The animal mounds had been indeed earlier mentioned, and the great serpent mound of Ohio had long attracted attention; but it was in the territory now known as Wisconsin that these mounds were found chiefly to abound. Long, in 1823, speaks of mounds in this region; but the forest coverings seem to have prevented any observer detecting their shapes till Lapham first noted this peculiarity in 1836. In April, 1838, R. C. Taylor was the earliest to figure them in the Amer. Journal of Science (Silliman’s), and again they were described by S. Taylor in Ibid., 1842. Prof. John Locke referred to them in a Report on the mineral lands of the United States, made to Congress in 1844. William Pidgeon, who had been a trader among the Indians, published in his Traditions of De-coo-dah, and Antiquarian researches: comprising extensive exploration, surveys and excavations of the Mound Builders in America; the traditions of the last Prophet of the Elk Nation, relative to their origin and use, and the evidences of an ancient population more numerous than the present Aborigines (N. Y., 1853; again 1858) what he pretended was in large part the results of his intercourse with an Indian chief, involving some theories as to the symbolism of the mounds. The book contained so many palpable perversions, not to say undisguised fictions, that the Smithsonian Institution refused to publish it;[1726] and the book has never gained any credit, though some unguarded writers have unwittingly borrowed from it.[1727]

In the eighth volume of the Smithsonian Contributions,[1728] Haven, the librarian of the Amer. Antiq. Soc., summed up the results of mound exploration as they then stood. The steady and circumspect habit of Haven’s mind was conspicuous in his treatment of the mounds. It is to him that the later advocates of the identity of their builders with the race of the red Indians look as the first sensibly to affect public opinion in the matter.[1729] He argued against their being a more advanced race (p. 154), and in his Report of the Am. Antiq. Soc., in 1877 (p. 37), he held that it might yet be proved that the moundbuilders and red Indians were one in race, as M’Culloh had already suggested.

At the time when Haven was first intimating (1856) that this view might yet become accepted, it was doubtless held to be best established that those who built the mounds were quite another race from those who lived among them when Europeans first knew the country. The fact that the Indians had no tradition of their origin was held to be almost conclusive, though it is alleged that the southern Indians in later times retained no recollections of the expedition of De Soto, and Dr. Brinton thinks that it is common for Indian traditions to die out.[1730] It is not till recent years that any considerable number of moundbuilder skulls have been known, and from the scant data which the early craniologists had, their opinion seems to have coincided with those in favor of a vanished race.[1731] It was a favorite theory, not yet wholly departed, that they were in some way connected with the more southern peoples, the Pueblo Indians, the Aztecs, or the Peruvians; either that they came from them, or migrated south and became one with them.[1732] The bolder theory, that we see their descendants in the red Indians, is perhaps gaining ground, and it has had the support of the Bureau of Ethnology and some able expounders.[1733]

Of the opposing theory of a disappeared race, Capt. Heart in reply to Barton (Amer. Philolog. Asso. Proc. iii.) gave, as Thomas thinks, “the earliest clear and distinct expression,” but Squier and Davis may be considered as first giving it definite meaning; and though Squier does not seem to have actually revoked this judgment as respects the mounds in the Mississippi valley, he finally reached the conclusion that those in New York were really the work of the Iroquois.[1734] This ancient-race theory, sometimes amounting to a belief in their autochthonous origin, has impressed the public through some of the best known summaries of American antiquities, like those of Baldwin, Wilson, and Short,[1735] and has been adopted by men of such reputation as Lyell.[1736] The position taken by Professor F. W. Putnam, the curator of the Peabody Museum of Archæology at Cambridge, is much like that taken earlier by Warden in his Recherches, that both views are, within their own limitations, correct, and, as Putnam expresses it, “that many Indian tribes built mounds and earthworks is beyond doubt; but that all the mounds and earthworks of North America are by these same tribes, or their immediate ancestors, is not thereby proved.”[1737] Thomas (Fifth Report, Bureau Ethnol.) holds this statement to be too vague. It is certainly shown in the whole history of archæological study that uncompromising demarcations have sooner or later to be abandoned.

Morgan finds it difficult to dissociate the mounds with his favorite theory of communal life.[1738] There is no readier way of marking the development of opinion on this question than to follow the series of the Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, as hardly a year has passed since 1861 but these Reports have had in them contributions on the subject.[1739] Among periodicals, the more constant attention to the mounds is conspicuous in the American Antiquarian.[1740]

The basis for estimating the age of the mounds is threefold. In the first place, there are very few found on the last of the river terraces to be reclaimed from the stream. In the second place, the decay of the skeletons found in them can be taken as of some indication, if due regard be had to the kind of earth in which they are buried. Third, the age of trees upon them has been accepted as carrying them back a certain period, at least, though this may widely vary, if you assume their growth to be subsequent to the abandonment of the mounds, or if, as Brinton holds,[1741] the trees were planted immediately upon the building. The dependence upon counting the rings is by no means a settled opinion as to all climes; but in the temperate zone the best authorities place dependence upon it. Unfortunately it cannot carry us back much over 600 years.[1742]

The early attempts to disclose the ethnological relations of the moundbuilders on cranial evidence were embarrassed by the fewness of the skulls then known. Morton (Crania Americana) called the four examined by him identical with those of the red Indian.[1743] At present, considerable numbers are available; but still Wilson (Prehistoric Man, ii. 128) holds that “we lack sufficient data,” and in the consideration of them sufficient care has not always been taken to distinguish intrusive burials of a later date.[1744]

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.

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]

It was, however, in Ohio that the interest in these mounds was first incited, and that the more thorough exploration has been made.[1754] The earliest pioneers reported upon them. Cutler described them in 1789 in a letter to Jeremy Belknap.[1755] Benj. S. Barton described a mound at Cincinnati in 1799.[1756] Dr. Harris in 1805 was seemingly the earliest traveller to note them in Journal of a Tour, where he gives one of the earliest engravings. A plan of those at Circleville, with description by J. Kilbourne, is given in the Ohio Gazetteer (Columbus, 1817). Caleb Atwater, in 1820, was more familiar with them than with others of his broader field. Warden in his Recherches noted the early describers. Gen. Harrison discussed the mounds in his Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio (Cincinnati, 1838). Squier and Davis, of course, brought them within their range,[1757] and Col. Whittlesey supplemented their work in the third volume of the Smithsonian Contributions. Whittlesey and Matthew C. Read contributed the Report on the Archæology of Ohio, which forms the second portion of the Final Report of the Ohio State Board of Centennial Managers (Columbus, 1877), and in it is a list of the ancient enclosures, which is not, as Short says (p. 82), as complete as it should be. A survey of the mounds was made by E. B. Andrews, and published in the Peabody Mus. Repts. (no. x.), 1877. The Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society started in June, 1887, the Ohio archæological and historical Quarterly, which has vigorously entered the field, and in it (March, 1888) G. F. Wright has reported on the present condition of the mounds. M. C. Read’s Archæology of Ohio (Cleveland, 1888) was published by the Western Reserve Historical Society, whose series of Tracts is of importance for the study of the mounds.[1758] Henry A. Shepard’s Antiquities of the State of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1887) summarizes the discoveries to date.[1759] Thomas (Fifth Rept. Bur. Ethnol.) claims that the Ohio mounds were built by Indians, but not by the Indians, nor by the ancestors of them, who inhabited this region at the coming of the whites; but by an Indian race driven south, of whom he finds the modern representatives in the Cherokees.

The works at Marietta, on the Muskingum River, were the earliest observed. Taking the southern and southeastern counties, there are no very conspicuous examples elsewhere, though the region is well dotted with earthworks.[1760] Those at Cincinnati were, after those at Marietta, the earliest to be noticed.[1761] The adjacent Little Miami Valley is the region which Professor Putnam and Dr. Metz have been of late so successfully working.[1762]

Of all the works in the central portions of Ohio, and indeed of all in any region, those at Newark, in Licking County, are the most extensive, and have been often described.[1763] In the east[1764] and west[1765] there are other of these earthworks; but those in the north have been particularly examined by Col. Whittlesey and others.[1766] The enclosure called Fort Azatlan, at Merom on the Wabash River, is the most noticeable in Indiana.[1767] In Illinois, the great Cahokia truncated pyramid, 700 feet long by 500 wide and 90 high, is the most important.[1768]

Henry Gillman, of Detroit, has been the leading writer on the mounds of Michigan.[1769] The supposed connection of their builders with the ancient copper mines of Lake Superior is considered in another place. Thomas (Fifth Rept., Bur. Ethnol.) contends that much of the copper found in the mounds was of European make, and had no relation to any aboriginal mining.

Wisconsin is the central region of what are known as the animal, effigy, symbolic, or emblematic mounds. Mention has been made elsewhere of the earliest notices of this kind of earthwork. The most extensive examination of them is the Antiquities of Wisconsin as surveyed and described by I. A. Lapham (Washington, 1855), with a map showing the sites.[1770] The consideration of these effigy mounds has given rise to various theories regarding their significance, whether as symbols or to totems.[1771] It is Thomas’s conclusion that the effigy mounds and the burial mounds of Wisconsin were the work of the same people (Fifth Rept., Bur. Ethnol.).

The existence of what is called an elephant or mastodon mound in Grant County has been sometimes taken to point to the age of those extinct animals as that of the erection of the mounds.[1772] Putnam, referring to the confined area in which these effigy mounds are found, says that the serpent mound, the alligator mound,[1773] and Whittlesey’s effigy mound in Ohio, and two bird mounds in Georgia,[1774] are the only other works in North America to which they are at all comparable.[1775]

When Lewis and Clark explored the Missouri River in 1804-6, they discovered mounds in different parts of its valley; but their statements were not altogether confirmed till the parties of the United States surveyors traversed the region after the civil war, as is particularly shown in Hayden’s Geological Survey, 6th Rept., in 1872. Within the present State of Missouri the mounds which have attracted most notice are those near the modern St. Louis.[1776] In Iowa (Clayton County) there is said to be the largest group of effigy mounds west of the Mississippi.[1777] The mounds of Iowa and the neighboring region are also discussed by Thomas in the Fifth Rept. Bur. Ethnol. O. H. Kelley has reported on the remains of an ancient town in Minnesota.[1778] In Kansas there is little noticeable,[1779] and there is not much to record in Dacotah,[1780] Utah,[1781] California,[1782] and Montana.[1783] We find scant accounts of the mounds in Oregon and Washington in the narrative of the Wilkes Exploring Expedition and in the earlier story of Lewis and Clark. Some of the mounds are of doubtful artificiality.[1784]

Along the lower portion of the Mississippi, but not within three hundred miles of its mouth, we find in Louisiana other mound constructions, but not of unusual significance.[1785]

The first effigy mound, a bear, which was observed south of the Ohio, is near an old earthwork in Greenup County, Kentucky.[1786] The mounds of this State early attracted notice.[1787] Bishop Madison[1788] thought them sepulchral rather than military. In the Western Review (Dec., 1819) one was described near Lexington. Rafinesque added a not very sane account of them to Marshall’s History of Kentucky, in 1824, which was also published separately, and since then all the general histories of Kentucky have given some attention to these antiquities.[1789]

In Tennessee we find in connection with the earthworks the stone graves, which the explorations of Putnam, about ten years ago, brought into prominence.[1790] The chief student of the aboriginal mounds in Georgia has been Col. C. C. Jones, Jr., who has been writing on the subject for nearly forty years.[1791] The mounds in the State of Mississippi, as including the region of the Natchez Indians, derive some added interest because of the connection sometimes supposed to exist between them and the race of the mounds.[1792] The same characteristics of the mounds extend into Alabama.[1793] The mounds in Florida attracted the early notice of John and William Bartram, and are described by them in their Travels, and have been dwelt upon by later writers.[1794] The seaboard above Georgia has not much of interest.[1795] Concerning the mounds along the Canadian belt there is hardly more to be said.[1796]

Lubbock classes the signs of successive periods in North America thus: original barbarism, mounds, garden beds, and then the relapse into barbarism of the red Indian. The agricultural age thus follows that of the mound erection, in his view, though, as Putnam says, there seems enough evidence that the constructors of the old earthworks were an agricultural race.[1797]

There is another class of relics which, outside the hieroglyphics of Central America, has as yet had little comprehensive study, though the general books on American archæology enumerate some of the inscriptions on rocks, which are so widely scattered throughout the continent.[1798]

Out of all this discussion has risen the new science of Anthropology, broad enough in its scope to include not only archæology in its general acceptation, but to sweep into its range of observation various aspects of ethnology and of geology. It is a new science as at present formulated; but under other conditions it is traced from its origin with the ancients in a paper by T. Bendyshe in the Memoirs of the Anthropological Society of London (vol. i. 335). Its progress in America is treated by O. T. Mason in the American Naturalist (xiv. 348; xv. 616). The most approved methods of modern research are explained in Emil Schmidt’s Anthropologische Methoden; Anleitung zum beobachten und sammeln für Laboratorium und Reise (Leipzig, 1888). “The methods of archæological investigation are as trustworthy as those of any natural science,” says Lubbock (Scientific Lectures, 139). Beside the publications of the various Archæological, Anthropological, and Ethnological Societies and Congresses[1799] of both hemispheres, we find for Europe a considerable centre of information in the Materiaux pour l’histoire primitive et naturelle (philosophique) de l’homme,[1800] and for America in the publications of the Smithsonian Institution,[1801] in the Comptes rendus of the successive Congresses of Américanistes, and in such periodicals as the American Antiquarian, the American Anthropologist, and the Folk Lore Journal.

The broad subject of prehistoric archæology is covered in a paper by Lubbock, which is included in his Scientific Lectures (Lond., 1879);[1802] in H. M. Westropp’s Prehistoric Phases, or Introductory Essays on Prehistoric Archæology (Lond., 1872); in Stevens’s Flint Chips (1870); by Dr. Brinton in the Iconographic Encyclopædia, vol. ii.; and more popularly in Charles F. Keary’s Dawn of History, an introd. to prehistoric study (N. Y., 1879), and in Davenport Adams’s Beneath the Surface, or the Underground World.

The French have contributed a corresponding literature in Louis Figuier’s L’Homme Primitif (Paris, 1870);[1803] in Zaborowski’s L’homme préhistorique (Paris, 1878); and in the Marquis de Nadaillac’s Les premiers hommes et les temps préhistoriques (Paris, 1881), and his Mœurs et monuments des peuples préhistoriques (Paris, 1888), not to mention others.[1804]

The principal comprehensive works covering the prehistoric period in North America, are J. T. Short’s North Americans of Antiquity (N. Y., 1879, and later); the L’Amérique préhistorique of Nadaillac (Paris, 1883);[1805] Foster’s Prehistoric Races of the United States (Chicago, 1873; 6th ed., 1887); and the compact popular Ancient America (N. Y., 1871) of John D. Baldwin. Beside Bancroft’s Native Races, there are various treatises of confined nominal scope, but covering in some degree the whole North American field, which are noted in other pages.[1806]

The purely ethnological aspects of the American side of the subject are summarily surveyed in A. H. Keane’s “Ethnology of America,” appended to Stanford’s Compendium of Geography, Cent. America, etc. (London, 2nd ed., 1882), and there are papers on Ethnographical Collections in the Smithsonian Report (1862).[1807] The great repository of material, however, is in the Contributions to North American Ethnology, being a section of Major Powell’s Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, and in the Annual Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology since 1879, made under Major Powell’s directions, and in the Reports of the Peabody Museum.[1808]

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APPENDIX.

I.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ABORIGINAL AMERICA.

By the Editor.

The student will find a general survey of “Les Sources de l’histoire anté-Colombienne du nouveau monde, par Léon de Rosny,” in the Revue Orientale et Américaine (Mém. de la soc. d’ethnographie) session de 1877 (p. 139). Bancroft in his Native Races (v. 136) makes a similar grouping of the classes of sources relating to the primitive Americans.[1809] These classes are defined in Daniel G. Brinton’s Review of the data for the study of the prehistoric chronology of America (Salem, 1887), from the Proceedings of the Amer. Asso. for the Advancement of Science (vol. xxxvi.), as conveniently divided into groups pertaining to legendary, monumental, industrial, linguistic, physical, and geological phenomena.

There have been given in the Introduction of the present volume the titles of general bibliographies of American histories, most of which include more or less of the titles pertaining to aboriginal times. It is the purpose of the present brief essay to enumerate, in an approximately chronological order, the titles of some of those and of others which are useful to the archæologist. So far as they are of service to the student of the American languages, an extended list will be found prefixed to Pilling’s Proof-Sheets (p. xi).

The earliest American bibliography was that of Antonio de Leon, usually called Pinelo,—Epitome de la Biblioteca oriental y occidental náutica y Geográfica (Madrid, 1629),—but which is usually found in the edition of Gonzales de Barcía, “Añadido y enmendado nuevamente” (Paris, 1737-1738), in which the American titles, including numerous manuscripts, are given in the second volume.[1810]

The Bibliotheca Hispana Nova of Nicolás Antonio was first published at Rome in 1672, but in a second edition at Madrid in 1783-88.[1811]

Passing by the Bibliotheca Mexicana of Eguiara y Eguren,[1812] and the early edition of Beristain, we note the new edition of the latter, prepared not by Juan Evangelista Guadalajara, as Brasseur notes,[1813] but by another, as the title shows,—Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrional, ó catalogo y noticia de los Literatos que ó nacidos, ó educados, ó florecientes en la America Septentrional Española, han dado á luz algun escrito ó lo han dexado preparado para la prensa por José Mariano Beristain y Martin de Souza. Segunda edicion, por Fortino Hipólito Vera (Amecameca, 1883).

Dr. Robertson intimates that the lists of books which writers of the seventeenth century had been in the habit of prefixing to their books as evidence of their industry had come to be regarded as an ostentatious expression of their learning, and with some hesitancy he counted out to the reader his 717 titles; but Clavigero, as elsewhere pointed out,[1814] was richer in such resources. Humboldt, in his Vues,[1815] gives a list of the authors which he cites.

The class of dealers’ catalogues—we cite only such as have decided bibliographical value—begins to be conspicuous in Paul Trömel’s Bibliothèque Américaine (Leipzig, 1861), the best of the German ones, and in Charles Leclerc’s Bibliotheca Americana (Paris, 1867), much improved in his Bibliotheca Americana. Histoire, géographie, voyages, archéologie et linguistique des deux Amériques et des îles Philippines (Paris, 1878), with later supplements, constituting the best of the French catalogues, provided with an excellent index and a linguistic table, rendered necessary by the classified plan of the list.

The list formed by students in this field begins with the Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima of Harrisse (New York, 1866; additions, Paris, 1872), and includes the Bibliothèque Mexico-Guatémalienne, précédée d’un coup d’œil sur les études américaines dans leurs rapports avec les études classiques, et suivie du tableau, par ordre alphabétique, des ouvrages de linguistique Américaine contenus dans le même volume (Paris, 1871) of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who at that time had been twenty-five years engaged in the studies and travels which led to the gathering of his collection. The library, almost entire, was later joined to that of Alphonse L. Pinart, and was included in the latter’s Catalogue de livres rares et précieux, manuscrits et imprimés (Paris, 1883).

In 1866, Icazbalceta published at Mexico his Apuntes para un Catálogo de Escritores en lenguas indígenas de América,[1816] but of his great bibliographical work only one volume has as yet appeared: Bibliografía Américana del Siglo xvi. Primera parte. Catálogo razonado de libros impresos en México de 1539 à 1600, con biografías de autores y otras ilustraciones, precedido de una noticia acerca de la introducción de la imprenta en México (México, 1886).

Bandelier has embodied some of the results of his study in his “Notes on the Bibliography of Yucatan and Central America,” in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., i. pp. 82-118.

The catalogues of collections having special reference to aboriginal America are the following:—

Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de José Maria Andrade, 7,000 pièces et volumes, ayant rapport au Méxique ou imprimés dans ce pays (Leipzig, 1869).[1817]

Bibliotheca Mejicana: Books and manuscripts almost wholly relating to the history and literature of North and South America, particularly Mexico (London, 1869). This collection was formed by Augustin Fischer, chaplain to the Emperor Maximilian; but there were added to the catalogue some titles from the collection of Dr. C. H. Berendt.

Catalogue of the library of E. G. Squier, edited by Joseph Sabin (N. Y., 1876).

Bibliotheca Mexicana, or A Catalogue of the library of the rare books and important MSS. relating to Mexico and other parts of Spanish America, formed by the late Señor Don José Fernando Ramirez (London, 1880). This catalogue was edited by the Abbé Fischer.[1818]

The most useful guides to the literature of aboriginal America, however, are some compiled in this country. First, the comprehensive though not yet complete bibliography, Joseph Sabin’s Dictionary of books relating to America, now being continued since Sabin’s death, and with much skill, by Wilberforce Eames. Second, the voluminous Proof-sheets of a Bibliography of the languages of the North American Indians (Washington, 1885), prepared by James Constantine Pilling, tentatively, in a large quarto volume, distributed only to collaborators, and out of which, with emendations and additions, he is now publishing special sections of it, of which have already appeared those relating to the Eskimo and Siouan tongues. His enumeration so much exceeds the range of purely linguistic monographs that the treatises become in effect general bibliographies of aboriginal America.

Third, An Essay towards an Indian bibliography, being a Catalogue of books relating to the history, antiquities, languages, customs, religion, wars, literature and origin of the American Indians, in the library of Thos. W. Field, with bibliographical and historical notes and synopses of the contents of some of the works least known (N. Y., 1873). The sale of Mr. Field’s library took place in New York, May, 1875, from a Catalogue not so elaborate, but still of use. These books are not so accurately compiled as to be wholly trustworthy as final resorts.

Finally, the list prefixed to Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. i., and the references of his foot-notes, throughout his five volumes (condensed often in Short’s North Americans of Antiquity), are on the whole the most serviceable aids to the general student, but unfortunately the index of the set is of no use in searching for bibliographical detail.

The reader will remember that the bibliographies of sectional or partial import in the field of American archæology are referred to elsewhere in the present volume.

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II.

THE COMPREHENSIVE TREATISES ON AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES.

By the Editor.

At the time when Bancroft published his Native Races (1875), he referred to John D. Baldwin’s Ancient America (N. Y., 1871) as the only preceding, comprehensive book on America before the Spaniards.[1819] It still remains a convenient book of small compass; but its absence of references to sources precludes its usefulness for purposes of study, and it is not altogether abreast of the latest views. To the popular element a moderate share of the indexical character, rendering the book passably serviceable to the average reader, has been added in the somewhat larger North Americans of Antiquity, their origin, migrations, and type of civilization considered, by John T. Short (N. Y., 1880,—somewhat improved in later editions), though it will be observed that the Peruvian and other South American antiquities have not come within his plan. The latest of these comprehensive books is the Marquis de Nadaillac’s (Jean F. A. du Pouget’s) L’Amérique préhistorique (Paris, 1883), which in an English version by N. D’Anvers was published with the author’s sanction in London in 1882. With revision and some modifications by W. H. Dall, which have not met the author’s sanction, it was republished as Prehistoric America (N. Y., 1884). It is a work of more theoretical tendency than the student wishes to find at the opening stage of his inquiry.

But as a compend of every department of archæological knowledge up to about fifteen years ago no advance has yet been made upon Bancroft’s Native Races as indicative of every channel of investigation which the student can pursue. Upon the monuments of the moundbuilders (iv. ch. 13) and the antiquities of Peru (iv. ch. 14) the treatment is condensed and without references, as occupying a field beyond his primary purpose of covering the Pacific slope of North America and the immediately adjacent regions. Mention is made elsewhere of Bancroft’s methods of compilation, and it may suffice to say that in the five volumes of his Native Races he has drawn and condensed his matter from the writings of about 1200 writers, whose titles he gives in a preliminary list.[1820] The method of arranging the departments of the work is perhaps too far geographical to be always satisfactory to the special student,[1821] and he seems to be aware of it (for instance, i. ch. 2); but it may be questioned if, while writing with, or engrafting upon, an encyclopædic system, what might pass for a continuous narrative, any more scientific plan would have been more successful. Bancroft’s opinions are not always as satisfactory as his material. The student who uses the Native Races for its groups and references will accordingly find a complemental service in Sir Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man (London, 1876), in which the Toronto professor conducts his “researches into the origin of civilization in the old and the new world,” by primarily treating of the early American man, as the readiest way of understanding early man in Europe. His system is to connect man’s development topically in the directions induced by his habits, industries, dwellings, art, records, migrations, and physical characterizations.

Another and older book, in some respects embodying like purposes, and though produced at a time when archæological studies were much less advanced than at present, is Alexander W. Bradford’s American Antiquities and researches into the origin and history of the red race (N. Y., 1841).[1822] The first section of the book is strictly a record of results; but in the final portion the author indulges more in speculative inquiry. Even in this he has not transcended the bounds of legitimate hypothesis, though some of his postulates will hardly be accepted nowadays, as when he contends that the red Indians are the degraded descendants of the people who were connected with the so-called civilization of Central America.[1823]

The periodical literature of a comprehensive sort is not so extensive as treatments of special aspects; but the student will find Poole’s Index and Rhee’s Catalogue and Index of the Smithsonian publications serviceable.

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III.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE INDUSTRIES AND TRADE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES.

By the Editor.

While we have a moderate list of works on the general subject of prehistoric art and industries,[1824] we lack any comprehensive survey of the subject as respects the American continent, and must depend on sectional and local treatment. Humboldt in the introduction to his Atlas of his Essai politique (Paris, 1813) was among the earliest to grasp the material which illustrates the origin and first progress of the arts in America. The arts of the southern regions and western coasts of North America are best followed in those portions of the chapters on the Wild Tribes, devoted to the subject, which make up the first volume of Bancroft’s Native Races,[1825] and for Mexican and Maya productions some chapters (ch. 15, 24) in the second volume. Prescott’s treatment of the more advanced peoples of this region is scant (Mexico, i., introd., ch. 5). The art in stone of the Pueblo Indians is beautifully illustrated in Putnam’s portion of Wheeler’s Report of his survey, and comparison may be made with Hayden’s Annual Rept. (1876) of the U. S. Geol. and Geographical Survey. The work of Putnam and his collaborators in the archæological volume (vii.) of Wheeler’s Survey is probably the most complete account of the implements, ornaments and utensils of any one people (those of Southern California) yet produced; and its illustrations have not been surpassed. Passing north, we shall get some help from E. L. Berthoud’s paper on the “Prehistoric human art from Wyoming and Colorado,” in his “Journal of a reconnaissance in Creek Valley, Col.,” published by the Colorado Acad. of Nat. Sciences (Proceedings, 1872, p. 46). In the Pacific Rail Road Reports (vol. iii. in 1856) there is a paper by Thomas Ewbank in “Illustrations of Indian antiquities and arts.” S. S. Haldeman has described the relics of human industry found in a rock shelter in southeastern Pennsylvania (Compte Rendu, Cong. des Amér., Luxembourg, ii. 319; and Transactions Amer. Philos. Soc., 1878). The best of all the more comprehensive monographs is Charles C. Abbott’s Primitive industry: or illustrations of the handiwork, in stone, bone and clay, of the native races of the Northern Atlantic seaboard of America (Salem, 1881). Morgan’s League of the Iroquois touches in some measure of the arts of that confederacy, his earliest study being in the Fifth Report of the Regents of the State of New York (1852).

For the Canada regions, the Annual Reports of the Canadian Institute, appended to the Reports of the Minister of Education, Ontario, contain accounts of the discovery of objects of stone, horn, and shell. (See particularly the sessions of 1886-87.) Dawson in his Fossil men (ch. 6) considers what he accounts the lost arts of the primitive races of North America. On the other hand, Professor Leidy found still in use among the present Shoshones split pebbles resembling the rudest stone implements of the palæolithic period (U. S. Geological Survey, 1872, p. 652).

Many archæologists have remarked on the uniform character of many prehistoric implements, wherever found, as precluding their being held as ethnical evidences. The system of quarrying[1826] for flint best fitted for the tool-maker’s art has been observed by Wilson (Prehistoric man, i. 68) both in the old and new world, and in his third chapter (vol. i.) we have a treatise on the ancient stone-worker’s art.[1827]

Treating the subject topically, we find the late Charles Rau making some special studies of the implements used in native agriculture[1828] in the Smithsonian Reports for 1863, 1868, and 1869.[1829] The agriculture of the Aztecs and Mayas is treated in Max Steffen’s Die Landwirtschaft bei den altamerikanischen Kulturvölkern (Leipzig, 1883).[1830]

The working of flint or obsidian into arrowpoints or cutting implements is a process by pressure that has not been wholly lost. Old workshops, or the chips of them, have been discovered, and they are found in numerous localities (Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 75, 79; Abbott’s Primitive Industry, and Putnam in the Bull. Essex Institute), but Powell in his Report of Explorations of the Colorado of the West (1873) does not, as Wilson says he does, describe the present ways.[1831]

Wilson (Prehistoric Man, i. ch. 4 and 7) in an essay on the bone and ivory workers substitutes for the corresponding words usually employed in classifying stone implements the terms palæotechnic and neotechnic, as indicating periods of progress, in order that the art of making tools in horn, bone, shell, and ivory might have a better recognition, as of equal importance with that of making such in stone. Separate treatises are few. Morgan has a paper on the bone implements of the Arickarees in the 21st Rept. of the Regents of the University of the State of N. Y. (1871), and Rau’s monograph on Prehistoric fishing in Europe and North America, one of the Smithsonian Contributions (1884), involves the making of fish-hooks of bone. See also Putnam in the Peabody Museum Reports, and in Wheeler’s Survey, vol. vii.; Wyman’s contributions on the shell heaps, and the Journal of the Cincinnati Soc. of Nat. Hist. for such as have been found in the ash-pits of Madisonville. On shell-work there is a section in Foster’s Prehistoric Races (p. 234); a paper by W. H. Holmes in the Second Rept. of the Bureau of Ethnology (p. 179); and one on American shell-work and its affinities by Miss Buckland in the Journal Anthropol. Inst., xvi. 155.

From the primitive materials of stone, bone, horn, or shell, we pass to metals; but as Wilson (i. p. 174) says, “if metal could be found capable of being wrought and fashioned without smelting or moulding, its use was perfectly compatible with the simple arts of the stone period, as a mere malleable stone;” and to the present day, he adds, the rude American race has no knowledge of working metal, except by pounding or grinding it cold.[1832] The story which Brereton tells in his account of Gosnold’s visit (1602) to New England, about the finding of abundant metal implements in use among the natives, is questioned (Baldwin’s Ancient America, p. 62). We have the evidences of the early mining[1833] of copper extending for over a hundred miles along the southern shores of Lake Superior and on Isle Royale, in the abandoned trenches and tools first discovered in 1847; and in one case there was found a mass of native copper (ten feet by three and two, and weighing over six tons) which had been elevated on a wooden frame prior to removal, and was discovered in this condition.[1834] There are also indications that the manufacture of copper tools was carried on in the neighborhood of the mines (Wilson, i. 213); and chemical tests have shown that a popular belief in the tempering of metal by these early peoples is without foundation.[1835]

It seems to be a fact that while in the use of metals an intermediate stage of pure copper, as coming between the use of bone and stone and the use of alloyed metals, was not until comparatively recently suspected in Great Britain, the “peculiar interest attaches to the metallurgy of the new world that there all the earlier stages are clearly defined: the pure native metal wrought by the hammer without the aid of fire; the melted and moulded copper; the alloyed bronze; and the smelting, soldering, graving, and other processes resulting from accumulating experience and matured skill” (Wilson, i. 230). It is in the regions extending from Mexico to Peru that the art of alloying introduces us to the American bronze age. Columbus in his fourth voyage found in a vessel which had come alongside from Yucatan crucibles to melt copper, as Herrera tells us; and Humboldt was among the earliest to discover tools alloyed of copper and tin, and many such alloys have since been recognized among Peruvian bronzes (Wilson, i. 239). In Mexico, metallurgic arts were carried perhaps even farther in casting and engraving, and not only the results but the evidences of their mining places have remained to our day (Ibid. i. 248). It seems evident, however, that experimenting with them had not carried them so near the perfect combination for tool-making (one part tin to nine parts copper) as the bronze people of Europe had reached, though they fell considerably short of the exact standard (Ibid. i. 234). Doubt has sometimes been expressed of Mexican mining for copper, as by Frederick von Hellwald (Compte Rendu, Cong. des Américanistes, 1877, i. 51); but Rau indicated the references[1836] to Short (p. 94), which forcibly led him to the conclusion that the Mexicans mined copper to turn into tools.[1837] Among the Mayas, Nadaillac (p. 269) contends that only copper and gold were in use. Bancroft (ii. 749) thinks the use of copper doubtful, and if used, that it must have been got from the north. He cites the evidences of the use of gold. William H. Holmes discusses The use of gold and other metals among the ancient inhabitants of Chiriqui, Isthmus of Darien (Washington, 1887). As to iron, that found in the Ohio mounds, only of late years, has been proved to be meteoric iron by Professor Putnam (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Apr., 1883). Bancroft (i. 164) says iron was in use among the British Columbian tribes before contact with the whites, but it was probably derived through some indirect means from the whites. Though iron ore abounds in Peru, and the character of the Peruvian stone-cutting would seem to indicate its use, and though there is a native word for it, no iron implements have been found.[1838] There is not much recorded of the use of silver. It has been found by Putnam in the mounds in thin sheets, used as plating for other metals.[1839] He has also found native silver in masses, and in one case a small bit of hammered gold.

Wilson, in 1876, while regretting the dispersion of the William Bullock collection of pottery, the destruction of that formed by Stephens and Catherwood, and the transference to an English museum of most of the specimens gathered by Squier and Davis, lamented that no American collection[1840] had been yet formed adequate to the requirements of the students of American archæology and ethnology. Since that date, however, the collections in the National Museum (Smithsonian Institution) at Washington and in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge have largely grown; and especially for the fictile art and work in stone of Spanish North America the Museo Nacional in Mexico has assumed importance. The collection in the possession of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia,[1841] since transferred to the Philadelphia Academy, is also of value for the study of the pottery of middle America.

Rau has supplied a leading paper on American pottery in the Smithsonian Report, 1866; and E. A. Barber has touched the subject in papers at the Copenhagen, Luxembourg, and Madrid meetings of the Congrès des Américanistes, and in the American Antiquarian (viii. 76).[1842] W. H. Holmes has a paper on the origin and development of form and of ornament in ceramic art in the Fourth Report, Bureau of Ethnology, p. 437.

For local characters there are various monographs.[1843]

There is no satisfactory evidence that the potter’s wheel was known to any American tribe; but Wilson, in his chapter on ceramic art (Prehistoric Man, ii. ch. 16), feels convinced that the early potter employed some sort of mechanical process, giving a revolving motion to his clay.