending for their value upon absolutely accurate geological verifications, fail also in that respect. Nor is the recently discovered" Lansing man" of Kansas any exception to the rule. One needs, as Professor Holmes well says more unimpeachable evidence to make one believe, as some of the relics exhibited would necessarily imply, that "man in America must have passed through the savage and well into the barbarous stage, while the hypothetical earliest representative of the human race in the Old World, Pithecanthropus erectus of Dubois, was still running wild in the forests of Java, a half-regenerate Simian." And this, within the limits of what is now the United States. Some evidence, however, there is (e. g. from the gravels of the Delaware Valley, what is probably the most convincing proof that has yet * *Handbook of American Indians, pt. i.. p. 61. INDIGENOUS ORIGIN OF INDIAN CULTURE. been obtained) for belief in the Glacial antiquity of man in certain regions of North America. Indigenous Origin of American Indian There is now common agreement among the most competent authorities that the culture of the American Indians, past and present, within the borders of the United States, etc., is of indigenous origin, and shows no effects of pre-Columbian influence from Asia or from Europe. In the far Northwest, a local "culturering," embracing the Behring Sea region and the coasts of both continents for a certain distance south, has been discovered as a result of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition organized by Dr. Boas, but there it is America that has influenced Asia, and not notably vice versa. In Greenland, of course, the ancient Norsemen exerted some little influence upon the Eskimo, but only for a time, and, in spite of beliefs to the contrary entertained in certain quarters, there is absolutely no convincing evidence of Norse or any other pre-Columbian European element in the culture of the American Indians of the United States or elsewhere. The latest Norse find, the "Kensington (Minn.) runestone," purporting to be the record of an exploring expedition from Vinland in the year 1362, has no more confirmative data behind it than the story of Leif's sojourn in Massachusetts. From the tribes of lowest 59 culture nothing in support of such views can be obtained, nor is the case at all different when one contemplates the greater material progress made in the Southeast, part of the Mississippi valley (the "Mound-Builders' " country), or the Southwest, the scene of the development of the Pueblos, the Cliff-Dwellers, etc. In no part of the country, likewise, to use the words of so competent an authority as Professor W. H. Holmes, " are there remains of man or his works clearly indicating the presence of peoples distinct from the Indian and the Eskimo, or having culture, markedly different in kind and degree from those characterizing the aborigines of historic times." It was believed at one time by many writers (and some still entertain this erroneous opinion) that the so-called " Mound-Builders " of the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf States were a people of different race and distinctly higher culture than the Indians, by whom they were driven out or exterminated. But careful explorations and scientific examinations of these mounds (burial, earthworks, effigy, building-sites, enclosures), including such structures as the Cahokia Mound (Illinois), the largest of all, the Elephant Mound in Wisconsin, the Etowah Mound in Georgia, the Grave Creek Mound (W. Va.), the Great Serpent Mound, and the works at Fort Ancient and Newark in Ohio,- have revealed nothing justifying such a belief. It is to the credit of the late Professor Cyrus Thomas to have made it clear that "the mound-builders were the ancestors of the Indians found inhabitating the same region by the first European explorers" and to have called marked attention to the fact, for which there is abundant evidence, that some of these structures were certainly erected in post-Columbian times, as the presence in them of articles of European manufacture of the colonizing epoch and the statements of De Soto and others as to the actual building and use of mounds, etc., in their day prove. Among the mound-building Indians are to be reckoned the Yuchis, Creeks, Chickasaws, Natchez, Quapaw, "Texas," Shawnees, Iroquois of New York, Cherokees (who built at least part of the Ohio mounds), and others. The contents of the mounds, exclusive of intrusive articles derived from the whites, have produced nothing indicating a much higher form of culture or a distinctly different mode of life and human activities of another order from that known to the Indians, past and present, of this area. Some of the shell-work and copper-plates suggest Southern influence (Mexico perhaps), but authorities like Cushing maintained that even these things could be accounted for by the use of methods not beyond the knowledge of the Indians of the region in question. In a word, the " great and unique civilization" of the "Mound-Builders" is a myth, and they resolve themselves into Indian tribes, whose culture did not transcend in kind or in degree the possibilities of their thoroughly American environment. Their antiquity has also been greatly exaggerated. Professor Thomas is, doubtless, correct in stating that 66 many of them were built a century or two before the appearance of the whites" and that few competent archæologists are inclined to date any of them before the beginning of the Christian era. The evidence derived from the examination of the extensive shell-heaps of Florida, according to Wyman and Moore, indicate a minimum antiquity of perhaps a thousand years; Ellis Landing shell-mound in San Francisco Bay in California is assigned by N. C. Nelson a probable age of from 3,000 to 4,000 years, about the period given by Dall for the earliest remains represented by the middens of the Aleutian Islands, but in none of these cases is there any evidence of non-Indian peoples or cultures. The same thing is true, when we come to consider the Pueblos Indians, Cliff-Dwellers, etc., of the Southwest, concerning whom some otherwise respectable authorities have been mislead into romancing a good deal. In the Pueblo country (the term "Pueblo " strictly refers to those Indians "who lived or are living in permanent stone or adobe houses built into compact villages"), we meet with a form of culture, differing in many respects from that found elsewhere, but as thoroughly Indian INDIGENOUS ORIGIN OF INDIAN CULTURE. as any other, and, as Dr. Fewkes has shown, particularly in his study of the Hopi (Moqui), in remarkable fashion exemplifying the effects of the arid environment in the midst of which it now exists. The ancient domains of these Indians seem to have been much more extensive, and their culture in part of the territory must have closely resembled that of the northern Aztecan peoples, from whom, or by way of whom, certain Mexican-like aspects of Pueblo civilization may be accounted for, if we do not assume a certain unity of the culture of both regions and a possible identity of original stimulus. It is an interesting fact, to be remembered here, that the present population of the Pueblos includes Indians belonging to at least four distinct linguistic stocks — Tanoan, Keresan, Shoshonian, and Zuñian. This would, of itself, suggest the development here of a somewhat higher form of culture. A number of the Pueblo-sites has been abandoned since the coming of the Spaniards, but many others long before then. There has evidently been considerable migration in this region in prehistoric times. There has also been evolution from lower to higher forms of culture, but as Professor E. L. Hewett has remarked, "the time-element in this process has been by no means constant." In the Pueblos-culture itself (material products, agriculture, sociology, mythology, religion, etc.) there is nothing that fails of explanation, even in pre 61 historic times, by reference to the |