Lonely as the land may have seemed, those early voyagers always came upon the traces, ere long, of human occupants. Who were those men and women, what was their origin, what their mode of life? Every one who explores the mounds of the Ohio Valley, or gazes on the ruins of Yucatan, or looks into the wondrous narratives of the Spanish conquerors, must ask himself this question. Until within a few years there has seemed no answer to it. Facts have come in faster and faster, and every new fact has made the puzzle seem more hopeless, so long as no one could offer the solution. These various prehistoric races, so widely sundered, threw no light upon each other; they only deepened each other's darkness. Indians, Aztecs, Mayas, Mound-builders, seemed to have no common. origin, no visible analogy of life or habits. The most skilful student was hardly in advance of the least skilful as to any real comprehension of the facts; nor could this possibly be otherwise, so long as the clew to the labyrinth was not found. It is only some thirty years since it may be said to have been discovered; only some eight or ten years since it has been resolutely and persistently used. Let us see what results it has already yielded. When in 1852 Lieutenant J. H. Simpson, of the United States army, gave to the world the first detailed description of the vast ruined pueblos of New Mexico, and of the other pueblos still occupied, he did not know that he was providing the means for rewriting all the picturesque tales of the early conquerors. All their legends of cisatlantic emperors and em pires were to be read anew in the light of that one discovery. These romances had been told in good faith, or something as near it as the narrator knew, and the tales had passed from one to another, each building on what his predecessor had laid down. The accounts were accepted with little critical revision by modern writers; they filled the attractive pages of Prescott; even Hubert Bancroft did not greatly modify them; but the unshrinking light of a new theory was to raise questions as to them all. And with them were to be linked also Stephens's dreams of vast cities, once occupied by an immense population, and now remaining only as unexplored ruins amid the forests of Central America. The facts he saw were confirmed, but his impressions must be tested by a wholly new interpretation. And, after all, these various wonders were only to be exchanged for new marvels, as interesting as the old ones, and more intelligible and coherent. From the publication of Lewis H. Morgan's remarkable essay, entitled "Montezuma's Dinner," in the North American Review for April, 1876, the new interpretation took a definite form. The vast accumulation of facts in regard to the early American races then began to be classified and simplified; and with whatever difference of opinion as to details, the general opinion of scholars now inclines to the view which, when Morgan first urged it, was called startling and incredible. That view is still a theory, as Darwin's "origin of species" is still a · theory; but Morgan's speculations, like Darwin's, have begun a new era for the science to which they relate. He holds that there never was a prehistoric American civilization, properly so called, but only an advanced and wonderfully skilful barbarism, or semi-civilization at the utmost. The aboriginal races, except perhaps the Eskimo, were essentially one in their social structure, he thinks, however varying in development. In his view there never was an Aztec or Maya empire, but only a league of free tribes, appointing their own chiefs, and accepting the same general modes of organization, based on consanguinity, that have prevailed among all the more advanced families of North American Indians. Montezuma was not an emperor, and had no palace, but he lived in the great communal dwelling of his tribe, where he was recognized and served as head. The forests of Yucatan held no vast cities-cities whose palaces remain, while the humble dwellings of the poor have perished-but only pueblo towns, in whose great communal structures the rich and the poor alike dwelt. There are questions enough left unsolved in American archæology, no doubt, but the solution of this part of the problem has now been proposed in intelligible terms, at least; and it has been rapidly followed up by the accurate researches of Morgan and Putnam and Bandelier. I have said that all this new view of the problem dates from our knowledge of the Pueblo or Village Indians of New Mexico. What is a pueblo? It is an Indian town, of organization and aspect so peculiar that it can best be explained by minute descriptions. Let us begin with the older examples, now in ruins. Mr. Bandelier has lately examined for the American Archæological Institute a ruined building at Pecos, in New Mexico, which he claims to be the largest aboriginal structure of stone within the limits of the United States. It has a circuit of 1480 feet, is five stories high, and once in This is simply a cluded by calculation 500 separate rooms. ruined pueblo.. This composite dwelling once sheltered the inhabitants of a whole Indian town. Pueblo Bonito, on the Rio Chacos, described by Lieutenant Simpson, and more lately by Dr. W. H. Jackson, is 1716 feet in circuit; it included 641 rooms, and could have housed, it is estimated, 3000 Indians. A stone pueblo on the Animas River, lately visited and described by Mr. L. H. Morgan, had more than 400 rooms-and such instances could easily be multiplied. As a rule, each of these buildings constituted a village-a single vast house built on three sides of a court. The stories rose in successive terraces, each narrower than the one beneath, and each approachable only by ladders, there being no sign of any internal means of ascent from story to story. The outer walls were built usually of thin slabs of gray sandstone, laid 144 Ft. 300 Ft. PLAN OF HUNGO PAVIE. with the greatest precision and accuracy, often with no signs of mortar, the intervals being filled with stones of the minutest thinness, so that the whole ruin appears in the distance, according to Simpson, "like a magnificent piece of mosaic - work." These pueblos were practically impregnable to all un civilized warfare, and they differ only in material, not in the essentials of their structure, from the adobe pueblos occupied by the Village Indians of to-day. The first impression made by the adobe pueblos now inhabited is quite different from that produced by these great stone structures, yet the internal arrangement is almost precisely the As you cross, for instance, the green meadows of the Rio Grande, you see rising abruptly before you, like a colossal same. |