NO. 



GREAT STONE MONUMENTS FEWKES 



49 



The plain near Acora, Peru, is covered with many rude monuments 

 in the forms of circles and rectangles constructed of unwrought up- 

 right stones, which Squier finds " almost identical " with cromlechs 

 of Europe, and " might be transferred to Brittany or Wales and pass 

 for structures contemporary with the thousand rude monuments of 

 antiquity found in those regions." 



The long, and at times seemingly tortuous, trail we have followed 

 has led the speaker to the following generalization. Although the 

 megaliths are among the oldest buildings or architectural structures 

 erected by man, all, from the simplest to the most complex, belong to 

 a series wholly distinct from 

 that including habitations 

 of the living. From the 

 rude uncut monoliths to the 

 perfection of architectural 

 expression, the Parthenon, 

 there are many and varied 

 forms of religious edifices, 

 temples, and shrines, but 

 none of them were erected 

 primarily as human resi- 

 dences. Man has never 

 built as good a dwelling 

 for himself as for his ances- 

 tors or gods. Man's noblest 

 architectural efforts are not 

 for abodes for himself while 

 living, but in response to 

 a striving for ideals far higher than personal vanity or shelter for his 

 family. Even dwellings of despots shrink into insignificance in com- 

 parison with the creations of a race influenced by the highest religious 

 feeling. The habitations of the builders of the great temples whose 

 ruins astound us by their magnitude, are forgotten; they do not 

 belong in the same series as the megaliths we have studied ; they 

 were built by individuals for shelter and personal comfort. Mega- 

 lithic monuments are expressions of a community feeling influencing 

 man to cooperate for ideals higher than self and should be judged by 

 a very different standard. Temples are not modified human dwell- 

 ings, but evolutions of the same religious ideal which led man in early 

 times to erect monoliths and colossi. 



Fig. 36. — Corner of massive wall. Cuzco, 

 Peru, from Squier. 



