THE ANTIQUITY OF THE RED RACE IN AMERICA. 1043 



agery, of tl.e nomadic^ Indians prevailed, which was indicated by their 

 principal occupations— war, hunting, and lishmg. 



Yet there are broad lines of demarcation in their culture, the princi- 

 pal and best defined of which was the building of mounds and earth- 

 works. These monuments, of such great magnitude and extent in 

 certain localities in the interior of the United States, did not extend 

 over half its territory. The monnds and earthworks were conhned 

 between the twenty-fifth and the fifty-first northern parallels of lati- 

 tude, and between the sixty-ninth and one hundred and first meridi- 

 ans of longitude. The mound-building area had its greatest length 

 from Cape Sable, Florida, to Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, and its gTeat- 

 est breadth from Point Pema.piid, Maine, to Bismarck, North Dakota. 

 No mounds or earthworks are found outside this area. 



The culture of the aborigines occupying Mexico and Central America, 

 with the pueblo regions of Arizona and New Mexico, was of a totally 

 different character from that in the other regions of North America. 

 They were sedentary, agricultural, religious, and highly ceremonial; 

 they built immense monuments of the most enduring character the 

 outside of the stone walls of some of which were decorated in a high 

 order of art, resembling more the great Certosa of Pavia than any 

 other monument in Europe. The Teocalh, or mounds of ceremony or 

 sacrifice, were immense. The manufacture and use of stone images 

 and idols were extensive and surprising to the last degTee Their 

 working of iade and the extensive use thereof surpasses that of any 

 other localiiy in prehistoric "times. Their pottery excites our wonder 

 and admiration; some specimens for their beauty, their elegance of 

 form, and their fineness of decoration; other specimens, of idols or 

 images, are astonishing on account of tl.e precision of their manufac- 

 ture'' and of the difficulty of its accomplishment by hand. 



The culture of Central America, Nicaragua, Yucatan, Costa Kica, 

 was as different from that of Mexico as the Mexican was from that of 

 the red Indian of the north. The gold ornaments of Chiriqui aud 

 Quimbaya are evidence, not simply of a different material, but of a 

 different art in working that material. The pottery ot Mexico, Nica- 

 ragua and Costa Pica displays such marked differences of kind, form, 

 color, decoration, size, and mode of manufacture as to show as much 

 difference between the cultures of these countries with a separation 

 between them as clearly marked and isolation each from the other as 

 between any three countries in modern times. The pottery milk pans 

 made in western Ohio and used there by our mothers were not more 

 different from the porcelain of Sevres or Meissen or the ware of Delft 

 than was the aboriginal pottery of America in different localities. 



The culture of Colombia and Peru in South America tells the same 

 story of separation and long-continued isolation, and it finds its con- 

 tinuation among the aborigines of the Orinoco, Amazon, La Plata and 

 so on south to Patagonia. The isolation of the Patagonians has been 



