﻿41 6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS [VOL. 47 



conquerors and colonists, and were discontinued so abruptly that 

 very meager records of their operation have been preserved. The 

 story of the struggles of primitive man in exploiting the valleys and 

 mountains and in extracting the staple materials of the stone age 

 from their rocky beds forms one of the most interesting and impor- 

 tant chapters in the history of incipient civilization. With only 

 stone, bone, and wooden implements the aborigines attacked the 

 massive strata, breaking up solid bodies of flint, quartz, obsidian, 

 jasper, etc., for the manufacture of implements and carving out huge 

 monoliths from the living rock for building and sculpture. A study 

 of the American mines and quarries gives us a vivid conception of 

 the strength and persistence of the forces that underlie human de- 

 velopment and of the difficulties encountered by the race in carrying 

 culture upward through the stone age to the higher level of the age 

 of metal. The shaping of the stone into implements and utensils 

 supplemented the work of the quarrymen, and the story of the devel- 

 opment is clearly told in many lands, but America's contributions to 

 the history of this most important branch of activity are exception- 

 ally full and satisfactory. 



Architecture. — Aboriginal architecture in America teaches the 

 lessons of the initial development of this branch of culture with ex- 

 ceptional clearness, beginning at the lowest stage and carrying it 

 up to about the stage of the keystone arch. The present period 

 affords a wide range of phenomena representing the elementary 

 forms of building, and the post-Columbian chronicles give us 

 somewhat meager glimpses of the higher development that came 

 under the observation of the Spanish conquerors, whilst archeologic 

 remains supplement the lessons of the historic period. We find con- 

 structions of great variety and of remarkable preservation in the 

 Mississippi valley, in the Pueblo country, on the Mexican plateau, 

 in Yucatan. Guatemala, and Honduras, and in South America. By 

 the aid of these we see how the midden and the earth mound develop 

 into the pyramid with its multiple stairways of cut stone ; how the 

 walls change from irregularly placed stone and clay-covered wicker 

 to massive structures of accurately hewn stone ; how the chamber 

 spaces, ceiled at first with weak timbers subject to quick decay, are 

 spanned later by the offset arch of stone. W r e see supported on this 

 native arch the concrete roof, so massive as to defy the earthquake 

 ami support the forest growth of succeeding centuries: we see the 

 multiplication of stories, tier on tier: we see the spanned space, lim- 

 ited at first to a few feet, increase indefinitely to the many-vaulted 

 roof supported by a wilderness of limestone columns: we see walls 

 decorated within and without with symbolic sculptures, single build- 



