Pre-Columbian history

“ 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 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Discoveries and investigations carried on during the 19th century have thrown much light on the splendid past of Central America. The still extant ruins of great buildings, unlike anything which is known in the old world, testify to the high culture attained in pre-Columbian days by several native peoples differing greatly from one another in speech and racial affinities. As a science the archaeology of Central America has scarcely yet emerged from its infancy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The mountain chains which cover this part of Colombia are the northern terminal ranges of the great Andean system. In northern Ecuador the Andes narrows into a single massive range which has the character of a confused mass of peaks and ridges on the southern frontier of Colombia. There are several lofty plateaus in this region which form a huge central watershed for rivers flowing east to the Amazon, west to the Pacific, and north to the Caribbean Sea. ”

“ It [73] cannot be too strongly insisted upon that any foreign influence arriving in the American continent in pre-Columbian times was not sufficiently powerful to have more than a merely transitory influence upon the customs or religious beliefs of the inhabitants.
This leads us to the conclusion that the religions of Mexico and Peru were of indigenous origin. Any attempt to prove them offshoots of Chinese or other Asiatic religion on the basis of a similarity of art or custom is doomed to failure. ”

“ Physical Geography.—Colombia is usually described as an extremely mountainous country, which is true of much less than half its total area. Nearly one half its area lies south-east of the Andes and consists of extensive llanos and forested plains, traversed by several of the western tributaries of the Amazon and Orinoco. These plains slope gently toward the east, those of the Amazon basin apparently lying in great terraces whose escarpments have the character of low, detached ranges of hills forming successive rims to the great basin which they partly enclose. ”

“ Although it is not improbable that the civilization of Mexico and Peru is at bottom congenital, as old elements of civilization could have been transported over the isthmus and on either side independently developed—in such a case the Muisca of Colombia might have formed the intermediate link—yet it is certain that the Mexicans and Peruvians were isolated, and as in the Old World with China and the rest of Asia, the one had no positive knowledge of the civilization of the other. ”

“ Her outlet was found in America. Here it is that that Power who orders history could try, on a fit scale, the great experiments of the new life. Thus it was ordered, let us say reverently, that South America should show what the Catholic church could do [Pg 152] in the line of civilizing a desert, and that North America should show what the coming church of the future could do. To us it is interesting to remember that Columbus personally led the first discovery of South America, and that he made the first effort for a colony on our half of the continent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Crossing the Atlantic, we find the empire of the Incas on the steep, bare, uninviting western slope of the Andes, when just across the divide there lay the rich countries now forming the Colombian republics and typically exuberant Brazil. ”

“ While Atlantis was sinking, some of the inhabitants likely escaped on rafts and boats, and be{338}ing exactly in the location whence Columbus and the Teneriffe ship were, they had nothing to do but to wait, and the trade winds would take them to the West Indices and Yucatan and Central America. We can now easily see why the oldest civilization of America is in Central America. Some of the immigrants stopped in the West Indies, for the aborigines Columbus found there spoke the same language as the Mayas and Caribs of Yucatan speak today. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ In most of the other republics there seems to be much less that can be called distinctive of each. Colombians,442 Venezuelans, and Ecuadorians inhabit regions generally similar, have had a similar history, and have all received about an equal infusion of native blood, though in each—and especially in Colombia—there are some few old Spanish families who have remained unaffected. ”

“ Other Colombian legends of the origin of men include the Pijaos belief, recorded by Fray Simon, that their ancestors had issued from a mountain, and the tradition of the Muzo—western neighbours of the Chibcha—that a shadow, Aré, formed faces from sand, which became men and women when he sprinkled them with water. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In following the historical narrative of these two elements we are confronted, as we are in any great epic, with a picture of how at a particular moment in human civilization a particular group of people has organized its life (just as we are confronted with the same issue, for example, in the other great epic we have studied, The Odyssey) .
Like many other epics, this novel has connections with a particular people's historical reality, in this case the development of the Latin American country of Colombia since its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century (1810 to 1825) . ”

“ Descending from the mountainous part of the country, we reach, to the east, that portion of Colombia situated upon the affluents of the Orinoco, a region which we may more readily consider in our description of that great river, lying mainly in the adjoining Republic of Venezuela. Here stretch the llanos, or plains, and the forests which are the home of the wilder tribes, for Colombia has various grades of civilization among her folk, of which the last are these aboriginals, and the middle the patient Christianized Indians, who constitute the bulk of the working classes. ”