Elephant pipes and inscribed tablets in the Museum of the Academy of natural sciences, Daveport, Iowa / by Charles E. Putnam.

  • Charles Edwin Putnam
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elephant pipes and inscribed tablets in the Museum of the Academy of natural sciences, Daveport, Iowa / by Charles E. Putnam. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “Excluding such remains as are due to Europeans, and are post-Columbian, I hold that all the ancient artificial works found in the Mississippi Valley and Gulf States are to be attributed to the Indians found in this country at the time of the discovery and their ancestors. By this limitation of the term ‘ Indians ’ I exclude the Toltec, Aztec, and other civilized people of Mexico and Central America.”* Tlie position thus assumed by Major Powell, and maintained by Prof. Thomas, finds recent and strong support in William H. Dali, an honorary Curator of the National Museum, who, in his edition of Marquis De Nadaillac’s “Prehistoric America,” just issued from the .American ]U'ess, thus states his conclusions upon this interesting (piestion : “In closing this chajiter, what, it may be asked, are we to believe was the char- acter of the race to which, for the purpose of clearness, we have for the time being applied the term ‘Mound-builder?’ The answer must be, they were no more nor less than the immediate predecessors, in blood and culture, of the Indians described by De Soto’s clironicler and other early explorers—the Indians who inhabited the region of the mounds at the time of the discovery by civilized men.”t The remarkable unanimity among these gentlemen, in their expres- sions of o])inion, clearly indicates concerted action, and a settled ]mlicy in the management of this department of the Smithsonian Institution, to force this |)eculiar theory u])on the attention and secure its accept- ance by the scientific world. Another class of archaeologists as strongly maintain the opposite theory, that the Mound-builders were more advanced in civilization than the American Indian, and hence have endeavored to trace them to a Mexican origin, or to some earlier common ancestry. The leader- ship on this side must be accorded to Messrs. Squier and Davis, who, in their great work upon “ Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Val- ley,” thus state their conclusions: “Without undertaking to point out the affinities, or to indicate the probable origin of the builders of the western monuments, and the cause of their final dis- appearance, we may venture to suggest that the facts so far collected point to a connection, more or less intimate, between the race of the mounds and the semi- civilized nations which formerly had their seats among the sierras of Mexico and Peru, and who erected the imposing structures which, from their number, vastness, and mysterious significance, invest the central portion of the continent with an interest no less absorbing than that which attaches to the Nile. These nations alone, of all found in possession of the continent by the European discoverers, were essentially stationary and agricultural in their habits — conditions indispensable to large populations, to fixedness of institutions, and to any considerable advance in * American Antiquarian, March, 1885, p. 65. f “ Prehistoric .\nierica,” by Marquis De Xadaillac, p. 130.