PREHISTORIC ART IN AMERICA, 825 



impossible to attribute them to the barbarous tribes that inhabited the 

 country at the time of the arrival of the Europeans. These tribes were 

 incapable of executing works of this kind, and even of comprehending 

 any art, however crude it may appear to us. Who, then, were the 

 peoples to whom we can attribute the painted stones ? What was 

 their origin ? The illustrious German traveler tells us nothing that can 

 diminish our ignorance on this point. 



There are mentioned as among the works in the country of the 

 Chibkas, in the United States of Colombia, a stone probably designed 

 for sacrificial purposes, and sustained by caryatides, a jaguar sculp- 

 tured at the entrance to a cave near Neyba, and gigantic llamas. In 

 the land of the allied tribe of the Muiscao, the granitic and syenitic 

 rocks are adorned with colossal figures of crocodiles and tigers, guard- 

 ians doubtless of the images of the sun and moon, the supreme gods 

 of the South American natives. All of these figures are coarsely exe- 

 cuted, and betray, like the North American figures, an extreme ab- 

 sence of taste and an absolute inability to reproduce objects faithfully. 



Abundant examples occur on the Pacific coast of an art which 

 we can best compare with that of Guatemala. A granite block near 

 Macaya, known as the Piedra de Leon, is covered with sculptures 

 which all are agreed are very ancient. The most important group 

 represents a face-to-face struggle of a man and a puma. The figures 

 suggest movement, and the man and the animal appear to be really 

 struggling. Near the little city of Nepen may be seen a colossal ser- 

 pent ; a short distance from Arequipa, trees and flowers ; farther on, 

 bisons with bored noses are wearing movable rings cut in the same 

 stone. At the Pintados de las Rayaa, geometrical figures, circles, and 

 rectangles, the meaning of which can not be defined, take the place 

 of figures from life. In the province of Tarapaca, considerable sur- 

 faces are covered with figures of men and animals mostly fairly good 

 specimens of work, and with a kind of characters arranged vertically. 

 The lines are from twelve to eighteen feet long, and each character 

 is quite deeply engraved. This is not an isolated instance. Inscrip- 

 tions very much worn have been found near Huara, and between 

 Mendoza and La Punta, Chili, is a large pillar on which letters have 

 been imagined analogous in some respects with the Chinese alphabet. 

 These evidences are very vague, and, however well disposed to dis- 

 cover in them the beginnings of graphic art, we can not as yet found 

 so important a conclusion upon them. 



The use of colors was certainly known to the Americans from the 

 most remote antiquity. The ochres, soot-black, and lime doubtless 

 furnished them their first colqring elements, and there was nothing in 

 the idea of using these pigments above the most primitive conceptions. 

 Experiment induced a rapid progress, and men learned to extract 

 vegetable colors from leaves, fruits, roots, stems, and seeds. A color- 

 ing-matter was also borrowed, like the Tyrian purple, from sea-mol- 



