THE PROBLEMS OF ARCHEOLOGY 529 



explorations made by the Jesup expedition not long ago in this and 

 the neighboring regions seem to yield the interesting fact that all 

 these tribes were forced outward from the interior to the coast 

 at a period perhaps not very remote. 



In the central and southern portions of the United States, great 

 triumphs have been won by archeology. Since Squier and Davis 

 published their celebrated book, their work has been energetically 

 taken up by the Peabody Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, 

 and a number of other learned societies, and carried forward with 

 great success. The valleys of the Ohio and the Delaware, Wisconsin, 

 and the Lake region, the Mississippi Valley, the neighborhood of 

 this very place, which proudly calls itself the "Mound City," the 

 Alleghanies, Georgia, Florida, have yielded an immense number 

 of objects of the most interesting nature. For their preservation and 

 scientific study, museums have grown up in many American cities, 

 whose well-adapted and liberal equipment has roused the admira- 

 tion of scholars. Through these discoveries, the meager accounts 

 given by early writers of the Indian tribes who inhabited these 

 fertile plains at the time of the first white settlement accounts 

 which, to say nothing of their marked tendency to exaggeration, 

 plainly correspond with but little faithfulness to that which lay 

 before the eyes of the writers have received for the first time 

 their proper elucidation. For it seems to be firmly established by 

 the exhaustive investigations of the last few decades that it was the 

 ancestors of the Indians of to-day who were buried in the mounds, 

 sarcophagi, and graves; that it is their domestic utensils, their 

 ornaments, their ceremonial and social symbols, their instruments 

 of worship, which we contemplate with astonishment to-day in the 

 various American museums as objects discovered in the mounds. 

 That the condition of material, and perhaps the intellectual ad- 

 vancement, was distinctly higher than that of the Indians with 

 whom the immediate ancestors of the present generation had to 

 contend, may be seen at once from these discoveries. But the na- 

 ture of the discoveries shows us also that among them every man's 

 hand was not always, as people have been accustomed to suppose, 

 against every man, that rather, in spite of all their wars, there 

 was a wide range of predominantly peaceful intercourse. We fre- 

 quently find in one and the same spot copper from the Great Lakes, 

 mica from the Alleghanies, mussel-shells from the Gulf, pieces of 

 obsidian from the Central Basin, and snail-shells from the Pacific. 

 If, however, the old theory of a special race of mound-builders has 

 long ago had to be abandoned, a significant displacement of the 

 tribes undoubtedly occurred, none the less; and it is not impossible 

 that whole tribes have disappeared from the face of the earth, and 

 speak to us only in the fragments that we dig up. Philology (in the 



