[cAMPBELL] AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY ga 
Kasseem in Arabia. The stone buildings of Central America, such as 
those of Copan, Palenque, Uxmal, and Chichen-Itza, as well as some 
within the area of Mexico proper, are distinct in character, and have 
been compared with such oriental remains as the temple of Boro-Bodo 
in Java, while their cartouche-like hieroglyphic groups exhibit relation- 
ship with the characters of the Easter Island inscriptions. The analogues 
of the Mexican pyramids and other stone structures may be found in 
ancient Japan, but the Casas Grandes, towards the borders of the United 
States, built of adobe or unburnt brick, were one not assured of their 
antiquity, might very well be placed to the credit of the conquering 
Spaniard. Pueblo architecture differs little from that of the walled 
villages of Tartary and the other aboriginal outlines of towns in Bashan 
and the Hauran. Finally, the cliff dwellings, high up in the rocky 
ledges of the western canyons, carry one back to the abodes of the 
Kenites in Mount Hor, who put their nest in a rock. 
In Oregon and Washington and in British Columbia the mound- 
building area begins, and extends eastward into western Ontario, its chief 
extent in the United States being from Dakota to the Atlantic, south- 
ward to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. Professor Cyrus Thomas's 
elaborate report, constituting the transactions of the Bureau of Ethnology 
for 1890-91, does not touch upon the mounds of British Columbia and the 
Northwestern States, but, beginning with Manitoba and the Dakotas 
follows the track of their builders east and south. Many of these mounds 
are small affairs, built solely for purposes of interment. Others, again of 
large size and very varied design, were simply raised platforms for a 
wooden architecture that has long crumbled into dust. Similar artificial” 
mounds exist in the Japanese islands, in Corea and northern China, and 
throughout Siberia, clustering most thickly about the River Yenisei. 
They are also found in Tartary,in northern India, in parts of Persia and 
in the Caucasus, as well as throughout the whole of Syria. The Siberian 
mounds, the only class in the Old World that has been systematically 
explored, are identical in character with those of America, the chambered 
tumuli used for interment being of the same nature even to the layers of 
birch-bark spread over the body of the dead. Professor Thomas and 
Major Powell are both agreed that the mounds of America are of no very 
great antiquity, and that they were the work of the ancestors of existing 
Indian tribes that dwelt in the vicinity of their sites when the white man 
first became acquainted with them. When, however, these authorities 
limit the culture of the Mound-Builders to that which prevailed among 
the Indians at the beginning of European colonization, they either rate 
the latter more highly than early travellers indicate it to have been or 
depreciate the evidence of mound contents illustrative of considerable 
pictorial skill in gold and copper work and of much agricultural and 
commercial activity. 
