book 3, chapter 2, note.

AMBLEVE, Battle of (716.)

See FRANKS (MEROVINGIAN EMPIRE): A. D. 511-752.

AMBOISE, Conspiracy or Tumult of.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1559-1561.

AMBOISE, Edict of.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1560-1563.

AMBOYNA, Massacre of.

See INDIA: A. D. 1600-1702.

AMBRACIA (Ambrakia).

See KORKYRA.

AMBRONES, The.

See CIMBRI AND TEUTONES: B. C. 113-102.

AMBROSIAN CHURCH.--AMBROSIAN CHANT.

See MILAN: A. D. 374-397.

AMEIXAL, OR ESTREMOS, Battle of (1663).

See PORTUGAL: A. D. 1637-1668.

[Image: ETHNOLOGICAL MAP OF MODERN EUROPE (right)]

{46}

AMERICA, The Name.

See below: A. D. 1500-1514.

AMERICA, Prehistoric.

"Widely scattered throughout the United States, from sea to sea, artificial mounds are discovered, which may be enumerated by the thousands or hundreds of thousands. They vary greatly in size; some are so small that a half-dozen laborers with shovels might construct one of them in a day, while others cover acres and are scores of feet in height. These mounds were observed by the earliest explorers and pioneers of the country. They did not attract great attention, however, until the science of archæology demanded their investigation. Then they were assumed to furnish evidence of a race of people older than the Indian tribes. Pseud-archæologists descanted on the Mound-builders that once inhabited the land, and they told of swarming populations who had reached a high condition of culture, erecting temples, practicing arts in the metals, and using hieroglyphs. So the Mound-builders formed the theme of many an essay on the wonders of ancient civilization. The research of the past ten or fifteen years has put this subject in a proper light. First, the annals of the Columbian epoch have been carefully studied, and it is found that some of the mounds have been constructed in historical time, while early explorers and settlers found many actually used by tribes of North American Indians; so we know that many of them were builders of mounds. Again, hundreds and thousands of these mounds have been carefully examined, and the works of art found therein have been collected and assembled in museums. At the same time, the works of art of the Indian tribes, as they were produced before modification by European culture, have been assembled in the same museums, and the two classes of collections have been carefully compared. All this has been done with the greatest painstaking, and the Mound-builder's arts and the Indian's arts are found to be substantially identical. No fragment of evidence remains to support the figment of theory that there was an ancient race of Mound-builders superior in culture to the North American Indians. ... That some of these mounds were built and used in modern times is proved in another way. They often contain articles manifestly made by white men, such as glass beads and copper ornaments. ... So it chances that to-day unskilled archæologists are collecting many beautiful things in copper, stone, and shell which were made by white men and traded to the Indians. Now, some of these things are found in the mounds; and bird pipes, elephant pipes, banner stones, copper spear heads and knives, and machine-made wampum are collected in quantities and sold at high prices to wealthy amateurs. ... The study of these mounds, historically and archæologically, proves that they were used for a variety of purposes. Some were for sepulture, and such are the most common and widely scattered. Others were used as artificial hills on which to build communal houses. ... Some of the very large mounds were sites of large communal houses in which entire tribes dwelt. There is still a third class ... constructed as places for public assembly. ... But to explain the mounds and their uses would expand this article into a book. It is enough to say that the Mound-builders were the Indian tribes discovered by white men. It may well be that some of the mounds were erected by tribes extinct when Columbus first saw these shores, but they were kindred in culture to the peoples that still existed. In the southwestern portion of the United States, conditions of aridity prevail. Forests are few and are found only at great heights. ... The tribes lived in the plains and valleys below, while the highlands were their hunting grounds. The arid lands below were often naked of vegetation; and the ledges and cliffs that stand athwart the lands, and the canyon walls that inclose the streams, were everywhere quarries of loose rock, lying in blocks ready to the builder's hand. Hence these people learned to build their dwellings of stone; and they had large communal houses, even larger than the structures of wood made by the tribes of the east and north. Many of these stone pueblos are still occupied, but the ruins are scattered wide over a region of country embracing a little of California and Nevada, much of Utah, most of Colorado, the whole of New Mexico and Arizona, and far southward toward the Isthmus. ... No ruin has been discovered where evidences of a higher culture are found than exists in modern times at Zuni, Oraibi, or Laguna. The earliest may have been built thousands of years ago, but they were built by the ancestors of existing tribes and their congeners. A careful study of these ruins, made during the last twenty years, abundantly demonstrates that the pueblo culture began with rude structures of stone and brush, and gradually developed, until at the time of the exploration of the country by the Spaniards, beginning about 1540, it had reached its highest phase. Zuni [in New Mexico] has been built since, and it is among the largest and best villages ever established within the territory of the United States without the aid of ideas derived from civilized men." With regard to the ruins of dwellings found sheltered in the craters of extinct volcanoes, or on the shelves of cliffs, or otherwise contrived, the conclusion to which all recent archæological study tends is the same. "All the stone pueblo ruins, all the clay ruins, all the cliff dwellings, all the crater villages, all the cavate chambers, and all the tufa-block houses are fully accounted for without resort to hypothetical peoples inhabiting the country anterior to the Indian tribes. ... Pre-Columbian culture was indigenous; it began at the lowest stage of savagery and developed to the highest, and was in many places passing into barbarism when the good queen sold her jewels."

_Major J. W. Powell, Prehistoric Man in America; in "The Forum," January, 1890._

"The writer believes ... that the majority of American archæologists now sees no sufficient reason for supposing that any mysterious superior race has ever lived in any portion of our continent. They find no archæological evidence proving that at the time of its discovery any tribe had reached a stage of culture that can properly be called civilization. Even if we accept the exaggerated statements of the Spanish conquerors, the most intelligent and advanced peoples found here were only semi-barbarians, in the stage of transition from the stone to the bronze age, possessing no written language, or what can properly be styled an alphabet, and not yet having even learned the use of beasts of burden."

_H. W. Haynes, Prehistoric Archæology of North America (volume 1, chapter 6, of "Narrative and Critical History of America")._

{47}

"It may be premised ... that the Spanish adventurers who thronged to the New World after its discovery found the same race of Red Indians in the West India Islands, in Central and South America, in Florida and in Mexico. In their mode of life and means of subsistence, in their weapons, arts, usages and customs, in their institutions, and in their mental and physical characteristics, they were the same people in different stages of advancement. ... There was neither a political society, nor a state, nor any civilization in America when it was discovered; and excluding the Eskimos, but one race of Indians, the Red Race."

_L. H. Morgan, Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines: (Contributions to North American Ethnology, v, 5.), chapter 10_.

"We have in this country the conclusive evidence of the existence of man before the time of the glaciers, and from the primitive conditions of that time, he has lived here and developed, through stages which correspond in many particulars to the Homeric age of Greece."

_F. W. Putnam, Report, Peabody Museum of Archæology, 1886._

ALSO IN _L. Carr, The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley_.

_C. Thomas, Burial Mounds of the Northern Sections of the United States: Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1883-84_.

_Marquis de Nadaillac, Prehistoric America_.

_J. Fiske, The Discovery of America, chapter 1._

See, also, MEXICO; PERU; and AMERICAN ABORIGINES: ALLEGHANS, CHEROKEES, and MAYAS.

AMERICA: 10th-11th Centuries. Supposed Discoveries by the Northmen.

The fact that the Northmen knew of the existence of the Western Continent prior to the age of Columbus, was prominently brought before the people of this country in the year 1837, when the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen published their work on the Antiquities of North America, under the editorial supervision of the great Icelandic scholar, Professor Rafn. But we are not to suppose that the first general account of these voyages was then given, for it has always been known that the history of certain early voyages to America by the Northmen were preserved in the libraries of Denmark and Iceland. ... Yet, owing to the fact that the Icelandic language, though simple in construction and easy of acquisition, was a tongue not understood by scholars, the subject has until recent years been suffered to lie in the background, and permitted, through a want of interest, to share in a measure the treatment meted out to vague and uncertain reports. ... It now remains to give the reader some general account of the contents of the narratives which relate more or less to the discovery of the western continent. ... The first extracts given are very brief. They are taken from the 'Landanama Book,' and relate to the report in general circulation, which indicated one Gunniborn as the discoverer of Greenland, an event which has been fixed at the year 876. ... The next narrative relates to the rediscovery of Greenland by the outlaw, Eric the Red, in 983, who there passed three years in exile, and afterwards returned to Iceland. About the year 986, he brought out to Greenland a considerable colony of settlers, who fixed their abode at Brattahlid, in Ericsfiord. Then follow two versions of the voyage of Biarne Heriulfson, who, in the same year, 986, when sailing for Greenland, was driven away during a storm, and saw a new land at the southward, which he did not visit. Next is given three accounts of the voyage of Leif, son of Eric the Red, who in the year 1000 sailed from Brattahlid to find the land which Biarne saw. Two of these accounts are hardly more than notices of the voyage, but the third is of considerable length, and details the successes of Leif, who found and explored this new land, where he spent the winter, returning to Greenland the following spring [having named different regions which he visited Helluland, Markland and Vinland, the latter name indicative of the finding of grapes]. After this follows the voyage of Thorvald Ericson, brother of Leif, who sailed to Vinland from Greenland, which was the point of departure in all these voyages. This expedition was begun in 1002, and it cost him his life, as an arrow from one of the natives pierced his side, causing death. Thorstein, his brother, went to seek Vinland, with the intention of bringing home his body, but failed in the attempt. The most distinguished explorer was Thorfinn Karlsefne, the Hopeful, an Icelander whose genealogy runs back in the old Northern annals, through Danish, Swedish, and even Scotch and Irish ancestors, some of whom were of royal blood. In the year 1006 he went to Greenland, where he met Gudrid, widow of Thorstein, whom he married. Accompanied by his wife, who urged him to the undertaking, he sailed to Vinland in the spring of 1007, with three vessels and 160 men, where he remained three years. Here his son Snorre was born. He afterwards became the founder of a great family in Iceland, which gave the island several of its first bishops. Thorfinn finally left Vinland because he found it difficult to sustain himself against the attacks of the natives. The next to undertake a voyage was a wicked woman named Freydis, a sister to Leif Ericson, who went to Vinland in 1011, where she lived for a time with her two ships, in the same places occupied by Leif and Thorfinn. Before she returned, she caused the crew of one ship to be cruelly murdered, assisting in the butchery with her own hands. After this we have what are called the Minor Narratives, which are not essential.

_B. F. De Costa, Pre-Columban Discovery of America, General Introduction._

By those who accept fully the claims made for the Northmen, as discoverers of the American continent in the voyages believed to be authentically narrated in these sagas, the Helluland of Leif is commonly identified with Newfoundland, Markland with Nova Scotia, and Vinland with various parts of New England. Massachusetts Bay, Cape Cod, Nantucket Island, Martha's Vineyard, Buzzard's Bay, Narragansett Bay, Mount Hope Bay, Long Island Sound, and New York Bay are among the localities supposed to be recognized in the Norse narratives, or marked by some traces of the presence of the Viking explorers. Professor Gustav Storm, the most recent of the Scandinavian investigators of this subject, finds the Helluland of the sagas in Labrador or Northern Newfoundland, Markland in Newfoundland, and Vinland in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island.

_G. Storm, Studies of the Vineland Voyages._

{48}

"The only discredit which has been thrown upon the story of the Vinland voyages, in the eyes either of scholars or of the general public, has arisen from the eager credulity with which ingenious antiquarians have now and then tried to prove more than facts will warrant. ... Archælogical remains of the Northmen abound in Greenland, all the way from Immartinek to near Cape Farewell; the existence of one such relic on the North American continent has never yet been proved. Not a single vestige of the Northmen's presence here, at all worthy of credence, has ever been found. ... The most convincing proof that the Northmen never founded a colony in America, south of Davis Strait, is furnished by the total absence of horses, cattle and other domestic animals from the soil of North America until they were brought hither by the Spanish, French and English settlers."

_J. Fiske, The Discovery of America, chapter 2._

"What Leif and Karlsefne knew they experienced," writes Professor Justin Winsor, "and what the sagas tell us they underwent, must have just the difference between a crisp narrative of personal adventure and the oft-repeated and embellished story of a fireside narrator, since the traditions of the Norse voyages were not put in the shape of records till about two centuries had elapsed, and we have no earlier manuscript of such a record than one made nearly two hundred years later still. ... A blending of history and myth prompts Horn to say that 'some of the sagas were doubtless originally based on facts, but the telling and retelling have changed them into pure myths.' The unsympathetic stranger sees this in stories that the patriotic Scandinavians are over-anxious to make appear as genuine chronicles. ... The weight of probability is in favor of a Northman descent upon the coast of the American mainland at some point, or at several, somewhere to the south of Greenland; but the evidence is hardly that which attaches to well established historical records. ... There is not a single item of all the evidence thus advanced from time to time which can be said to connect by archæological traces the presence of the Northmen on the soil of North America south of Davis' Straits." Of other imagined pre-Columban discoveries of America, by the Welsh, by the Arabs, by the Basques, &c., the possibilities and probabilities are critically discussed by Professor Winsor in the same connection.

J. Winsor, _Narrative and Critical History of America,