The Indian city of Santo Domingo, which has an exclusive aboriginal population, is built in the same manner, the material being, as usual, sun-burnt bricks; and my friend Dr. Wm. Gambel informs me, that in a late journey from Santa Fé across the continent to California, he constantly observed an analogous style of building, as well in the dwellings of the present native inhabitants, as in those older and abandoned structures of whose date little or nothing is known.
Who does not see in the builders of these humbler dwellings, the descendants of the architects of Palenque, and Yucatan? The style is the same in both. The same objects have been arrived at by similar modes of construction. The older structures are formed of a better material, generally of hewn stone, and often elaborately ornamented with sculpture. But the absence of all decoration in the modern buildings, is no proof that they have not been erected by people of the same race with those who have left such profusely ornamented monuments in other parts of Mexico; for the ruins of Pueblo Bonito, in the direction of Navajo, and those of the celebrated Casas Grandes on the western Colorado, which were regarded by Clavigero as among the oldest Toltecan remains in Mexico, are destitute of sculpture or other decoration. In fact, these last named ruins appear to date with the primitive wanderings of the cultivated tribes, before they established their seats in Yucatan and Guatimala, and erected those more finished monuments which could only result from the combined efforts of populous communities, acting under the favorable influence of peace and prosperity. Every race has had its center or centers of comparative civilization. The American aborigines had theirs in Peru, Bogota and Mexico. The people, the institutions and the architecture were essentially the same in each, though modified by local wants and conventional usages. Humboldt was forcibly impressed by this archæological identity, for he himself had traced it, with occasional interruptions, over an extent of a thousand leagues; and we now find that it gradually merges itself into the ruder dwellings of the more barbarous tribes; showing, as I have often remarked, that there is, in every respect, a gradual ethnographic transition from these into the temple-builders of every American epoch.[14-*]