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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    not overlooking the equivocal palaeolithic stone implements of the New Jersey river-gravels, or the so-called elephant mound and ele- phant pipes — is there an archaeologist who will contend that we have positive assurance of man’s appearance on this continent prior to the latest drift period? I believe that anthropologists are agreed that the American Indian is an exotic, not an autochthon; but what period of time elapsed, after the recession of the great ice-fields, before he was introduced here, we have no means of knowing. Nor have we reli- able data to serve as a basis for any satisfactory conjecture as to the mental development of these people when they came. The relics of their arts, falling in the classification of neolithic, gives color to the assumption that they were already mound-builders on their arrival, and fiourished here for some centuries, and were found by De Soto in the decadence of their ancient practices. To meet the insuperable negative argument of Mr. Henshaw, that no relics of the Indian’s use or knowledge of ivory have yet been found here, you say: “At the era of the Mound-builders [who are presumed to have made the elephant pipes] the elephant and mas- todon must have.nearly reached the point of extinction on this conti- nent, and hence would be infrequently seen, and the article of‘ivory’ quite uncommon.” Yet you marshal an array of many instances, and profess to be able to produce many more, of the remains of man and the elephant found together, in proof that the two must have been coeval here for a great length of time. Perhaps you would have us understand that the human remains found with the mastodon’s were not those of the cultured (?) Mound-builder, but of a race of wild In- dians who were here prior to the coming of the Mound-builder? This position granted, I would ask why it is that this primitive race, domi- nant here for ages, when elephants and mastodons were plentiful, did not learn to use ivory, or leave us some record of their acquaintance with the great beasts? We have learned that, in Central Africa, the most degraded and beast-like cannibal tribes, who are the least re- moved from mere simian intelligence, work ivory into beautiful orna- ments and weapons. The Root-diggers of thirty years ago, admittedly the lowest known people of our continent, went naked, and subsisted on roots, acorns, and vermin — like animals; yet they manufactured beautiful weapons and ornaments of sea-shells, stone, bone, etc. And we are expected to believe that the Mound-builders, who wrought the most refractory stones into suri)rising shapes of elegance and artistic beauty; who traveled hundreds of miles for mica and sea-shells, and made all materials, from rushes to hematite and coi)per, tributes to their arts,— and yet failed to utilize the ivory (that finest of all sub- stances for their pur])oses) of the few mastodons they occasionally killed or found dead! We are expected to believe that the Indians who — according to Dr. Albert Koch — killed the great mastodon they found mired in the Bourbeuse bottom with fire and with Hint weapons, feasted on his flesh, but left his immense ivory tusks untouched. Is it not reasonable to believe that the very scarcity of mastodons would, when one was seen by the cultured (?) Mound-builders, inspire them