Part 17

Here, to all appearance, intelligent research had at length been rewarded by the discovery of undoubted traces of the American palæolithic man; and Dr. Abbott, not unnaturally, gave free scope to his fancy, as he realised to himself the preoccupation of the river valley with “the village sites of pre-glacial man.” There is a fascination in such disclosures which, especially in the case of the original discoverer, tempts to extreme views; and both in France and England, at the present time, the more eager among the geologists and archæologists devoted to this inquiry are reluctantly restrained from assuming as a scientific fact the existence of man in Southern England and in France under more genial climatic influences, prior to the great Ice age which wrought such enormous changes there. The theory which Dr. Abbott formed on the basis of the evidence first presented to him by the disclosures of the Trenton gravel may be thus stated. Towards the close of the great Ice age, the locality which has rewarded his search for specimens of palæolithic art marked the termination of the glacier on the Atlantic coast. Here, at the foot of the glacier, a primitive people, in a condition closely analogous to that of the Eskimo of the present day, made their home, and wandered over the open sea in the vicinity, during the accumulation of the deposit from the melting glacier. But this drift-gravel was modified by subsequent action. According to Dr. Abbott’s conclusions, it was deposited in open water, on the bed of a shallow sea. But the position of the large boulders, and the absence of true clay in the mass, suggest that it has undergone great changes since its original deposition as glacial debris; and if this is to be accounted for by subsequent action of water, the unpolished surfaces of the chipped implements are inconsistent with such a theory of their origin. Huge boulders, of the same character as those which abound in the underlying gravel, occur on the surface; and their presence there was referred to by Dr. Abbott as throwing light upon “the occurrence of rude implements identical with those found in the underlying gravels, inasmuch as the same ice-raft that bore the one, with its accompanying sand and gravel, might well gather up also stray relics of this primitive people, and re-deposit them where they are now found.” Accordingly, seeking in fancy to recall this ancient past, he says in his first report: “In times preceding the formation of this gravel bed, now in part facing the Delaware river, there were doubtless localities, once the village sites of pre-glacial man, where these rude stone implements would necessarily be abundant,” and he accordingly asks “May not the ice in its onward march, gathering in bulk every loose fragment of rock and particle of soil, have held them loosely together, and, hundreds of miles from their original site, left them in some one locality such as this, where the river has again brought to light rude implements that characterise an almost primitive people? But, assuming that the various implements fashioned by a strictly pre-glacial people have been totally destroyed by the crushing forces of the glacier, and that the specimens now produced were not brought from a distance, may they not be referred to an early race that, driven southward by the encroaching ice, dwelt at the foot of the glacier, and during their sojourn here these implements were lost?”[51]

The opinions thus set forth in the first published account of Dr. Abbott’s discoveries, have since been considerably modified, in so far as the geological age of the tool-bearing gravel of the Delaware valley is concerned. In his earlier publications he assumed, as no longer questionable, the existence of inter-glacial, if not pre-glacial, man on the continent. In his more matured views, as set forth in his _Primitive Industry_, he speaks of “having been seriously misled by the various geological reports that purport to give, in proper sequence, the respective ages of the several strata of clay, gravel, boulders, and sand, through which the river has finally worn its channel to the ocean level”;[52] so that he has probably ascribed too great an antiquity to the peculiar class of stone implements brought to light in the river-gravels of New Jersey. Dr. Abbott, accordingly, states as his more matured conclusion, confirmed by the reports of some of the most experienced geological observers, on whose judgment he relies, that the Trenton gravel, in which alone the turtle-back celts have thus far been found, is a post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river was larger than at present; and is the most recent of all the formations of the Delaware.[53] Here, however, the term “recent” is employed altogether relatively; and although Dr. Abbott no longer claims in the discovery of the stone implements of the gravel beds near Trenton, New Jersey, evidence of the existence of man on the American continent before the close of the Glacial period, he still refers the Trenton gravel tool-makers to an era which, at the lowest computation, precedes by thousands of years the earliest historical glimpses of Assyria, Egypt, or wherever among the most ancient nations of the Old World the beginnings of history can be traced.

The disclosures of Dr. Abbott claim a special importance among the fruits of archæological investigation on the American continent, not only from the fact that they furnish the first well-authenticated results of systematic research based on the scientific analogies of European archæology, but these later results have included the remains of man himself. When Dr. Usher of Mobile contributed to _The Types of Mankind_ an account of the discovery of a human skeleton at New Orleans, found under circumstances from which the existence of man in the delta of the Mississippi was deduced well nigh sixty thousand years ago, it was scarcely calculated to win the reader’s acceptance of that assumption when it was added that “the type of the cranium was, as might have been expected, that of the aboriginal American race.” Nor is this the only example of skull of a strictly modern Indian type from which the inference has been drawn that the same unchanging form has prevailed from the era of pre-glacial American man till now. Three human crania found in the Trenton gravel are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge (Harvard). All are of the same type, but it differs essentially from that of the Red Indian skull. They are of small size, oval, and present a striking contrast to all other skulls in the Peabody collection. Their value is due to the fact of their discovery in the implement-bearing gravel, in proximity to the characteristic examples of what are assumed to be palæolithic celts. For it is well for us to bear in remembrance that the evidences of the antiquity of man in Europe do not rest on any number of chance disclosures. It is a simple procedure to dig into a Celtic or Saxon barrow, and find there the implements and pottery of its builders lying alongside of their buried remains. But archæologists have learned to recognise the palæolithic implements as not less characteristic of certain post-pliocene deposits than the palæontology of the same geological formation. The river-drift and cave deposits are characterised by traces of contemporaneous life, as shown in the examples of primitive art from which they receive the name of the tool-bearing drift or gravel; just as older geological formations have their characteristic animal and vegetable fossils. The specific character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French Drift having been determined, geologists and archæologists have sought for flint implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the fossils of the same period, and with like success. Palæolithic implements have been recovered in this manner in Suffolk, Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, and other districts in the south of England. So entirely indeed has the man of the Drift passed beyond the province of the archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed up his _Notes on Further Discoveries of Flint Implements in Beds of Post-Pleiocene Gravel and Clay_, with a list of forty-one localities where gravel and clay pits or gravel beds occur, as some of the places in the south of England where he thought flint implements might also by diligent search possibly be found; and subsequent discoveries confirmed his anticipations. It has been by the application of the same principle to the drift and river-valley gravels of the New World that a like success has been achieved. The result of a careful study of the tool-bearing gravel of the Delaware may be thus summarised from recent reports of trustworthy scientific observers. The Trenton gravel is a post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river was larger than its present volume. It represents apparently the latest of the surface deposits of the upper Delaware valley;[54] and Dr. Abbott remarks of it: “The melting of a local glacier in the Cattskill Mountains would probably result, at the headwaters of the Delaware, in a continued flood of sufficient volume, if supplemented by the action of floating ice, to form the Trenton gravels.”[55] But these gravels are now recognised as the youngest of the series of ancient implement-bearing deposits. Underneath lies the older Columbia gravel, which has also yielded—though in much fewer numbers,—palæoliths of primitive types. The researches of Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson in the State of Delaware have already been referred to; and from those results, as well as from similar disclosures in Ohio and Indiana, it is no longer doubted that reliable traces have been recovered of American man contemporary with the mammoth and the mastodon; and—like the old cave-dwellers of Cro-Magnon,—a hunter of the reindeer in the valley of the Delaware.

American archæologists have undoubtedly been repeatedly deceived by the misleading traces of comparatively modern remains in deposits of some geological antiquity; as in instances already referred to in the California gravel beds. In these, indeed, ground and polished instruments of stone, including a “plummet” of highly polished syenite, “an exhibition of the lapidary’s skill superior to anything yet furnished by the Stone age of either continent,”[56] are produced from time to time from the same post-pliocene formation where the remains of the elephant and mastodon abound. Dr. Abbott did not overlook the danger to which the archæologist is thus exposed on a continent which, so far as its aborigines are concerned, has scarcely yet emerged from its Stone age. He accordingly remarked in his original report: “The chance occurrence of single specimens of the ordinary forms of Indian relics, at depths somewhat greater than they have usually reached, even in constantly cultivated soils, induced me, several years since, to carefully examine the underlying gravels, to determine if the common surface-found stone implements of Indian origin were ever found therein, except in such manner as might easily be explained, as in the case of deep burials by the uprooting of large trees, whereby an implement lying on the surface, or immediately below it, might fall into the gravel beneath, and subsequently become buried several feet in depth; and lastly, by the action of the water, as where a spring, swollen by spring freshets, cuts for itself a new channel, and carrying away a large body of earth, leaves its larger pebbles, and possibly stone implements of late origin, upon the gravel of the new bed of the stream.” But there is little difficulty in separating chance-buried neolithic or modern implements from the genuine palæolithic celts or hatchets abundantly present in the undisturbed gravel beds, from which they have been taken on their first exposure.

Professor Henry C. Lewis, of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, states that “at the localities on the Pennsylvania Railroad, where extensive exposures of these gravels have been made, the deposit is undoubtedly undisturbed. No implement could have come into this gravel except at a time when the river flowed upon it, and when they might have sunk through the loose and shifting material. All the evidence points to the conclusion that at the time of the Trenton gravel flood, Man, in a rude state, with habits similar to those of the river-drift hunter of Europe, and probably under a climate similar to that of more northern regions, lived upon the banks of the ancient Delaware, and lost his stone implements in the shifting sands and gravel of the bed of that stream.”[57] To this Dr. Abbott adds: “At just such a locality as Trenton, where the river widens out, traces of man, had he existed during the accumulation of the gravel, would be most likely to occur. This is true not only because there is here the greatest mass of the gravel, and the best opportunities for examining it in section, but the locality would be one most favourable for the existence of man at the time. The higher ground in the immediate vicinity was sufficiently elevated to be free from the encroachments of the ice and water, and the climate, soil, and fauna are all such as to make it possible for man to exist at this time in this locality.”[58] In 1878 the tusk of a mastodon was found under partially stratified gravel at a depth of fourteen feet; and Dr. Abbott states that, within a few yards of this, palæolithic implements have been gathered, one at the same and three at greater depths. Now that an intelligent interest has been awakened in the subject, numerous labourers are enlisted in its elucidation. To this a coherent unity has been given by the archæologists of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and the curators of the National Museum at Washington. The results of a systematic inquiry by the latter into the localities and numbers of examples of supposed palæolithic works of art already recovered, have disclosed abundant confirmatory evidence. Special attention was invited to the occurrence of surface-finds, as well as to the depth and the geological indications of age in those recovered from excavations or chance exposures under the surface. Of the superficial examples the proof of the occurrence of stone implements of palæolithic types over widely diffused areas, from New England to Texas, is abundant. Much caution is required in the conclusions derived from such implements found exposed, or in superficial deposits, on a continent where weapons and implements of stone are still in frequent use. But after the elimination of all doubtful examples, abundant evidence remains of the presence of man on the American continent in a Palæolithic as well as an early Neolithic age. An interesting _résumé_ of recent evidence is embodied in the “Results of an Inquiry as to the Existence of Man in North America during the Palæolithic Period of the Stone Age,” by Mr. Thomas Wilson of the National Museum at Washington.[59]

It may still be a question whether the Palæolithic age of the New World is equally remote with that of the eastern hemisphere. The date approximately assigned thus far to the American Palæolithic era is, geologically speaking, recent; and on that very account adapts itself to other favoured assumptions, such as the supposed Eskimo pedigree derived from the race of Europe’s Reindeer period. This chimes in with the old idea of the American antiquary that the _Skrælings_ referred to in the Eric Saga were Eskimo, as is far from improbable, though the assumption rests on no definite evidence. Dr. Abbott accordingly reproduces the statement of Professor Dawkins, in confirmation of the revived belief. “We are without a clue to the ethnology of the river-drift man, who most probably is as completely extinct at the present time as the woolly rhinoceros or the cave-bear; but the discoveries of the last twenty years have tended to confirm the identification of the cave-man with the Eskimo.” Such a fanciful hypothesis once accepted as fact, its application to American ethnology is easy; and so Dr. Abbott proceeds to appeal unhesitatingly to evidence sufficient “to warrant the assertion that the palæolithic man on the one hand, and the makers of the argillite spear points on the other, stand in the relationship of ancestor and descendant; and if the latter, as is probable, is in turn the ancestor of the modern Eskimo: then does it not follow that the River-drift and Cave-man of Europe, supposing the relationship of the latter to the Eskimo to be correct, bear the same close relationship to each other as do the American representatives of these earliest of people?”[60]

Such an appeal to European archæology can scarcely fail to suggest some very striking contrasts thereby involved. As the thoughtful student dwells on all the phenomena of change and geological revolution which he has to encounter in seeking to assign to the man of the European Drift his place in vanished centuries, his mind is lost in amazement at the vista of that long-forgotten past. Yet inadequate as the intermediate steps may appear, there are progressive stages. Amid all the overwhelming sense of the vastness of the period embraced in the changes which he reviews, the mind rests from time to time at well-defined stations, in tracking the way backward, through ages of historical antiquity, into the night of time, and so to that dim dawn of mechanical skill and rational industry in which the first tool-makers plied their ingenious arts. But, so far as yet appears, it is wholly otherwise throughout the whole western continent, from the Gulf of Mexico northward to the pole. North America has indeed a Copper age of its own very markedly defined; for the shores and islands of Lake Superior are rich in pure native copper, available for industrial resources without even the most rudimentary knowledge of metallurgic arts. But the tools and personal ornaments fashioned out of this more workable material are little, if at all, in advance of the implements of stone; and, with this exception, the primitive industry of North America manifests wondrously slight traces of progression through all the ages now assigned to man’s presence on the continent.

The means available for forming some just estimate of the character of native American art are now abundant. In the National Museum at Washington; the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Mass.; the Peabody Academy at Salem; the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia; the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.; and in various Historical Societies and University Museums throughout the States; the student of American archæology has the means of obtaining a comprehensive view of the native arts. At the Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia in 1876, the various States vied with one another in producing an adequate representation of the antiquities specially characteristic of their own localities; and numerous valuable reports, of the Smithsonian Institution, the United States Geographical Surveys, the Geological Survey of Canada, and the Geological Surveys of various States, have furnished data for determining the prehistoric chroniclings of the northern continent.

One of the latest publications of this class is Dr. Abbott’s own volume, entitled _Primitive Industry: or Illustrations of the Handiwork in Stone, Bone, and Clay of the native Races of the Northern Atlantic Seaboard of America_. It is a most instructive epitome of North American archæology. Notwithstanding the limits set in the title, works in metal as well as in stone are included; and what are the results? Twenty-one out of its twenty-three chapters are devoted to the detailed illustrations of stone and flint axes, celts, hammers, chisels, scrapers, drills, knives, etc. Fish-hooks, fish-spears, awls or bodkins, and other implements of bone, pottery, pipes both in stone and clay, and personal ornaments, receive the like detailed illustration; but nearly all are in the rudest stage of rudimentary art. An advance upon this is seen in the pottery of some southern states. That of the Mound-Builders appears to have shown both more artistic design and better finish. The carving in bone, ivory, and slate-stone of various western tribes, as well as of the extinct Mound-Builders, was also of a higher character. But taking them at their highest, they cannot compare in practical skill or variety of application with the industrial arts of Europe’s Neolithic age; and we look in vain for any traces of higher progress. For well nigh four centuries, this continent has been familiar to European explorers and settlers. During some considerable portion of that time, by means of agricultural operations, and all the incidents consequent on urban settlement, its virgin soil has been turned up over ever-increasing areas. For nearly forty years I have myself watched, with the curious interest of one previously familiar with the minute incidents of archæological research in Britain, the urban excavations, railway cuttings, and other undesigned explorations of Canadian soil. Within the same period, both in Canada and the United States, extensive canal, railway, and road-works have afforded abundant opportunities for research; and a widespread interest in American antiquities has tended to confer an even exaggerated importance on every novel discovery. And with what result? Dr. Abbott, in crowning such explorations with his interesting and valuable discovery of the turtle-back celts and other implements of the Delaware gravel, has epitomised the prehistoric record of the northern continent. The further back we date the presence of man in America, the more marvellous must his unprogressive condition appear. Whatever may be the ampler disclosures relative to the palæolithic or primeval race, it does not seem probable that this northern continent will now yield any antiquities suggestive of an extinct era of native art and civilisation. Here we cannot hope to find a buried Ilium, or Tadmor in the Wilderness. Everywhere the explorer wanders, and the agriculturist follows, turning up the soil, or digging deeper as he drains and builds; but only to disturb the grave of the savage hunter. The Mound-Builders of its great river-valleys have indeed left there their enduring earthworks, wrought at times in regular geometrical configuration on a gigantic scale, strangely suggestive of some overruling and informing mind guiding the hand of the earthworker. But their mounds and earthworks disclose only implements of bone and flint or stone, with here and there an equally rude tool of hammered native copper. The crudest metallurgy of Europe’s Copper age was unknown to their builders. The art of Tubal-cain, the primitive worker in brass and iron, had not dawned on the mind of any native artificer. Only the ingeniously carved tobacco pipe, or the better-fashioned pottery, gives the slightest hint of even such progress beyond the first infantile stage of the tool-maker as is shown in the artistic carvings of the cave-men contemporary with the mammoth and the reindeer of post-glacial France.