Americans Before Columbus

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AMERICAN

AMERICAN S BEFORE COLUMBUS BY ELIZABETH CHESLEY BAITY Illustrated with drawings by C. B. FALLS and 32 pages of photographs Here is unfolded to the mind and imagi¬ nation of the reader an impressive pano¬ rama of life on the American continents before ever Columbus opened the way for European exploration and conquest. Beginning with an exciting account of the ice-age animals—“horses and camels and dogs and many other animal families that were really and truly American”—the story sweeps in dramatic episodes from the cold and lonely journey of Asiatic peoples across the Bering Strait, to the highly organized civilization of the Incas. “It is a story of epic size, of ordinary human beings faced with the challenge of the unknown and the dangerous, and of the courage and endurance with which these men, women, and children traveled across the icy top of the world . . . [and] found their way down from the cold northland into the endless Great Plains from which they spread in countless ways. Some of the groups settled here and there along the way. Others pushed on across high mountains and through danger-infested jungles until, perhaps many centuries after the first arrival in America, people had reached the south¬ ern tip of the continent, the cold land strangely named Tierra del Fuego, or ‘Land of Fire.’” A profusion of scrupulously authenti¬ cated drawings by C. B. Falls and photo¬ graphs assembled from museums and anthropological collections strengthen and illuminate the .author’s detailed and lively descriptions of the customs and costumes, the arts, crafts, and architec¬ ture characteristic of the various cultural (continued on back flap)

Y Rn6. i

3

AMERICANS BEFORE COLUMBUS

ALSO BY ELIZABETH CHESLEY BAITY

AMERICA BEFORE MAN

AMERICANS BEFORE COLUMBUS BY ELIZABETH CHESLEY BAITY ILLUSTRATED AND MAPS

WITH

DRAWINGS

BY C. B. FALLS AND

WITH 32 PAGES OF PHOTOGRAPHS

THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT 1951,© 1961 BY ELIZABETH CHESLEY BAITY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED REVISED EDITION 1961 FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1951 BY THE VIKING PRESS, INC. 625 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10022 PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN CANADA BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG NUMBER: 51-10661 SBN 670-12166-5 PRINTED IN U.S.A. 12

13

14

970.1

15

16

80

79

78

77

76

1.

Indians of North America

2.

Indians of South America

75

CONTENTS

Preface

I.

9

Indian Arts and Architecture (photographs)

17

The First Americans

51

Columbus came late • Ice-age America • How man reached the Americas

II.

•

Ice-age Americans

The Hunters and the Hunted

62

Ancient men in South America • “Minnesota Man” • Man and Folsom Man • Yuma men and later hunters great extinction • Who killed Cock Robin? hi.

Sandia The

•

Time and Change

76

Villagers become traders and city dwellers

•

Neolithic revolution

in the Americas

iv.

Food Gatherers and Basketmakers Cochise Man ery of maize

v.

• •

83

The cliff-dwelling Basketmakers • The discov¬ About time scales • The tree-ring calendar

Citadels of the Southwest

95

Invasion from Mexico? • The Pueblo communities • Pueblo daily life • Rites and festivals • The great building time • Hard times come to the Pueblos • How America’s most ancient art gallery was discovered • The people of the Gallina towers

vi. vii.

Interlude: The Vikings Find and Lose America

112

The Mound Builders

119

Main Street in Moundsville • Evidences of Mound Builder life • Types of mounds • Mound Builder art • Extent of Mound Builder commerce • Mayan influence? • How the Mound Builder culture developed

vm.

•

The end of the Mound Builders

The Warrior Democracies of the Eastern Forests Ancient prehistory of the eastern forests

ix.

•

The Iroquois

Food Gatherers of the Far North and West The fishermen of the northwest coast •

Summary 5

•

136

The Indians of California

145

CONTENTS

6

x.

The Mayan Triumph and Failure

157

The America that Columbus failed to discover • Dating the Mayan eras • The Mayan calendar • The number system • Mayan writing • The Old Mayan era • Mayan temples • The Mayan Dark Ages • The New Mayan era • Mayan sculpture and painting • Records left by the Mayas • A day in Chichen Itza • Mayan gods • Mayan priests • The decline of the Mayan civilization • The Spanish Conquest

xi.

The Mexican Melting Pot

185

Ancient man discovers Mexico • The Toltecs build great re¬ ligious centers • The Aztecs arrive in Mexico • Life in Tenochtitlan in the time of Montezuma • A day in Tenochtitldn • Aztec government • Social organization • Education of the Mexicas Serpent

xii.

Aztec religion: the old gods change

•

•

•

The Plumed

Human sacrifice

Children of the Sun

210

Cuzco, capital of the Incas people of the Andes • Chan of the Chimus

•

•

How we know about the early

Pre-Incaic peoples of the coast • Chan Pre-Incaic people of the highlands •

How new territories were brought into the Inca state state

•

Inca feudalism

the Incas

•

Crime and punishment

•

The Inca

•

The lot of the common people under •

The effect of Inca rule

•

The end of the Incas

xiii.

An End and a Beginning

228

The migration to the Americas

•

Imperial days

Indian America • What happened then? the Indian civilizations?

xiv.

•

Fall

of

What is left of

•

A Decade of Discovery Lewisville Man

•

Tide Springs Man

Santa Rosa Man and the dwarf mammoth

•

American pebble tools?

•

Naco elephant kills to Bering?

242 •

The Alaska-Chuckchi Province

•

•

Back

What happened to the Pleistocene animals?

Time and change

•

From

Graham Cave, Missouri cation

•

seed-gatherers

to

•

The Lehner•

agriculturalists?

Russell Cave, Alabama

•

Domesti¬

Suggested Readings

261

Glossary

262

Acknowledgments

264

Index

267

ILLUSTRATIONS INDIAN ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE

PHOTOGRAPHS

Stone pipe, human effigy from the Adena Mound, Ohio

17

Painted stone effigy: Lebanon, Tennessee

18

War club, Iroquois, found in Pennsylvania

19

Hohokam bowl: Gila Pueblo, Arizona

20

Mimbres bowl: Mimbres Valley, New Mexico

20

Basketmaker Pictograph: Barrier Canyon, Utah

21

Mural painting (restored): Awatovi, Arizona

21

Deer mask: Key Marco, Florida

22

Iroquois cornhusk mask

22

Spirit mask: Alaska

23

Katchinas of the Hopi Indians: Arizona

23

Mochica portrait vessel: Chicamac Valley, Peru

24

Early Chimu portrait vessel: Peru

24

Maize God: Copan, Honduras

25

Seated clay figure: central Veracruz, Mexico

26

Maya Astronomer: Chiapas, Mexico

26

Gold staff head: Colombia

27

Gold female figure: Colombia

27

Pueblo Bonito: Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

28

Prehistoric cliff dwellings: Mesa Verde, Colorado

29

Taos Pueblo: New Mexico

3°

Temple base: Uaxactun, Guatemala

31

Model of ruins: Copan, Honduras

32

Hieroglyphic stairway: Copan, Honduras

33

Temple of the Cross: Palenque, Mexico

34

Pyramid of the Sun: Teotihuacan, Mexico

35

Temple of Quetzalcoatl: Teotihuacan, Mexico

36

7

8

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Temple base: Xochicalco, Mexico

37

Inner court of a palace: Mitla, Mexico

38

Palace of the Nuns: Uxmal, Mexico

39

Mayan temple, “Rio Bee B”: Quintana Roo, Mexico

40

Model of “Rio Bee B”

41

Temple of the Frescoes: Tulum, Mexico

42

Model of the Temple of the Frescoes

43

Temple of the Three Lintels: Chichen Itza, Mexico

44

Caracol or Observatory: Chichen Itza, Mexico

45

El Castillo: Chichen Itza, Mexico

46

Machu Picchu: Peru (general view)

47

Street in Cuzco, showing Inca masonry: Peru

48

DRAWINGS BY C. B. FALLS

Pueblo art: elkskin mask, Zuni Pueblo; pottery water jars; dance mask, Zuni Pueblo

104

Mound Builder art: engraved stone disk; engraved shell gorget; carved stone pipe in the form of a bird

124

Carved wooden masks of the Northwest Coast: winter dance mask, Nootka, Vancouver Island; Alaskan dance mask; cere¬ monial mask, Tshimshian, British Columbia

150

Mayan art: characteristic designs on painted Mayan pottery; painted vase; polychrome vase

164

Mexican art: incensario of the Teotihuacan culture of the valley of Mexico; effigy burial vase, Mazapan culture, Teotihuacan; clay mask, Veracruz; pottery jars Aztec gods:

188

Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent God; Huitzi-

lopochtli, the War God

203

Inca art: designs from Peruvian tapestries; pottery water jars of the early Chimu period; Mochica portrait vessel

226

Preface During the decade since this book was first published, new discoveries have added enormously to the story of America’s first men. Carbon-14 dating0

has pin-pointed early finds with an

accuracy impossible before 1950, when Dr. Willard Libby pub¬ lished his first list of C-14 dates. Recent C-14 dating takes our story back some forty-four thousand years, indicating that the Amerinds have been on the scene much longer than was once thought. It is still believed that the early arrivals were migratory hunters, with some Mongoloid and some Caucasoid traits, who came across the Bering Strait region long ago. The Amerind is now given credit for inventing his early tools and weapons, though some cultural items are thought to have been brought in by later Asiatic arrivals.

More and

more Amerind

experiments

with basket¬

making, pottery, weaving, agriculture and architecture have been found. Archaeologists have learned much from an area called the Alaska-Chukchi province, where evidence from some five thou¬ sand years of indigenous culture shows that there were no hunting cultures on the Asiatic side which were directly ancestral to America’s early herd-hunters. The earlier theory of the Amerinds’ late arrival in the New World was based partly on the fact that no Paleo-man skulls— beetle-browed, chinless, and prognathous—were found along the Bering route, but only those of modern or neo-man

(Homo

sapiens sapiens). Hundreds of skulls were measured, but since earlier researchers did not always follow the methods of modern * Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of the element carbon, present in the air and thus absorbed into the bones of animals and fibers of plants. C-14 dating consists of Geiger-counting the scintillations of C-14 atoms in once-living material. Since the rate of decay of C-14 into nitrogen atoms is known, the time since the organic material tested was living can be measured, though not yet with exact reliability. 9

io

PREFACE

archaeologists, it was not realized that these modern-type skulls were embedded in geological strata laid down well before the supposed date of man’s arrival at Bering Straits. Recent C-14 dates show that neo-man was in the Americas while his kind were still disputing Europe and the Near East with Neanderthal man, here and there settling down to housekeeping instead of fighting. Perhaps the most fascinating of recent dis¬ coveries is that neo-man did not descend from beetle-browed Paleo-man but from ancestors smooth of brow and with deter¬ mined chins which they were sticking into things as early as ninety-three thousand years ago, the provisional birth date now assigned to our species. Tool-making, we now know, is immensely older, pre-dating man himself. Dr. and Mrs. L. S. B. Leakey, excavating since 1932 at Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, have uncovered the record of over a half million years of tool-making. The age of their finds was not always accepted by other experts, who usually arrived after sites were eroded. When in 1959 Mrs. Leakey discovered a new Australo-

pithecine (Southern Ape) Clark Howell was on the spot in time to give this “missing link” his god-fatherly approval (January i960,

Current Anthropology). The Leakeys named their six-hundredthousand-year-old youth of the Lower Pleistocene Zinjanthropus, or East Africa man. He had very large teeth, a small brain, and some manlike features found only in hominids of the Middle Pleistocene elsewhere, and he had his pebble tools all but in his hand. Some eighty feet of deposits containing pebble-tool cultures trace the development of these simple tools up to hand axes of types widely used in Eurasia’s Old Stone Age. Even East Africa Man, however, was a “Johnny-come-lately” in comparison with an individual who laid himself to rest during Europe s warm palmy days some ten million years ago, in what was to become a coal seam in middle Italy. In 1948 Dr. Johannes Hihzeler, of the 5°o-year-old University of Basel, Switzerland,

PREFACE

thoughtfully re-examining

a

fossil

11

jaw

labeled

Oreopithecus

(Mountain Ape) found himself unable to classify it with the monkeys. During a ten-year search, both encouraged and frus¬ trated by discoveries of some thirty specimens destroyed by mining operations, Dr. Hiirzeler descended for his last after¬ noon in a coal mine about to be closed. Just as he was on the point of giving up, he flashed his light on the shaft roof and saw there, as if neatly sculptured, the fossilized remains of a complete Oreopithecus displaying a short, un-apelike face and hominidtype teeth and pelvic bones. Though an extinct side branch rather than a direct ancestor of man, this hominid that is almost nine and a half million years older than any other known offers mute evidence that far from having descended from apes, man comes from an ancestral line which may have branched off from theirs by some fifty million or so years, according to Dr. Hiirzeler—and, incidentally, to Charles Darwin himself. Labeled “the Abominable Coal-man” by wits, this early hominid calls for a re-examination of the timescale allowed for man’s evolution.

Acknowledgments

for

up-to-date materials

and

for

expert

assistance in assembling the newly added Chapter XIV will be found on page 266.The author also owes warm thanks to unnamed individuals for help during the past ten years, during which an avocational interest in American prehistory has developed, under the stimulus of work in Africa, Europe, and Asia, and study in the Anthropology Department of the University of North Caro¬ lina, into a more professional concern with cultural anthropology.

September 14, i960 Geneva, Switzerland

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