Pre-Columbian civilizations

“ In Colombia and Venezuela archaic art is common in arid and mountainous territory. Local developments confuse the issue of time. Various cultural successions took place here, the Quimbaya, Sinu, and Tairona Indians having developed civilizations with possible Mayan affiliations in some features. The archaic figurines of Colombia are decorated with designs made by the process of negative painting through the medium of wax. This process is pretty generally distributed from central Mexico to northern Peru. ”

“ With regard to culture the differences have been considerable, although, with two or three apparent but not real exceptions, there was nothing in pre-Columbian America that could properly be called civilization; the general condition of the people ranged all the way from savagery to barbarism of a high type. ”

“ The revelations of scientific research are daily adding to the record of its glory in the remote past, when the Incas and their predecessors ruled with theocratic sway over a large part of the continent and lived in barbaric splendor at Cuzco, at Chan-Chan, or at some other of the great pre-Columbian capitals, the ruins of which to-day excite the admiration of archæologists and the enthusiasm of sightseers. ”

“ The idea of pre-Columbian intercourse between Europe and America, is thus no novelty. What we have anew to consider is: whether, in its wider aspect, it is more consistent with probability than the revived notion of a continent engulfed in the Atlantic Ocean? The earliest students of American antiquities turned to Phœnicia, Egypt, or other old-world centres of early civilisation, for the source of Mexican, Peruvian, and Central American art or letters ”

“ The time has arrived when Colombia should assume in the politics of South America the position to which she is called by her topographical situation, her historical traditions, her population, and her political conquests. ”

“ Throughout this mountain region, from the plateau of Bogotá in the north to the neighbourhood of latitude 30o south, was continued in pre-Columbian times the succession of groups of civilized or semi-civilized peoples of which the most northerly were the Nahua of Mexico, or perhaps the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. The ethnic boundary of the southern continent is to be drawn in Central America. ”

“ In conception and execution these works are purely aboriginal, and, so far as can be determined by the data at hand, are pre-Columbian, and possibly to a great extent remotely pre-Columbian. The discovery of articles of bronze, which metal we cannot prove to be of indigenous production, is the only internal evidence pointing toward the continuance of the ancient epoch of culture into post-Columbian times. The relics are obtained from tombs from which nearly all traces of human remains have disappeared. ”

“ That exception is the case of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. We have so long been accustomed to gorgeous accounts of the civilization of these countries at the time of their discovery by the Spaniards that it may at first shock our preconceived notions to see them set down as in the "middle status of barbarism," one stage higher than Mohawks, and one stage lower than the warriors of the Iliad. "Civilizations" of Mexico and Peru. ”

“ This Antillean area, I shall here call the Columbian Continent, as the great discoverer landed at its two east and west extremities—the land-fall on San Salvador in the Bermudas, and on the coast of Honduras in Central America, as well as at Cuba, and at the mouths of the Orinoco—and his bones rested for a long time in the soil of San Domingo. It—this Columbean Continent—is a significant intercalation. It unites North and South America, but it unites them subject to the phases of its own generation. ”

“ The issue in that earlier year of the Antiquitates Americanæ, sive scriptores septentrionales rerum ante-Columbiarum in America, by the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, under the editorship of Professor Charles Christian Rafn, produced a revolution, alike in the form and the reception of illustrations of ante-Columbian American history. ”

“ THE ancient so-called civilization which the Spaniards found in Mexico and Central America is the subject of much controversy: in the first place as regards its origin, whether indigenous, or allied to and derived from the civilizations of the Old World; and in the second place as regards its character, whether it was something more than a kind of grotesque barbarism, or of a nature that makes even the Spanish culture, which supplanted it, inferior in some respects by comparison. ”

“ All over the American continent at the time of the Discovery we see cultures and systems whose time had come. Back of most of the North and South American tribes we find the remains of mighty and utterly extinct civilizations—only their dim memory left. In the centers of higher culture from Mexico to Peru we see the ancient civilization brought further down to our own times; but there also, in process, all the incidents of break-up and an expiring greatness. ”

“ There are many striking parallels between the Colombian tales and those of the Pueblo tribes of North America—the great underworld-goddess, the serpent and the spider as subaqueous and subterranean powers, the return of the dead to the realm below, the importance of birds in cosmogony, the cult of the rainbow; and along with these there are tales of a culture hero and of a pair of divine brothers such as are common to nearly all American peoples. ”

“ Passing from the traces of Aztec and Mayan civilization, we may now glance at the antiquities of the Colombian states. There are no temples or large structures, because the natives, before the Spanish conquest, used timber for building, but owing to the abundance of gold in their brooks and rivers, they developed skill in gold-working, and produced fine ornaments of wonderful beauty. Many hollow figures have been found, evidently cast from molds, representing men, beasts, and birds, etc. Stone-cutting was also an art of this ancient race, sometimes applied to making idols bearing hieroglyphs. ”

“ But, assuming this to be true, the first migration of civilized people from South America must have taken place at a very distant period in the past, for it preceded not only the history indicated by the existing antiquities, but also an earlier history, during which the Peruvians and Central Americans grew to be as different from their ancestors as from each other. In each case, the development of civilization represented by existing monuments, so far as we can study it, appears to have been original. ”

“ Nor was this due to the fact that it alone, under Inca domination, had reached the stage of stable and diversified social organization; for the archaeology of Peru and [Pg 189] Bolivia shows that the Empire of the Incas was only the last in a series of central Andean civilizations which it excelled, if at all, in political power rather than in the arts, industrial or aesthetic.
Our knowledge of the religious and mythic ideas of these various groups reflects their relative importance at the time of the Spanish conquests more than their natural diversity. ”

“ Then Venezuela gave to South America Simon Bolivar, and the storm of revolution which swept the Continent shook these northern dependencies into transient wakefulness and energy, until the great day of Boyaca dawned, and New Granada and Venezuela, as Spanish colonies, ceased to be. Fit or unfit as they might have been for self-government at the time, these peoples set out to make histories as independent States, and the Spanish colonial era, having lasted over two and a half centuries, came to an end. ”

“ The isolation of these distant inland settlements has served to preserve the language, manners and physical characteristics of these early colonists with less variation than in any other Spanish-American state. They form an intelligent, high-spirited class of people, with all the defects and virtues of their ancestry. Their isolation has made them ignorant to some extent of the world’s progress, while a supersensitive patriotism blinds them to the discredit and disorganization which political strife and misrule have brought upon them. ”

“ If, moreover, Iberian, Hittite, Egyptian, Phœnician, or other of the world’s gray fathers, transplanted to America the germs of its long indigenous stock, we look in vain for any traces of their Old World civilisation north of the Mexican Gulf. Nor is it by any means an established truth that the arts of Central America or Peru are of any very great antiquity. ”

“ Had the destiny of Colombia, after the union, been entrusted to the direction of wise and unselfish patriots, as was the infant Republic of the United States of North America, one may well believe that the history of this part of South America, during the last three-quarters of a century, would have been quite different from what it has been, and that it would have been spared those countless internecine wars that have deluged the country in blood and rendered civilization, in its higher sense, impossible. ”

“ The white contingent in the population of Colombia is chiefly composed of the descendants of the Spanish colonists who settled there during the three centuries following its discovery and conquest. Mining enterprises and climate drew them into the highlands of the interior, and there they have remained down to the present day, their only settlements on the hot, unhealthy coast being the few ports necessary for commercial and political intercourse with the mother country. ”

“ We shall, in a hasty review, turn back across the centuries intervening between the present time and the advent of Europeans with Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro, across the barbarism of the Indian period, across even the earlier times, when the Aztecs in the North, and the Peruvians under the Incas in the South, were cultivating their peculiar forms of civilization, to a more remote past occupied by those elder children of Time, to whose heritage these peoples appear to have succeeded. ”

“ The chief powers of southern South America—Argentina, Brazil, and Chili—had by the end of the nineteenth century in large measure successfully worked out their own problems. They resented the interference of a power of alien race such as the United States, and they suspected its good intentions in wielding the "Big Stick," especially after the cavalier treatment which Colombia had received. They observed with alarm the strengthening of the grip of the United States about the Caribbean. ”

“ She has fought for the antiquity of opinion, while she has guarded the avenue to facts. There are immense districts of Central and South America, which are yet a perfect terra incognita to the traveller and the antiquarian.
Entire tribes and nations in the gloomy ranges of the Andes and the Cordilleras have never submitted to the Spanish yoke, and still enjoy their original customs and institutions. So far as modern explorations have been made, the results are, in a high degree, auspicious. ”

“ We know as little of portions of the continent as we do of Central Africa, yet there is no section of the globe which suggests a greater degree of physical interest, or which would respond more readily and profitably to intelligent effort at development. When the Spaniards first came to South America, it was only in Peru, the land of the Incas, that they found natives who had made any substantial progress in civilization. ”

“ We are firmly convinced that civilization or self-improvement began among the savages of America, probably Peru, as it did three thousand years or more ago among the savages of Egypt and Babylon. We believe that the civilization found in America originated here and nowhere else. It is neither an importation nor imitation of anything else on earth. As a recent explorer of the ruins of Peru, Central America and Mexico well says, "The American monuments are different from those of any other known people, of a new order, and entirely and absolutely anomalous; they stand alone." ”

“ Truly, here was a people widely differentiated from the ruck of South American natives—those squalid Indians with whom the Spanish adventurers came into contact. Possessed of sufficient enterprise to establish an empire which, from north to south, extended from Quito in Ecuador to the River Maule in Chili, they were a noble and withal peaceful race; and the inexplicable manner in which this fabric of civilisation arose can only be compared in sheer wonder with the sudden manner of its fall. ”

“ According to the old Central American books and traditions, some of the principal seats of the earliest civilization, that of the “Colhuas,” was in this forest-covered region. In their time the whole was cultivated and filled with inhabitants. Here was a populous and important part of the Colhuan kingdom of “Xibalba,” which, after a long existence, was broken up by the Toltecs, and which had a relation, in time, to the Aztec dominion of Montezuma, much like that of the old monarchy of Egypt to the kingdom of the Ptolemies. ”

“ As after these ruins I saw no others in South America, for neither southern Bolivia nor Chile nor Argentina,152 nor Uruguay has any to shew, this seems the fittest place for such few thoughts on the ancient civilization of South America as are suggested to the traveller's mind by the remains of it which he sees and by what he reads in the books of historians and archæologists. A large part of the interest which Peru and Bolivia have for the modern world is the interest which this ancient civilization awakens. It is a unique chapter in the history of mankind. ”