The whole evidence supplied by Northern archæology proves that in so far as it had any civilisation of foreign origin, it must have been derived from the South, where alike in Central and in Southern America, diverse races, and a native civilisation replete with elements of progress, have left behind them many enduring memorials of skill and ingenuity. But the extremely slight and very partial traces of its influence on any people of the northern continent would of itself suffice to awaken doubts as to its long duration. The civilisation of Greece and Rome did indeed exercise no direct influence on transalpine Europe; but long centuries before the Romans crossed the Alps, as the disclosures of the lake villages, the crannoges, the kitchen middens, and the sepulchral mounds of Central and Northern Europe prove, the nations beyond their ken were familiar with weaving, and with the ceramic and metallurgic arts; were far advanced as agriculturists, had domesticated animals, acquired systems of phonetic writing, and learned the value of a currency of the precious metals.
Midway between North America with its unredeemed barbarism, and the southern seats of a native American civilisation, Mexico represents, as I believe, the first contact of the latter with the former. A gleam of light was just beginning to dawn on the horizon of the northern continent. The long night of its Dark Ages was coming to a close, when the intrusion of the Spaniards abruptly arrested the incipient civilisation, and began the displacement of its aborigines and the repetition of the Aryan ethnical revolution, which had already supplanted the autochthones of prehistoric Europe.
The publication in 1848 of the first volume of the _Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge_, devoted to the history and explorations of the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, gave a wonderful stimulus to archæological research in the United States. For a time, indeed, much credulous zeal was devoted to the search for buried cities, inscribed records, and the fancied recovery, in more or less modified form, in northern areas, of the civilisation of the Aztecs; not unmingled with dreams of Phœnician, Hebrew, Scandinavian, and Welsh remains. The history of some of its spurious productions is not without interest; but its true fruits are seen in numerous works which have since issued from the American press, devoted to an accurate record of local antiquities. So thoroughly has this already been carried out, that it may now be affirmed that, to all appearance, the condition of the Indian tribes to the north of Mexico, as shown in the rude arts of a Stone age, scarcely at all affected in its character by their use of the native copper of Lake Superior, represents what prevailed throughout the whole northern continent in all the centuries—however prolonged,—since the hunters in the Delaware valley fashioned and employed their turtle-back celts.
