Observations on the aboriginal monuments of the Mississippi Valley. The character of the ancient earth-works, and the structure, contents, and purposes of the mounds; with notices of the minor remains of ancient art / With illustrations. From the second volume of the Transactions of the American ethnological society.

  • Ephraim George Squier
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the aboriginal monuments of the Mississippi Valley. The character of the ancient earth-works, and the structure, contents, and purposes of the mounds; with notices of the minor remains of ancient art / With illustrations. From the second volume of the Transactions of the American ethnological society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    who themselves possessed an accidental or regular inter¬ course with the people of the other continent. The first hypothesis has not, it is believed, been seriously advanced. It cannot be supposed that so extensively disseminated a people as the mound-builders would have left so slight and doubtful an evidence of their alphabetic system, had they possessed one. The other hypothesis falls more nearly within the scope of possibility, not to say probability, and has ingenious, and no doubt earnest, supporters among those who claim an European intercourse with America, long anterior to the discovery in the fifteenth century. The difficulties in the way of this hypothesis will probably appear light to those who can readily find, in the rude rock-tracery of the Indians, the indubitable record of an European visit to the shores of New England! The objec¬ tion that the race of the mounds have left no evidence of their occupation of the country bordering the Atlantic, and would consequently be unable to avail themselves of an opportunity of communication with Europeans, driven by stress of weather, or arriving in quest of adventures, upon the American shores, is also easily surmounted by the supposition, that the intervening country was possessed by tribes, through the agency of which the inscription found its way beyond the mountains. Or if it is preferred, it is quite feasible, by a single effort of the imagination, to trans¬ port a sturdy Celt across a trackless ocean, through a wilderness infested by savages and wild beasts, and upon the banks of the Ohio invest him with a chieftaincy among the mound-builders ; who, it is also easy to suppose, in memory of so renowned an adventurer, reared over his remains a huge (earth structure,—a mode of sepulture eminently congenial to an individual accustomed to similar practices in his native land! It is indispensable that this diversified journey should be performed, if, as it is stated by some who have seen the relic, it was composed of the pre¬ vailing sandstone of the region in which it was found.