III. PETROGLYPHS IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA
Some writers have endeavored to draw definite ethnic distinctions between the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North America and those farther south. The opinions and theories which have favored such discriminations have originated in error and ignorance. Until lately there has been but scanty scientific investigation of the peoples of Central and South America and but a limited exploration of the regions now or formerly occupied by them. The latest opinion of the best ethnologists is that no sufficient reason can be shown for separate racial classification of the aborigines of the three Americas. The examples of petroglyphs now presented from Central and South America, all of which are selected as typical, show remarkable similarity to some of those above illustrated and described, especially to those in California, New Mexico, and Arizona. This topic is further discussed under the heading of Special Comparison, Chapter XX, infra.
SECTION I.
PETROGLYPHS IN CENTRAL AMERICA.
NICARAGUA.
Dr. J. F. Bransford (a) gives the following account:
On a hillside on the southern end of the island of Ometepec, Nicaragua, about 1-1/2 miles east of Point San Ramon, are many irregular blocks of basalt with marks and figures cut on them. The hillside faces east, and is about half a mile from the lake. There were similar markings on many of the shore rocks, which, in May, were partially covered with water, notwithstanding that that was about the driest season. These markings were excavated about half an inch in depth and a little more in width. Human faces and spiral lines predominated. There was also a crown, a representation of a monkey, and many irregular figures.
Several illustrations from these rocks are presented, infra, in Figs. 1102 and 1103, and one is reproduced in this connection as Fig. 104.
GUATEMALA.
The following extract is taken from the work of Dr. S. Habel (a):
Santa Lucia is a village in the Republic of Guatemala, in the Department of Esquintla, near the base of the Volcano del Fuego, at the commencement of the inclined plane which extends from the mountain range to the coast of the Pacific Ocean. * * *
The sculptured slabs are in the vicinity of the village. The greater number of them form an extended heap, rendering it probable that there are others hidden from view that more extended researches would reveal. * * * All the sculptures, with the exception of three statues, are in low relief, nearly all being in cavo-relievo, that is, surrounded by a raised border, the height of which indicates the elevation of the relief. The same kind of relief was practiced by the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians.
In seven instances the sculpture represents a person adoring a deity of a different theological conception in each case. One of these seems to represent the sun, another the moon, while in the remaining five it is impossible to define their character. All these deities are represented by a human figure, of which only the head, arms, and breast are correctly portrayed, proving that the religious conceptions had risen to anthropomorphism, while the idols of the nations of Central America and Mexico, which have previously come to our knowledge, are represented by disfigured human forms or grotesque images.
Four of the other sculptures represent allegorical subjects; two of them the myth of the griffin, the bird of the sun.
The slabs on which the low reliefs are sculptured are of various sizes; the greater number of these, like those representing the deities, are 12 feet in length, 3 feet in width, and 2 feet in thickness. Nine feet of the upper part of these stones are occupied by the sculptures, while the lower 3 feet appear to have served as a base.
Several illustrations of these rock sculptures are presented, infra, as Figs. 1235 and 1236. It is evident that these very large slabs received their markings when they were in the locality in which they are now found so can be classed geographically.
SECTION 2.
SOUTH AMERICA.
Alexander von Humboldt (a) gives general remarks, now condensed, upon petroglyphs in South America:
In the interior of South America, between the second and fourth degrees of north latitude, a forest-covered plain is inclosed by four rivers, the Orinoco, the Atabapo, the Rio Negro, and the Cassiquiare. In this district are found rocks of granite and of syenite, covered with colossal symbolical figures of crocodiles and tigers, and drawings of household utensils, and of the sun and moon. The tribes nearest to its boundaries are wandering naked savages, in the lowest stages of human existence, and far removed from any thoughts of carving hieroglyphics on rocks. One may trace in South America an entire zone, extending through more than 8° of longitude, of rocks so ornamented, viz, from the Rupuniri, Essequibo, and the mountains of Pacaraima, to the banks of the Orinoco and of the Yupura. These carvings may belong to very different epochs, for Sir Robert Schomburgk even found on the Rio Negro representations of a Spanish galiot, which must have been of a later date than the beginning of the sixteenth century; and this in a wilderness where the natives were probably as rude then as at the present time. Some miles from Encaramada there rises in the middle of the savannah the rock Tepu-Mereme, or painted rock. It shows several figures of animals and symbolical outlines which resemble much those observed by us at some distance above Encaramada, near Caycara. Rocks thus marked are found between the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo and, what is particularly remarkable, 560 geographical miles farther to the east, in the solitudes of Parime. Nicholas Hortsmann found on the banks of the Rupunuri, at the spot where the river winding between the Macarana mountains forms several small cascades, and before arriving at the district immediately surrounding lake Amucu, “rocks covered with figures,” or, as he says in Portuguese, “de varias letras.” We were shown at the rock of Culimacari, on the banks of the Cassiquiare, signs which were called characters, arranged in lines, but they were only ill-shaped figures of heavenly bodies, boa-serpents, and the utensils employed in preparing manioc meal. I have never found among these painted rocks (piedras pintadas) any symmetrical arrangement or any regular even-spaced characters. I am therefore disposed to think that the word “letras,” in Hortsmann’s journal, must not be taken in the strictest sense.
Schomburgk saw and described other petroglyphs on the banks of the Essequibo, near the cascade of Warraputa. Neither promises nor threats could prevail on the Indians to give a single blow with a hammer to these rocks, the venerable monuments of the superior mental cultivation of their predecessors. They regard them as the work of the Great Spirit, and the different tribes whom we met with, though living at a great distance, were nevertheless acquainted with them. Terror was painted on the faces of my Indian companions, who appeared to expect every moment that the fire of heaven would fall on my head. I saw clearly that my endeavors to detach a portion of the rock would be fruitless, and I contented myself with bringing away a complete drawing of these memorials. Even the veneration everywhere testified by the Indians of the present day for these rude sculptures of their predecessors show that they have no idea of the execution of similar works. There is another circumstance which should be mentioned. Between Encaramada and Caycara, on the banks of the Orinoco, a number of these hieroglyphical figures are sculptured on the face of precipices at a height which could now be reached only by means of extraordinarily high scaffolding. If one asks the natives how these figures have been cut, they answer, laughing, as if it were a fact of which none but a white man could be ignorant, that “in the days of the great waters their fathers went in canoes at that height.”
UNITED STATES OF COLOMBIA.
Mr. W. H. Holmes (b), of the Bureau of Ethnology, gives this account of petroglyphs in the province of Chiriqui, state of Panama:
Pictured rocks.--Our accounts of these objects are very meager. The only one definitely described is the “piedra pintal.” A few of the figures engraved upon it are given by Seemann, from whom the following paragraph is quoted:
“At Caldera, a few leagues (north) from the town of David, lies a granite block known to the country people as the piedra pintal or painted stone. It is 15 feet high, nearly 50 feet in circumference, and flat on the top. Every part, especially the eastern side, is covered with figures. One represents a radiant sun; it is followed by a series of heads, all with some variations, scorpions, and fantastic figures. The top and the other side have signs of a circular and oval form, crossed by lines. The sculpture is ascribed to the Dorachos (or Dorasques), but to what purpose the stone was applied no historical account or tradition reveals.”
These inscriptions are irregularly placed and much scattered. They are thought to have been originally nearly an inch deep, but in places are almost effaced by weathering, thus giving a suggestion of great antiquity. Tracings of these figures made recently by Mr. A. L. Pinart show decided differences in detail, and Mr. McNiel gives still another transcription.
In Fig. 105 Mr. McNiel’s sketch of the southwest face of the rock is presented.
Other illustrations from Colombia appear as Figs. 151 and 1166, infra.
GUIANA.
The name of Guiana has been applied to the territory between the rivers Amazon, Orinoco, Negro, and Cassiquiare. It was once divided into the French, British, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish Guianas. The Portuguese Guiana now belongs to Brazil and Spanish Guiana is part of Venezuela. Many petroglyphs have been found in the several Guianas. They appear throughout the whole of the part belonging to Venezuela, but they are more thickly grouped in parts of the valley of the Orinoco.
The subject is well discussed in the following extract from Among the Indians of Guiana, by im Thurn (a):
The pictured rocks of Guiana are not all of one kind. In all cases various figures are rudely depicted on larger or smaller surfaces of rocks. Sometimes these figures are painted, though such cases are few and of but little moment; more generally they are graven on the rock, and these alone are of great importance. Rock sculptures may, again, be distinguished into two kinds, differing in the depth of incision, the apparent mode of execution, and, most important of all, the character of the figures represented.
Painted rocks in British Guiana are mentioned by Mr. C. Barrington Brown. He says that in coming down past Amailah fall, on the Cooriebrong river, he passed “a large white sandstone rock ornamented with figures in red paint.” * * * Mr. Wallace, in his account of his Travels on the Amazons, mentions the occurrence of similar drawings in more than one place near the Amazons. * * *
The engraved rocks must be of some antiquity; that is to say, they must certainly date from a time before the influence of Europeans was much felt in Guiana. As has already been said, the engravings are of two kinds and are probably the work of two different people; nor is there even any reason to suppose that the two kinds were produced at one and the same time.
These two kinds of engravings may, for the sake of convenience, be distinguished as “deep” and “shallow,” respectively, according as the figures are deeply cut into the rock or are merely scratched on the surface. The former vary from one-eighth to one-half of an inch, or even more, in depth; the latter are of quite inconsiderable depth. This difference probably corresponds with a difference in the means by which they were produced. The deep engravings seem cut into the rock with an edged tool, probably of stone; the shallow figures were apparently formed by long continued friction with stones and moist sand. The two kinds seem never to occur in the same place or even near to each other; in fact, a distinct line may almost be drawn between the districts in which the deep and shallow kinds occur, respectively; the deep form occurs at several spots on the Mazeruni, Essequibo, Ireng, Cotinga, Potaro, and Berbice rivers. The shallow form has as yet only been reported from the Corentyn river and its tributaries, where, however, examples occur in considerable abundance. But the two kinds differ not only in the depth of incision, in the apparent mode of their production, and in the place of their occurrence, but also--and this is the chief difference between the two--in the figures represented.
Fig. 106 is a typical example of the shallow carvings.
Fig. 1104, infra, is a similar example of the deep carvings.
The shallow engravings seem always to occur on comparatively large and more or less smooth surfaces of rock, and rarely, if ever, as the deep figures, on detached blocks of rock, piled one on the other. The shallow figures, too, are generally much larger, always combinations of straight or curved lines in figures much more elaborate than those in the deep engravings; and these shallow pictures always represent not animals, but greater or less variations of the figure which has been described. Lastly, though I am not certain that much significance can be attributed to this, all the examples that I have seen face more or less accurately eastward.
The deep engravings, on the other hand, consist not of a single figure but of a greater or less number of rude drawings. * * * These depict the human form, monkeys, snakes, and other animals, and also very simple combinations of two or three straight or curved lines in a pattern, and occasionally more elaborate combinations. The individual figures are small, averaging from 12 to 18 inches in height, but a considerable number are generally represented in a group.
Some of the best examples of this latter kind are at Warrapoota cataracts, about six days’ journey up the Essequibo.
* * * The commonest figures at Warrapoota are figures of men or perhaps sometimes monkeys. These are very simple and generally consist of one straight line, representing the trunk, crossed by two straight lines at right angles to the body line; one about two-thirds of the distance from the top, represents the two arms as far as the elbows, where upward lines represent the lower part of the arms; the other, which is at the lower end, represent the two legs as far as the knees, from which point downward lines represent the lower part of the legs. A round dot, or a small circle, at the top of the trunk line, forms the head; and there are a few radiating lines where the fingers, a few more where the toes, should be. Occasionally the trunk line is produced downwards as if to represent a long tail. Perhaps the tailless figures represent men, the tailed monkeys. In a few cases the trunk, instead of being indicated by one straight line, is formed by two curved lines, representing the rounded outlines of the body; and the body thus formed is bisected by a row of dots, almost invariably nine in number, which seem to represent vertebræ.
Most of the other figures at Warrapoota are very simple combinations of two, three, or four straight lines similar to the so-called “Greek meander pattern,” which is of such widespread occurrence. Combinations of curved and simple spiral lines also frequently occur. Many of these combinations closely resemble the figures which the Indians of the present day paint on their faces and naked bodies.
The same author (pp. 368, 369) gives the following account of the superstitious reverence entertained for the petroglyphs by the living Indians of Guiana:
Every time a sculptured rock or striking mountain or stone is seen, Indians avert the ill will of the spirits of such places by rubbing red peppers (Capsicum) each in his or her own eyes. * * * Though the old practitioners inflict this self-torture with the utmost stoicism, I have again and again seen that otherwise rare sight of Indians children, and even young men, sobbing under the infliction. Yet the ceremony was never omitted. Sometimes, when by a rare chance no member of the party had had the forethought to provide peppers, lime juice was used as a substitute; and once, when neither peppers nor limes were at hand, a piece of blue indigo-dyed cloth was carefully soaked, and the dye was then rubbed into the eyes.
The same author (b) adds:
It may be as well briefly to sum up the few facts that can be said, with any probability, of these rock pictures in Guiana. The engravings are of two kinds, which may or may not have had different authors and different intention. They were still produced after the first arrival of Europeans, as is shown by the sculptured ship. They were, therefore, probably made by the ancestors of the Indians now in the country; for, from the writings of Raleigh and other early explorers, as well as from the statements of early colonists, it is to be gathered that the present tribes were already in Guiana at the time of the first arrival of Europeans, though not perhaps in the same relative positions as at present. The art of stone-working being destroyed by the arrival of Europeans, the practice of rock-engraving ceased. Possibly the customary figures were for a time painted instead of engraved; but this degenerated habit was also soon relinquished. As to the intention of the figures, that they had some seems certain, but what kind this was is not clear. Finally, these figures really seem to indicate some very slight connection with Mexican civilization.
The following extract from a paper on the Indian picture-writing in British Guiana, by Mr. Charles B. Brown (a), gives views and details somewhat different from the foregoing:
These writings or markings are visible at a greater or less distance in proportion to the depth of the furrows. In some instances they are distinctly visible upon the rocks on the banks of the river at a distance of 100 yards; in others they are so faint that they can only be seen in certain lights by reflected rays from their polished surfaces. They occur upon greenstone, granite, quartz-porphyry, gneiss, and jasperous sandstone, both in a vertical and horizontal position, at various elevations above the water. Sometimes they can only be seen during the dry season when the rivers are low, as in several instances on the Berbice and Cassikytyn rivers. In one instance, on the Corentyn river, the markings on the rock are so much above the level of the river when at its greatest height, that they could only have been made by erecting a staging against the face of the rock, unless the river was at the time much above its usual level. The widths of the furrows vary from half an inch to 1 inch, while the depth never exceeds one-fourth of an inch. * * * The furrows present the same weather-stained aspect as the rocks upon which they are cut. * * *
The Indians of Guiana know nothing about the picture-writing by tradition. They scout the idea of their having been made by the hand of man, and ascribe them to the handiwork of the Makunaima, their great spirit. * * *
As these figures were evidently cut with great care and at much labor by a former race of men, I conclude that they were made for some great purpose, probably a religious one, as some of the figures give indications of phallic worship.
VENEZUELA.
Prof. R. Hartmann (a) presented a pencil drawing of a South American rock, covered with sculptures, sketched by Mr. Anton Goering, a painter in Leipzig, which is here reproduced as Fig. 107. The rock is situated not far from San Esteban, a village in the vicinity of Puerto Cabello, in Venezuela. C. F. Appun, in Unter den Tropen, I, p. 82, remarks as follows in reference to this “Piedra de los Indios” (Indians’ stone), a large granite block lying by the side of the road:
These drawings, cut in the stone to a depth of half an inch, mostly represent snakes and other animal forms, human heads and spiral lines, and differ from those which I afterward saw in Guiana, on the Essequibo and Rupununi, in characters and forms, but their execution, like that of the latter, is rude. Though greatly weathered by the influence of rain and the atmosphere, the figures can still be perfectly distinguished and gigantic patience, such as none but Indians possess, was surely needed to carve them in the hard granite mass by means of a stone.
Dr. G. Marcano (a) gives an account translated as follows, which is connected with Fig. 108:
A tradition, the legend of the rock of Tepumereme, has been preserved by Father Gili. Some old writers, adhering to the Tamanak acceptation of the word, say indifferently tepumeremes or rocas pintadas (painted rocks). Usage has converted Tepumereme into a proper noun. At the present day it is applied exclusively to the rock situated some leagues from Encaramada, in the midst of the savanna, this rock having been the Mount Ararat of the Tamanaks.
Supposing that it is authentic, this legend, which we will relate further on [see page 33, supra], yields no information that might aid us in interpreting hieroglyphs, and so we are reduced to describing its principal characters.
Not all our pictographs correspond to the region of the Raudals, but in our ignorance of the peoples who carved them we see no harm in bringing them together so long as they all come from the banks of the Orinoco, and so long as the localities where they exist are indicated. The copies which we give of them have been very carefully made and reduced to one-tenth.
The first thing that strikes one on looking at them is that, despite differences in detail, the design presents a general common character. In fact, there is question not of figures with undecided forms, but with sure lines perfectly traced and combined in one and the same style. They are geometric designs rather than objective representations. The illustration [Fig. 108] came from a rock in the vicinity of Caïcara, a town situated on the right bank of the Orinoco, close to its last great bend. It represents three jaguars, one large and two small, the former being separated from the latter by an ornamented sun placed at the level of their feet. The spotting of their hides is rendered by means of angular lines arranged in so regular a manner that one might take them to be tigers did he not know that these felines never existed in these regions. The jaguars differ in insignificant details which, however, must have a purpose, in view of the general regularity. The largest shows six radiating lines on the muzzle and a circle in one of the ears. The second shows two hooks on the lower part of the body. The third is preceded by an isolated head, which is unfinished, without ears, inclined differently from the others. Some differences are also noted in the limbs.
Placed in the attitude of marching, these animals seem to descend from a height and to follow the same direction. Perhaps there is question here of a mnemonic whole, and, we might add, of a totem, if we knew that that system had been employed by the Indians of the region.
The same author (p. 205) gives a description of the petroglyphs of the rapids of Chicagua, here presented as Fig. 109.
This interesting collection includes the most varied ideographs.
Alongside of representations analogous to the preceding there appear new characters and partial groupings which we had not yet found. On running over them one passes successively from simple points to figures made up of tangled lines, to objective representations, and even to letters of the alphabet, a resemblance which, of course, is fortuitous.
The first group begins by three points similar to those in Fig. 19 [of Marcano, occurring in Fig. 1105 in this paper], followed by two circles with central dots, and terminates below in a plexus of broken lines. The second group, placed at the right, is composed of regular figures of great variety. Among them we note the two lowest, one of which resembles a K and the other a reversed A. A spiral, two circles, one of which has two appendices, and a figure in broken lines make up the third group. Below is seen a coiled serpent. Its head is characteristic; it is found in other pre-Columbian carvings of the Orinoco. As regards design e, we will merely call attention to the sign analogous to the E of our alphabet. It is found at times in the United States of America. [For this remark the author refers to the ideograph for pain, in Figs. 824 and 872, infra.]
Design f is an animal difficult to characterize; its head and tail may be guessed at. The body is covered with ornaments and the legs, very incomplete, are in the attitude of running. Design g represents probably a tree with an appendix of undulating lines; design h, a head surmounted by a complicated headgear. This is the first distinctly human representation that we have found in the country. The strange combinations of designs j, k, and l exhibit the dots at the end of the lines which we have already spoken of. Design m resembles an M; design n shows a circle with plane face.
Thus we see that the statements of some travelers concerning mysterious hieroglyphic combinations are far from being realized. As regards the exaggerations of Humboldt, they arise from the fact that he did not content himself with describing what he had seen. This is illustrated by the following sentence: “There is even seen on a grassy plain near Uruana an isolated granite rock on which, according to the account of trustworthy people, there are seen at a height of 80 feet deeply carved images which appear arranged in rows and represent the sun, the moon, and different species of animals, especially crocodiles and boas.” Elsewhere he speaks of kitchen and household utensils and of a number of objects which he can only have seen with the eyes of his imagination.
Other illustrations of pictographs in Venezuela are presented as Figs. 152, 153, 1105 and 1106, infra.
BRAZIL.
Remarks of general applicability to this region are made by Mr. J. Whitfield (a), an abstract of which follows:
The rock inscriptions were visited in August, 1865. Several similar inscriptions are said to exist in the interior of the province of Ceará, as well as in the provinces of Pernambuco and Piauhy, especially in the Sertaōs, that is, in the thinly-wooded parts of the interior, but no mention is ever made of their having been seen near the coast.
In the margin and bed only of the river are the rocks inscribed. On the margin they extend in some instances to 15 or 20 yards. Except in the rainy season the stream is dry. The rock is a silicious schist of excessively hard and flinty texture. The marks have the appearance of having been made with a blunt, heavy tool, such as might be made with an almost worn-out mason’s hammer. The situation is about midway between Serra Grande or Ibiapaba and Serra Merioca, about 70 miles from the coast and 40 west of the town Sobral. The native population attribute all the “Letreiros” (inscriptions), as they do everything else of which they have no information, to the Dutch, as records of hidden wealth. The Dutch, however, only occupied the country for a few years in the early part of the seventeenth century. Along the coast numerous forts, the works of the Dutch, still remain; but there are no authentic records of their ever having established themselves in the interior of the country, and less probability still of their amusing themselves with inscribing puzzling hieroglyphics, which must have been a work of time, on the rocks of the far interior, for the admiration of wandering Indians.
Mr. Franz Keller (a) narrates as follows regarding Fig. 110:
I found a “written rock” covered with spiral lines and concentric rings, evenly carved in the black gneiss-like material, and similar to those of the Caldeirão. Looking about for more, I discovered a perfect inscription, whose straight orderly lines can hardly be thought the result of lazy Indians’ “hours of idleness.” These characters were incised on a very hard smooth block 3 feet 4 inches in length, and 3-1/4 feet in height and breadth. It lay at an angle of 45°, only 8 feet above low water, and close to the water’s edge of the second smaller rapid, the Cachoeira do Ribeirão. The transverse section of the characters is not very deep, and their surface is as worn as that of the inscription farther down. In some places they are almost effaced by time and are to be seen distinctly only with a favorable light. A dark brown coat of glaze, found everywhere on the surface of the stones, laved at times by the water, covers the block so uniformly well on the concave glyphs as on the parts untouched by instrument, that many ages must have elapsed since some patient Indian spent long hours in cutting them out with his quartz chisel. As the lines of the inscription run almost perfectly horizontally, and as the figures near the Caldeirão and the Cachoeira and the Cachoeira das Lages are so little above low-water mark, the present position of the block seems to have been the original one. * * * On the rocky shores of the Araguaya, that huge tributary of the Tocantino, there are similar rude outlines of animals near a rapid called Martirios, from the first Portuguese explorers fancying they recognized the instruments of the Passion in the clumsy representation.
Dr. Ladisláu Netto (a) gives the illustration, reproduced as Fig. 111, of an inscription discovered by Domingos S. Ferreira Penna on the rock called Itamaraca, on the Rio Xingu. Dr. Netto’s description is translated as follows:
This whole inscription seems to represent one idea, figuring a collection of villages of vast proportions, inclosed by fortifications on two sides, at which it seems most accessible. On these same sides this collection of villages has external constructions or means of security, a kind of meanders or symbolic figures, which perhaps signify difficulties besetting the communication of the inhabitants with the surrounding fields.
In the lower part of the left-hand side there is a group of figures which seem to represent residences of chiefs, war houses, or redoubts, built near the principal entrance to the villages or to the city for its defense. There are found three figures of saurians, one with a large tail, on the side of the redoubts or fortified houses, as if representing the population, and two with small tails, which seem strange, and which walk toward the first.
This inscription is evidently the most perfect and the most notable of those found till now in all America [?], not only by its perfect condition and dimensions, but also by the mode in which a series of ideas has here been brought together.
The same author, on p. 552, furnishes copies of inscriptions carved on stones in the valley of the Rio Negro, and remarks: “In this series there are notable the two crowned personages [represented here in Fig. 112], one of whom holds a staff in the right hand, and below and under them there are two figures of capibars (sea-hogs) facing each other, and whose representation in black color resembles some figures from the inscriptions of North America.”
The following account is in Dr. E. R. Heath’s (a) Exploration of the River Beni:
Hieroglyphics were found on rocks at the falls and rapids of the rivers Madeira and Mamoré. * * * By accident we found some at the rapids at the foot of Caldierão do Inferno. Designs d and b are figures on the same rock side by side. a is another face of the same rock 10 feet across. e and f are on the upper surface of a rock, and c on one of its sides near the bottom; g is upon a rock 15 feet above the surface of the river. Many more were on the other rocks, but our time did not permit further copying. Mr. T. M. Fetterman, my companion, and myself sketched as fast as possible.
Fig. 113 is a reproduction of the illustration given.
The moment we arrived at the falls of Girão we searched for stone carvings, finding a few, and several repetitions of circles similar to those already found. Designs a and d are on the west and east side of the same rock, which is 9 feet in length. The figure is 21 inches high, the five circles 1 foot across. The east side was almost obliterated. Designs b and c are on loose stones; b, facing west, is 16 inches long; the rock is 50 inches long and 35 wide; c is 22 inches long; the rock 70 inches long by 27 inches broad, and was 30 feet above the river at date. The rocks are basaltic, dipping north at an angle of 86°. Many small stones, 1 and 2 feet in diameter, lie about, with marks on them nearly defaced.
Fig. 114 is a reproduction of the illustration.
At Pederneira all the rocks on the right side at the foot of the rapids are literally covered with figures. Fig. 115 a is on a large bowlder facing the south; b has joined to its right side, c; d, e, and f are on the same stone. Most of these rocks are only a few feet above low water and are covered at least eight months each year.
At Araras rapids the river is very wide, [containing] two islands and a rocky ledge crossing the river from the rapid. Nearly all the rocks on the right bank are covered with figures.
These are reproduced in Fig. 116.
Having no small canoe we could not pass a small channel so as to gather copies of the figures we could see at a distance. The approaches both above and below the rapids and falls are many times as difficult to pass as the rapid or fall itself, giving rise to the division into “head,” “body,” and “tail.” Some not only have these divisions, but also have these subdivided into “head, body, and tail.” One is constantly hearing “el rabo,” “el rabo del rabo,” “el rabo del cuerpo,” or “cabeza,” and so on.
Ribeiráo.--The tail of the rapid is 3 miles in length, a continuous broken current and fields of rocks. It is here, on a rock but a foot or two above the river, that the hieroglyphic shown in F. Keller’s “Amazon and Madeira” is found. As both Mr. Fetterman and myself made copies of it, unknown to the other till finished, our copies may be relied on, although differing from Keller’s. The length of the upper part is 45 inches and of the lower 36 inches, with 13 inches depth of each.
The copy mentioned is given here as Fig. 117.
The character of the lower right-hand corner was at one time as clearly cut as we represent it, some of the edges being yet clear and distinct.
At the rapid of Madeira there were a number of circles similar to 15 and 16 at Ribeiráo. On a ridge of rocks in the middle of the river, just above Larges rapids, are figures, and we had only time to sketch one, Fig. 118.
At Pao Grande we had a better harvest, showing evidently a later period than the former. One could easily believe these were made at the time of the Spanish conquest, the anchors, shields, and hearts being so often found in Spanish religious rites. Without doubt these were notices for navigators, as they were only out of water and seen when that passage was dangerous. Where projecting points of rock gave a face both up and down stream the same figure was on both faces. These rocks are syenitic granite and are cut to a depth of a half inch.
Fig. 119 is a reproduction of the copy published.
Senhor Tristão de Alencar Araripe (a) gives a large number of descriptions with illustrations, a selection of which, with translations, is as follows:
In the province of Ceará district of Inhamun, on the plantation of Carrapateira, is a small hill (or mound). On the face of one of its rocks, on the eastern side, near the edge of the road, is the inscription given in Fig. 120 painted in red.
In the district of Inhamun, on the plantation of Carrapateira, in Morcego, on the top of a mound, is a semicircular stone bearing on the face toward the mound the four characters which appear in Fig. 121.
In Inhamun, on the plantation of Carrapateira, in Morcego, is a large stone mound, the stones being piled up in a form of a tower; and in the inside of this tower, on the south or southwest side, are the characters given in Fig. 122 painted in bright, cochineal color.
Near the road from Cracará to Favelas, Inhamun, is a large rock, on the face of which, at the top of the western side, is the inscription [given on the upper part of Fig. 123,] all in red paint, as is also that following.
The under part of this rock forms a shelter, and on the roof of this shelter are all the remaining characters of the figure.
To the right or south of the shelter containing the inscription is a stone, with the form of the figure represented in the third place in the lower row of characters, counting from left to right, on a small heap, with the rear end raised up and the sharp point toward the east, its side inclining toward the west, in such a way that it can be climbed to the end which is erect.
On the same side, at the south, but beyond this, on the top of a rise, is a mound in sight, which is represented by the figure [delineated in the lower part of Fig. 123 at the extreme right,] resembling an inclosure (corral) with the 21 small lines before it.
Fig. 124 is a copy of an inscription at Pedra Lavrada, Province of Parahiba, published loc. cit., but the description by Senhor de Alencar Araripe is very meager, amounting in substance to the following:
This is an inscription of vast proportions on a large rock in the town of Pedra Lavrada, which takes its name from that of the rock.
Other petroglyphs in Brazil are copied in Figs. 1107, 1108, 1109, 1110, 1111, 1113, 1114, and also under the heading of Cup Sculptures, Chapter V, infra.
ARGENTINE REPUBLIC.
F. P. Moreno (a), Museo de La Plata, Catamarca, gives an illustration of an inscribed rock at Bajo de Canota, Mendoza, reproduced as Fig. 125.
PERU.
The following account is furnished by Messrs. de Rivero and Von Tschudi (a):
Eight leagues north of Arequipa there exist a multitude of engravings on granite which represent figures of animals, flowers, and fortifications, and which doubtless tell the story of events anterior to the dynasty of the Incas.
The illustration presented is copied here as Fig. 126.
The account is continued as follows:
In the province of Castro-Vireyna, in the town of Huaytara, there is found in the ruins of a large edifice, of similar construction to the celebrated palace of old Huanuco, a mass of granite many square yards in size, with coarse engravings like those last mentioned near Arequipa. None of the most trustworthy historians allude to these inscriptions or representations, or give the smallest direct information concerning the Peruvian hieroglyphics, from which it may possibly be inferred that in the times of the Incas there was no knowledge of the art of writing in characters and that all of these sculptures are the remains of a very remote period. * * * In many parts of Peru, chiefly in situations greatly elevated above the sea are vestiges of inscriptions very much obliterated by time.
The illustration is copied here as Fig. 127.
Charles Wiener (a), in Pérou et Bolivie, gives another statement, viz:
The archeologists of Peru have only found a single point--Tiahuanaco--where there were a limited number, though very interesting, of signs on rocks or stones which seemed to all observers to be symbolic. While there are a few petroglyphs found in Peru there are a large number of inscriptions properly so called on the tissues which cover or are found in connection with remains in the graves.
A number of pictographs from Peru are described and illustrated infra (see Figs. 688, 720, and 1167).
CHILE.
Prof. Edwyn C. Reed, of Valparaiso, Chile, presented through A. P. Niblack, ensign U. S. Navy, a photograph of a large bowlder bearing numerous sculpturings. No information pertaining to the locality at which the rock is situated or details respecting the characters upon it were furnished. The photograph is reproduced in Fig. 128.
Mr. R. A. Philippi, of Santiago, a corresponding member, made a communication to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, session of January 19, 1876, page 38, from which the following is extracted and translated:
I made a visit to the valley “Cajon de los Cipreses” in order to see the glacier giving rise to the Rio de los Cipreses, a tributary of the Cachapoal, and on that occasion had a cursory view of a rock with some pictures. I send you herewith a drawing of the rock and some of the figures cut on it. The rock, a kind of greenstone, lies at an altitude of about 5,000 feet above sea level, and the surface covered with figures, gently inclined down to the ground, may be 8 feet long and 5 or 6 feet high. The lines are about 4 mm. broad and 1 to 1/2 mm. deep. The carved figures on the stone are without any sort of order. When I spoke before a meeting of our faculty of physical and mathematical sciences concerning this stone which the shepherds of the region called piedra marcada, I learned that similar stones with carved figures are found in various places.
The figure mentioned is here reproduced as Fig. 129.
IV. EXTRA-LIMITAL PETROGLYPHS
The term “extra-limital,” familiar to naturalists, refers in its present connection to the sculptures, paintings, and drawings on rocks beyond the continents of North and South America, which are now introduced for comparison and as evidence of the occurrence throughout the world of similar forms in the department of work now under examination.
SECTION 1.
AUSTRALIA.
Mr. Edward G. Porter (a), in “The Aborigines of Australia,” says: “Their rock carvings are only outline sketches of men, fish, animals, etc., sometimes seen on the top of large flat rocks. Two localities are mentioned, one on Sydney common and another on a rock between Brisbane water and Hawkesbury river.”
Much more detailed information is given by Thomas Worsnop, viz:
At Chasm island, which lies 1-1/2 miles from “Groote Eylandt,” in the steep sides of the chasms, were deep holes or caverns undermining the cliffs, upon the walls of which are found rude drawings, made with charcoal and something like red paint, upon the white ground of the rock. These drawings represented porpoises, turtle, kangaroos, and a human hand, and Mr. Westall found the representations of a kangaroo with a file of thirty-two persons following after it.
In the MacDonnell ranges, 6 miles from Alice springs, in a large cave, there were paintings made by the aborigines, well defined parallel lines, intersected with footprints of the emu, kangaroo rat, and birds, with the outlines of iguana, hands of men, well sketched and almost perfect.
The parallel lines were of deep red and yellow colors, with brown and white borders; the footprints of light red, light yellow, and black; the outlines of the animals and hands were of red, yellow, white, black, wonderfully (considering it was done by savages) displayed and blended. All the paintings were in good preservation and evidently touched up occasionally, as they looked quite fresh.
I can only conjecture that these paintings were left as a record, a life-long charm, against the total destruction of the above animals. The paintings were seen by Mr. S. Gason, of Beltana, in the year 1873.
Very interesting groups of native drawings are to be seen in the caves of the Emily gorge in the MacDonnell ranges. Many of these drawings represent life-size objects.
The same author, page 20, describes the petroglyph copied in Fig. 130 as follows:
Mr. Arthur John Giles in the year 1873 discovered, at the junction of Sullivan’s creek with the Finke river, carvings on rocks. The sketch represents a smooth-faced rock, portion of a rock cliff about 45 feet high, composed of hard metamorphic slate. The lower portion of the sculptured face has been worn and broken away, forming a sort of cave. From the level of the creek to the lower edge of the sculptured rock is about 15 feet. The perpendicular lines are cut out, forming semicircular grooves about 1-1/2 inches in diameter, cut in to a depth of nearly half an inch; all remaining figures are also carved into the solid rock to a depth of one-fourth of an inch.
The same author, page 14, gives the following description of some pictures discovered between 1831 and 1840 by Capt. Stokes on Depuch island, one of the Forestier group in Dampier archipelago, on the western coast of Australia:
Depuch island would seem to be their favorite resort, and we found several of their huts still standing. The natives are doubtless attracted to the place partly by the reservoirs of water they find among the rocks after rain; partly that they may enjoy the pleasure of delineating the various objects that attract their attention on the smooth surface of the rocks. This they do by removing the hard red outer coating and baring to view the natural color of the greenstone, according to the outline they have traced. Much ability is displayed in many of these representations, the subject of which could be discovered at a glance. The number of specimens are immense, so that the natives must have been in the habit of amusing themselves in this innocent manner for a long period of time.
These savages of Australia, who have adorned the rocks of Depuch island with their drawings, have in one thing proved themselves superior to the Egyptian and the Etruscan, whose works have elicited so much admiration and afforded food to so many speculations, namely, there is not in them to be observed the slightest trace of indecency.
Fig. 131 shows a number of the characters drawn on these rocks. They are supposed to represent objects as follows:
a, a goose or duck; b, a beetle; c, a fish, with a quarter moon over, considered to have some reference to fishing by moonlight; d, a native, armed with spear and wommera or throwing stick, probably relating his adventures, which is usually done by song and accompanied with great action and flourishing of weapons, particularly when boasting of his powers; e, a duck and a gull; f, a native in a hut, with portion of the matting with which they cover their habitations; g, shark and pilot fish; h, a corroboreeo or native dance; i, a native dog; j, a crab; k, a kangaroo; l, appears to be a bird of prey, having seized upon a kangaroo rat.
The same author, page 5, describes another locality as follows:
In New South Wales, in the neighborhood of Botany bay and port Jackson, the figures of animals, of shields and weapons, and even of men, have been found carved upon the rocks, roughly, indeed, but sufficiently well to ascertain very fully what was the object intended. Fish were often represented, and in one place the form of a large lizard was sketched out with tolerable accuracy. On top of one of the hills the figure of a man, in the attitude usually assumed by them when they begin to dance, was executed in a still superior style.
The figure last mentioned was probably the god Daramūlŭn, see Howitt, Australian Customs of Initiation (a).
A special account of the aboriginal rock carvings at the head of Bantry bay is furnished by R. Etheridge, jr. (a), as follows, the illustration referred to being presented here as Fig. 132:
Of the numerous traces of aboriginal rock carvings to be seen on the shores of Port Jackson, none probably equal in extent or completeness of detail those on the heights at the head and on the eastern side of Bantry bay, Middle harbor, Australia.
The table of sandstone over which the carvings are scattered measures 2 chains in one direction by 3 in the contrary, and has a gentle slope of 7 degrees to the southwest. The high road as now laid out passes over a portion of them. * * *
The figures are represented in their present state in outline by a continuous indentation or groove from 1 to 1-1/2 inches broad by half an inch to 1 inch in depth. Some are single subjects scattered promiscuously over the surface; others form small groups, illustrating compound subjects, but all appear to have been executed about one and the same time. * * *
An advance on the other sculptures existing at this place seems to be made in the originals of the designs a and b, from the fact that an attempt was apparently made to represent a compound idea in the form of a single combat between two warriors. The figures are quite contiguous to one another. The individual marked a seems to be holding in his right hand a body similar to that represented as c, and the position in which it is held would lend color to the belief in its shield-like nature. In the opposite hand are a bundle of rods which have been suggested to be spears, and this explanation for the want of a better may be accepted. On the other hand, we are confronted with the fact that these weapons of offense and defense are held in the wrong hands, unless the holder be regarded as sinistral; otherwise it must be conceived that the warrior’s back is presented to the observer, which is contrary to the other evidence existing in the carving. The opponent, marked as b, with legs astride and arms outstretched much in the position of an aboriginal when throwing the boomerang, is equally definitive. I conceive it quite possible that the position of the boomerang close to the right hand conveys the idea that this man has just thrown the missile at the subject of a, allowing, of course, for the want of a knowledge of perspective on the part of the aboriginal artist. * * *
In several other figures the head is a mere rounded outline, but in b it is presented with a rather bird-like appearance. Another peculiarity is the great angularity given to the kneecap: this is visible both in a and b. It is further exemplified in the elbow of the left arms of both a and b.
SECTION 2.
OCEANICA.
The term “Oceanica” is used here without geographic precision, to include several islands not mentioned in other sections of the present work, in different parts of the globe, where specially interesting petroglyphs have been found and made known in publications. Although more such localities are known than are now mentioned, the pictographs from them are not of sufficient importance to justify description or illustration, but it may be remarked that they show the universality of the pictographic practice.
NEW ZEALAND.
Dr. Julius von Haast (a) published notes, condensed as follows, descriptive of the illustration produced here as Fig. 133:
The most remarkable petroglyphs found in New Zealand are situated about 1 mile on the western side of the Weka Pass road in a rock shelter, which is washed out of a vertical wall of rock lining a small valley for about 300 feet on its right or southern side. The whole length of the rock below the shelter has been used for painting, and it is evident that some order has been followed in the arrangement of the subjects and figures. The paint consists of kokowai (red oxide of iron), of which the present aborigines of New Zealand make still extensive use, and of some fatty substance, such as fish oil, or perhaps some oily bird fat. It has been well fixed upon the somewhat porous rock and no amount of rubbing will get it off.
Some of the principal objects evidently belong to the animal kingdom, and represent animals which either do not occur in New Zealand or are only of a mythical or fabulous character. The paintings occur over a face of about 65 feet, and the upper end of some reaches 8 feet above the floor, the average height, however, being 4 to 5 feet. They are all of considerable size, most of them measuring several feet, and one of them even having a length of 15 feet.
Beginning at the eastern end in the left-hand corner is the representation a of what might be taken for a sperm whale with its mouth wide open diving downward. This figure is 3 feet long. Five feet from it is another figure c, which might also represent a whale or some fabulous two-headed marine monster. This painting is 3 feet 4 inches long. Below it, a little to the right in d, we have the representation of a large snake possessing a swollen head and a long protruding tongue. This figure is nearly 3 feet long, and shows numerous windings.
It is difficult to conceive how the natives in a country without snakes could not only have traditions about them but actually be able to picture them, unless they had received amongst them immigrants from tropical countries who had landed on the coasts of New Zealand.
Between the two fishes or whales is b, which might represent a fishhook, and below the snake d a sword e with a curved blade.
Advancing toward the right is a group which is of special interest, the figure i, which is nearly a foot long, having all the appearance of a long-necked bird carrying the head as the cassowary and emu do, and as the moa has done. If this design should represent the moa, I might suggest that it was either a conventional way of drawing that bird or that it was already extinct when this representation was painted according to tradition; in which latter case k might represent the taniwha or gigantic fabulous lizard which is said to have watched the moa. h is doubtless a quadruped, probably a dog, which was a contemporary of the moa and was used also as food by the moa hunters. j is evidently a weapon, probably an adz or tomahawk, and might, being close to the supposed bird, indicate the manner in which the latter was killed during the chase. The post, with the two branches near the top l, finds a counterpart in the remnant of a similar figure g between the figures c and i. They might represent some of the means by which the moa was caught or indicate that it existed in open country between the forest. m, under which the rock in the central portion has scaled off, is like f, one of the designs which resemble ancient oriental writing.
Approaching the middle portion of the wall we find here a well-shaped group of paintings, the center of which n has all the appearance of a hat ornamented on the crown. The rim of this broad-brimmed relic measures 2 feet across. The expert of ancient customs and habits of the Malayan and South Indian countries might perhaps be able to throw some light upon this and the surrounding figures, o to r.
From q, which is altogether 3 feet high, evidently issues fire or smoke; it therefore might represent a tree on fire, a lamp or an altar with incense offering. * * * The figure o is particularly well painted, and the outlines are clearly defined, but I can make no suggestion as to its meaning. In s we have, doubtless, the picture of a human being who is running away from q, the object from the top of which issues fire or smoke. I am strengthened in my conviction that it is meant for a man by observing a similar figure running away from the monster aa. p, which has been placed below that group, might be compared to a pair of spectacles, but is probably a letter or an imitation of such a sign.
A little more to the right a figure 6 feet long is very prominent. It is probably the representation of a right whale in the act of spouting. Above it, in v, the figure of a mantis is easily recognizable, whilst u and the characters to the right below the supposed right whale again resemble cyphers or letters. w and y, although in many respects different, belong doubtless to the same group, and represent large lizards or crocodiles. * * * w is 4 feet long; it is unfortunately deficient in its lower portion, but it is still sufficiently preserved to show that besides four legs it possesses two other lower appendages, of which one is forked and the other has the appearance of a trident. I wish also to draw attention to the unusual form of the head. y is a similar animal 3 feet long, but it has eight legs, and head and tail are well defined. The head is well rounded off, and both animals represent, without doubt, some fabulous animal, such as the taniwha, which is generally described as a huge crocodile, of which the ancient legends give so many accounts.
aa, a huge snake-like animal 15 feet long, is probably a representation of the tuna tuoro, a mythical monster. It is evident that the tuna tuoro is in the act of swallowing a man, who tries to save himself by running away from it.
KEI ISLANDS.
Mr. A. Langen (a) made a report on the Kei islands and their Ghost grottoes, with a plate now reproduced as Fig. 134. He says:
The group of the small Kei islands, more correctly Arue islands [southwest from New Guinea], is a sea bottom raised by volcanic forces and covered with corals and shells. The corals appear but at a few points. They are in the main covered with a layer of shells cemented together, whose cement is so hard and firm that it offers resistance to the influence of time even after the shell has been weathered away.
On the whole, all the figures in similar genre are represented in thousands of specimens. [They may be divided into three series, the first including letters a to k; the second, letters l to t; the third, letters u to cc.] Many are effaced and unrecognizable, only letter k, series 1; letters n, o, s, t, series 2; and letters cc, series 3, stand isolated and seem to have a peculiar meaning. The popular legend ascribes the greatest age to the characters of series 1 and series 2, and it is said that the signs record a terrible fight in which the islanders lost many dead, but yet remained victors. It is stated that the signs were produced by the ghosts of the fallen. The signs of series 3 are said to be the work of a woman named Tewaheru, who was able to converse with ghosts as well as with the living. But, when on one occasion she helped a living man to recover his dead wife by betraying to him the secret of making the spirit return to the body, she is said to have been destroyed by the ghosts and changed into a blackbird, whose call even at this day indicates death. Since that time no medium is said to exist between the living and the dead, nor do any new signs appear on the rock.
Investigation in place showed me that the color of series 3 consists of ocher made up with water. The very oldest drawings seem to have been made with water color, as the color has nowhere penetrated into the rock. Most of the figures are painted on overhanging rocks in such a way as to be protected as much as possible against wind and weather; whether they bear any relation to the signs on the rocks of Papua, and what that relation may be, I am not yet able to judge.
It may safely be assumed that the caves as abodes of spirits were sacred, but did not serve as places of burial. The lead rings and pieces of copper gongs found in small number before some of the caves seem to be derived from sacrifices offered to the spirits. At the present day no more sacrifices are offered there, and the islanders knew nothing of the existence of these things.
EASTER ISLAND.
In this island carved human figures of colossal size have been frequently noticed in various publications, with and without illustrations, but apart from those statues ancient stone houses remain in which have been found large stone slabs bearing painted figures. Paymaster William J. Thompson, U. S. Navy (a) says of the Orongo houses, that the “smooth slabs lining the walls and ceilings were ornamented with mythological figures and rude designs painted in white, red, and black pigments.” The figures partake of the form of fish and bird-like animals, the exaggerated outlines clearly indicating mythologic beings, the type of which does not exist in nature. Fig. 135 is presented here, extracted by permission from the work above cited, and it may be of interest to know that nearly all, if not all, of the original specimens are now deposited in the U. S. National Museum.
While the curious carvings on the wooden tablets which are discussed in the work of Paymaster Thompson are not petroglyphs, it seems proper to mention them in this connection. Fig. 136 is taken from Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft, in Wien (a), and shows one of the tablets, which does not appear to be presented in this exact form in the work before mentioned.
The following remarks by Prof. de Lacouperie (b) are quoted on account of the eminence of his authority, though the subject is still under discussion:
The character of eastern India, the Vengi-Châlukya, was also carried to north Celebes islands. The people have not remained at the level required for the practical use of a phonetic writing. It is no more used as an alphabet. Curiously enough, it is employed as pictorial ornaments on the MSS. they now write in a pictographic style of the lowest scale. This I have seen on the facsimile (Bilderschriften des Ostindischen Archipels, Pl. I, 1, 11) published by Dr. A. B. Meyer, of Dresden, in his splendid album on the writings of this region.
In the Easter island, or Vaihu, some fourteen inscriptions have been found incised on wooden boards, perhaps of driftwood. The characters are peculiar. Most of them display strange shapes, in which, with a little imagination, forms of men, fishes, trees, birds, and many other things have been fancied. A curious characteristic is that the upper part of the signs are shaped somewhat like the head of the herronia or albatross. A pictorial tendency is obvious in all of these. Some persons in Europe have taken them for hieroglyphics, and have ventured to find a connection with the flora and fauna of the island. The knowledge of this writing is now lost; and it is not sure that the few priests and other men of the last generation who boasted of being able to read them could do so thoroughly. Anyhow, in 1770, some chiefs were still able to write down their names on a deed of gift when the island was taken in the name of Carlos III of Spain.
In examining carefully the characters I was struck by the forked heads of many of them, which reminded me of the forked matras of the Vengi-Châlukya inscriptions. A closer comparison with Pls. i to viii of the Elements of South Indian Paleography (A. C. Burnell, Elements of South Indian Paleography, from the fourth to the seventeenth century A. D., being An Introduction to the Study of South Indian Inscriptions and MSS., 2d edit., London and Mangalore, 1878; Pls. i, vii, viii are specially interesting for the forked matras) soon showed me that I was on the right track, and a further study of the Vaihu characters, and their analysis by comparing the small differences (vocalic notation) existing between several of them, convinced me that they are nothing else than a decayed form of the above writing of southern India returning to the hieroglyphical stage. With this clue, the inscriptions of Easter island are no more a sealed text. They can easily be read after a little training. Their language is Polynesian, and I can say that the vocabulary of the Samoan dialect has proved very useful to me for the purpose.
SECTION 3.
EUROPE.
In the more settled and civilized parts of Europe petroglyphs are now rarely found. This is, perhaps, accounted for in part by the many occasions for use of the inscribed rocks or by their demolition during the long period after the glyphs upon them had ceased to have their original interest and significance and before their value as now understood had become recognized. Yet from time to time such glyphs have been noticed, and they have been copied and described in publications.
But few of the petroglyphs in the civilized portions of Europe not familiar by publication have that kind of interest which requires their reproduction in the present paper. It may be sufficient to state in general terms that Europe is no exception to the rest of the world in the presence of petroglyphs.
A number of these extant in the British islands and in the Scandinavian peninsula, besides the few examples presented in this chapter, are described and illustrated in other parts of this work, and brief accounts of others recently noted in France, Spain, and Italy are also furnished.
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND.
Nearly all of the petroglyphs found in the British islands, accounts of which have been published, belong to the class of cup sculptures discussed in Chapter V, infra, but several inscriptions showing characters not limited to that category are mentioned in “Archaic Rock Inscriptions,” (a) from which the following condensed extract referring to a cairn in county Meath, Ireland, is taken:
The ornamentation may be thus described: Small circles, with or without a central dot; two or many more concentric circles; a small circle with a central dot, surrounded by a spiral line; the single spiral; the double spiral, or two spirals starting from different centers; rows of small lozenges or ovals; stars of six to thirteen rays; wheels of nine rays; flower ornaments, sometimes inclosed in a circle or wide oval; wave-like lines; groups of lunette-shaped lines; pothooks; small squares attached to each other side by side, so as to form a reticulated pattern; small attached concentric circles; large and small hollows; a cup hollow surrounded by one or more circles; lozenges crossed from angle to angle (these and the squares produced by scrapings); an ornament like the spine of a fish with ribs attached, or the fiber system of some leaf; short equiarmed crosses, starting sometimes from a dot and small circle; a circle with rays round it, and the whole contained in a circle; a series of compressed semicircles like the letters ∩ ∩ ∩ inverted; vertical lines far apart, with ribs sloping downwards from them like twigs; an ornament like the fiber system of a broad leaf, with the stem attached; rude concentric circles with short rays extending from part of the outer one; an ornament very like the simple Greek fret, with dots in the center of the loop; five zigzag lines and two parallel lines, on each of which, and pointing toward each other, is a series of cones ornamented by lines radiating from the apex, crossed by others parallel to the base--this design has been produced by scraping, and I propose to call it the Patella ornament, as it strikingly resembles the large species of that shell so common on our coasts, and which shell Mr. Conwell discovered in numbers in some of the cists, in connection with fragments of pottery and human bones; a semicircle with three or four straight lines proceeding from it, but not touching it; a dot with several lines radiating from it; combinations of short straight lines arranged either at right angles to or sloping from a central line; an S-shaped curve, each loop inclosing concentric circles; and a vast number of other combinations of the circle, spiral, line, and dot, which can not be described in writing.
Some of the ancient “Turf-Monuments” of England are to be classed as petroglyphs. The following extracts from the work of Rev. W. A. Plenderleath (b) give sufficient information on these curious pictures:
Although all the White Horses, except one, are in Wiltshire, that one exception is the great sire and prototype of them all, which is at Uffington, just 2-1/2 miles outside the Wiltshire Boundary and within that of Berkshire. * * * The one mediæval document in which the White Horse is mentioned is a cartulary of the Abbey of Abingdon, which must have been written either in the reign of Henry II or soon after, and which runs as follows: “It was then customary amongst the English that any monks who wished might receive money or landed estates and both use and devolve them according to their pleasure. Hence two monks of the monastery at Abingdon, named Leofric and Godric Cild, appear to have obtained by inheritance manors situated upon the banks of the Thames; one of them, Godric, becoming possessed of Spersholt, near the place commonly known as the White Horse Hill, and the other that of Whitchurch, during the time that Aldhelm was abbot of this place.”
This Aldhelm appears to have been abbot from 1072 to 1084, and from the terms in which the White Horse Hill is mentioned the name was evidently an old one at that time.
Now it was only two hundred years before this time, viz, in 871, that a very famous victory had been gained by King Alfred over the Danes close to this very spot. “Four days after the battle of Reading,” says Asser, “King Æthelred, and Alfred, his brother, fought against the whole army of the pagans at Ashdown. * * * And the flower of the pagan youths were there slain, so that neither before nor since was ever such destruction known since the Saxons first gained Britain by their arms.” And it was in memory of this victory that, we are informed by local tradition, Alfred caused his men, the day after the battle, to cut out the White Horse, the standard of Hengist, on the hillside just under the castle. The name Hengist, or Hengst, itself means Stone Horse in the ancient language of the Saxons, and Bishop Nicholson, in his “English Atlas,” goes so far as to suppose the names of Hengist and Horsa to have been not proper at all, but simply emblematical.
The Uffington horse measures 355 feet from the nose to the tail and 120 feet from the ear to the hoof. It faces to sinister, as do also those depicted upon all British coins. The slope of the portion of the hill upon which it is cut is 39°, but the declivity is very considerably greater beneath the figures. The exposure is southwest.
The author then describes the White Horse on Bratton Hill, near Westbury, Wilts, now obliterated, the dimensions of which were, extreme length, 100 feet; height, nearly the same; from toe to chest, 54 feet, and gives accounts of several other White Horses, the antiquity of which is not so well established. He then (c) treats of the Red Horse in the lordship of Tysoe, in Warwickshire, as follows:
This is traditionally reported to have been cut in 1461, in memory of the exploits of Richard, Earl of Warwick, who was for many years one of the most prominent figures in the Wars of the Roses. The earl had in the early part of the year found himself, with a force of forty thousand men, opposed to Queen Margaret, with sixty thousand, at a place called Towton, near Tadcaster. Overborne by numbers, the battle was going against him, when, dismounting from his horse, he plunged his sword up to the hilt in the animal’s side, crying aloud that he would henceforth fight shoulder to shoulder with his men. Thereupon the soldiers, animated by their leader’s example, rushed forward with such impetuosity that the enemy gave way and flew precipitately. No less than twenty-eight thousand Lancastrians are said to have fallen in this battle and in the pursuit which followed, for the commands of Prince Edward were to give no quarter. It was to this victory that the latter owed his elevation to the throne, which took place immediately afterwards.
The Red Horse used to be scoured every year, upon Palm Sunday, at the expense of certain neighboring landowners who held their land by that tenure, and the scouring is said to have been as largely attended and to have been the occasion of as great festivity as that of the older horse in the adjoining county of Berks. The figure is about 54 feet in extreme length by about 31 in extreme height.
The best known of Turf-Monuments other than horses is the Giant, on Trendle Hill, near Cerne Abbas, in Dorsetshire. This the same author (d) describes as follows:
This is a figure roughly representing a man, undraped, and with a club in his right hand; the height is 180 feet, and the outlines are marked out by a trench 2 feet wide and of about the same depth. It covers nearly an acre of ground. Hutchin imagines this figure to represent the Saxon god, Heil, and places its date as anterior to A. D. 600. * * * Britton, on the other hand, tells us that “vulgar tradition makes this figure commemorate the destruction of a giant who, having feasted on some sheep in Blackmoor and laid himself to sleep on this hill, was pinioned down like another Gulliver and killed by the enraged peasants, who immediately traced his dimensions for the information of posterity.” There were formerly discernible some markings between the legs of the figure rather above the level of the ankles, which the country folk took for the numerals 748, and imagined to indicate the date. We need, perhaps, scarcely remark that Arabic numerals were unknown in Europe until at least six centuries later than this period.
SWEDEN.
Mr. Paul B. Du Chaillu (a) gives the following (condensed) account describing, among many more “rock tracings,” as he calls them, those reproduced as Figs. 137 and 138:
There are found in Sweden large pictures engraved on the rocks which are of great antiquity, long before the Roman period.
These are of different kinds and sizes, the most numerous being the drawings of ships or boats, canoe-shaped and alike at both ends (with figures of men and animals), and of fleets fighting against each other or making an attack upon the shore. The hero of the fight, or the champion, is generally depicted as much larger than the other combatants, who probably were of one people, though of different tribes, for their arms are similar and all seem without clothing, though in some cases they are represented as wearing a helmet or shield.
On some rocks are representations of cattle, horses, reindeer, turtles, ostriches, and camels, the latter showing that in earlier times these people were acquainted with more southern climes. The greatest number and the largest and most complicated in detail of the tracings occur, especially in the present Sweden, in Bohuslän, “the ancient Viken of the Sagas,” on the coast of the peninsula washed by the Cattegat. They are also found in Norway, especially in Smaalenene, a province contiguous to that of Bohuslän, but become more scarce in the north, though found on the Trondhjem fjord.
Fig. 137 is a copy of a petroglyph in Tanum parish, Bohuslän, Sweden. The large figure is doubtless a champion or commander, the exaggerated size of which is to be noted in connection with that of the Zulu chiefs in Fig. 142, infra, from South Africa, and Fig. 1024, infra, from North America. There are numerous small holes and footprints between the chief and the attacking force. Height, 20 feet; width, 15 feet.
In Bohuslän the tracings are cut in the quartz, which is the geological formation of the coast. They are mostly upon slightly inclined rocks, which are generally 200 or 300 feet or more above the present level of the sea, and which have been polished by the action of the ice. The width of the lines in the same representation varies from 1 to 2 inches and even more, and their depth is often only a third or fourth of an inch, and at times so shallow as to be barely perceptible. Those tracings, which have for hundreds, perhaps for thousands, of years been laid bare to the ravages of the northern climate, are now most difficult to decipher, while those which have been protected by earth are as fresh as if they had been cut to-day. Many seem to have been cut near the middle or base of the hills, which were covered with vegetation, and were in the course of time concealed by the detritus from above.
Fig. 138 is from the same author (b) and locality. Height, 29 feet; width, 17 feet. The large birds and footprints and a chief designated by his size will be noticed, and also a character in the middle of the extreme upper part of the illustration which may be compared with the largest human form in Fig. 983, infra, from Tule valley, California.
FRANCE.
Perrier du Carne (a), gives the following account (translated and condensed) of signs carved on the dolmen of Trou-aux-Anglais, in Épone:
This dolmen, situated in the commune of Épone, in a place called Le Bois de la Garenne, was constructed beneath the ground; it was concealed from view and it is to this circumstance, no doubt, that its preservation is due. Nothing indicates that it has been surmounted by a tumulus; in any case this tumulus had long since disappeared, and the ground was entirely leveled when the digging was commenced some years ago. * * *
The characters (Fig. 139) are carved in intaglio on the farthest stone of the entrance, on the left side. The whole of the inscription measures 1^{m}, 10 in height and 82 centimeters in width, and may be divided into two groups, an upper and a lower one.
The upper character represents a rectangular figure divided into three transverse sections; in the third section and almost in the center is a cupule.
The lower character is more complicated and more difficult to describe. The first, or left-hand portion, represents a stone hatchet with a shaft; there is no doubt as to this, in my mind, as the outlines are perfectly clear, the design of the hatchet being very distinct. This hatchet measures 0^{m}, 108 in length and 38^{mm} in width to the edge of the blade. These are precisely the most common dimensions of the hatchets of our country. As to the remainder of the character, I think an interpretation of it difficult and premature.
On the whole, the result of an examination of these inscriptions leaves the impression that the author did not seek to cover a stone with ornamentation, for these outlines have nothing whatever of the ornamental, but that he wished to represent to his people, by intelligible symbols, some particular idea.
É. Cartailhac (a) begins an account of petroglyphs in the Department of Morbihan, in the old province of Brittany, translated and condensed as follows:
It is hardly possible to give a description of the designs in the covered way of Gavr’ inis. They are various linear combinations, the lines being straight, curved, undulating, isolated, or parallel, ramified like a fern, segments of concentric circles, limited or not, and decorating certain compartments with close winding spirals, recalling vividly the figures produced by the lines on the skin in the hollow of the hand and on the tips of the fingers.
In the midst of accumulated and very oddly grouped lines, which no doubt are merely decorative, there are found signs which must have had a meaning, and some figures easy to determine.
The hatchet, the stone hatchet and no other, the large hatchet of Tumiac, of Mané-er-Hroèg, and of Mont Saint Michel, is represented in intaglio or in relief, real size. A single pillar of Gavr’ inis bears eighteen of them. Less numerous groups are seen on some other blocks of the same covered way.
On a little block placed under the ceiling in order to wedge up one of the covering slabs, is seen the image of a hatchet with handle, conformable to a type found in the marsh of Ehenside in Cumberland, England. On many other monuments the presence of the same figures of hatchets, with handles or without, has been observed. The most curious slab is certainly that of Mané-er-Hroèg. It had been broken, and its three pieces had been thrown in disorder before the threshold of the crypt. One of its faces, very well smoothed off, bears a cartouche in the form of a stirrup, filled with enigmatic signs and surrounded above and below by a dozen hatchets with handles, all engraved.
One other sign, the imprint of the naked foot, is to be noted, found only once on this slab. Two human footprints are traced on one of the pillars of the crypt of the Petit-Mont in Arzon. They are said to be divided off, by a slight relief, from the rest of the granite frame on which they are sculptured, and which contains other drawings. Similar figures, engraved on rock or on tombstones, are cited from abroad, in lands far apart. In Sweden, the prints of naked or sandaled feet are common among the rock sculptures of the age of bronze which represent the curious scenes of the life of the people of that period. It is proper to note that these Scandinavian and Morbihan sculptures are not synchronous; the idea of an immediate influence of one people on the other can not be entertained. One might, however, maintain the identity of origin.
The other inscriptions of Brittany are enigmatic in every respect. But they probably had a conventional value, a determined meaning. There is first of all a sort of complicated cartouche, plainly defined, having the appearance of a buckler or heraldic shield. Among the isolated signs it is proper to note a figure of the shape of the letter U with the ends spread wide apart and curved in opposite directions. It recalls, with some aid from the imagination, the character which on the Scandinavian rocks represents more plainly ships and barks.
The sculpturing of hands and feet is to be remarked in connection with similar characters on the rocks in America, many illustrations of which appear in the present work.
B. Souché (a) in 1879 described and illustrated curious characters on the walls of the crypt of the tumulus of Lisières (Deux-Sèvres), France, some of which in execution markedly resemble several found in the United States and figured in this work.
SPAIN.
Mr. T. Jagor (a) communicated a brochure in reference to the Cueva de Altamira, transmitted to him by Prof. Vilanova in Madrid: “Short notes on some prehistoric objects of the province of Santander,” in which Don Marcelino de Sautuola describes the wall pictures and other finds in the cave discovered by him at Altamira. Mr. Jagor remarks as follows on the subject:
The reproductions of the large wall pictures discovered in that cave displayed, in part, so excellent technique that the question arose how much of this excellence is to be attributed to the prehistoric artist, and how much to his modern copyist. Mr. Vilanova, who visited the cave soon after its discovery, and who regards the wall pictures as prehistoric, being about equal in age to the Danish Kjökken-möddings, states that the pictures given are pretty faithful imitations of the originals. The published drawings are all found on the ceiling of the first cave; on the walls of the subsequent caves are seen sketches of those pictures, which the artist afterwards completed. The outlines of all the drawings have been cut in the wall with coarse instruments, and nearly all the bone implements found in the cave show scratches, which render it probable that they were used for this purpose. The colors used consist merely of various kinds of ocher found in the province, without further preparation. Finally Mr. Vilanova reports that in the cave farthest back there was found, in his presence, an almost perfect specimen of Ursus spelæus.
Don Manuel de Góngora y Martinez (a) gives the account translated as follows:
The inscriptions of Fuencaliente are of great interest and importance. About one league east of the town, on a spur of the Sierra de Quintana, at the site of the Piedra Escritá, there is an almost inaccessible place, the home of wild beasts and mountain goats. Beyond the river de los Batanes and the river de las Piedras, looking toward sunset and toward the town, the artisans of a remote age cut skillfully and symmetrically with the point of the pickax into the flank of the rock and of the mountain, which is of fine flint, leaving a facade or frontispiece 6 yards in height and twice as wide, and excavating there two contiguous caves, which are wide at the mouth and end in a point, making two triangular niches polished on their four faces. On the two outer fronts to the left and right appear more than 60 symbols or hieroglyphs, written in a simple and rustic way with the index finger of a rude hand, and with a reddish bituminous pigment. The niches, about a yard and a half in height, 1 yard deep, and half a yard at the mouth, are covered by the exceedingly hard and immense rock of the mountain. There is formed, as it were, a vestibule or esplanade before the monument, and it is defended by a rampart made of the rocks torn from the niches, strengthened with juniper, oaks, and cork trees. The half-moon, the sun, an ax, a bow and arrows, an ear of corn, a heart, a tree, two human figures, and a head with a crown stand out among those signs, the foreshadowings of primitive writing.
The inscription on the first triangular face of the second cave is reproduced here as the left-hand group of the upper part of Fig. 1108, infra, and that “on the outer plane to the right, which already turns pyramidally to the north,” is reproduced as the right-hand group of the same figure. They are inserted at that place for convenient comparison with other characters on the figure mentioned and with those in Figs. 1097 and 1107.
ITALY.
Mr. Moggridge (in Jour. Anthrop. Inst. Gr. Br. and I., VIII, p. 65) observes that one of the designs, q, reported by Dr. Von Haast from New Zealand (see Fig. 133), was the same as one which had been seen on rocks 6,900 feet above the sea in the northwest corner of Italy. He adds:
The inscriptions are not in colors, as are those given in Dr. Von Haast’s paper, but are made by the repeated dots of a sharp pointed instrument. It is probable that if we knew how to read them they might convey important information, since the same signs occur in different combinations, just as the letters of our alphabet recur in different combinations to form words. Without the whole of these figures we can not say whether the same probability applies to them.
SECTION 4.
AFRICA.
The following examples are selected from the large number of petroglyphs known to have been discovered in Africa apart from those in Egypt, which are more immediately connected with the first use of syllabaries and alphabets, with symbolism and with gesture signs, under which headings some examples of the Egyptian hieroglyphics appear in this work.
ALGERIA.
In the Revue Géographique Internationale (a) is a communication upon the rock inscriptions at Tyout (Fig. 140) and Moghar (Fig. 141) translated, with some condensation, as follows:
On the last military expedition made in the Sahara Gen. Colonieu made a careful restoration of the inscriptions on the rocks, whose existence was discovered at Tyout and Moghar. At Tyout these inscriptions are engraved on red or Vosgian sandstone, and at Moghar on a hard compact calcareous stone. At Moghar the designs are more complicated than those at Tyout. An attempt has been made to render ideas by more learned processes; to the simplicity of the line, the artlessness of the poses which are seen at Tyout, there are added at Moghar academic attitudes difficult to render, and which must be intended to represent some custom or ceremony in use among the peoples who then inhabited this country. The costume at Moghar is also more complicated. The ornaments of the head recall those of Indians, and the woman’s dress is composed of a waist and a short skirt fastened by a girdle with flowing ends. All this is very decent and elegant for the period. The infant at the side is swaddled. The large crouching figure is the face view of a man who seems to be bearing his wife on his shoulders. At the right of this group is a giraffe or large antelope. In the composition above may be distinguished a solitary individual in a crouching attitude, seen in front, the arms crossed in the attitude of prayer or astonishment. The animals which figure in the designs at Moghar are cattle and partridges. The little quadruped seated on its haunches may be a gerboise (kind of rat), very common in these parts.
In the inscriptions at Tyout we easily recognize the elephant, long since extinct in these regions, but neither horse nor camel is seen, probably not having been yet imported into the Sahara country.
EGYPT.
While the picture-writings of Egypt are too voluminous for present discussion and fortunately are thoroughly presented in accessible publications, it seems necessary to mention the work of the late Mrs. A. B. Edwards (a). She gives a good account of the petroglyphs on the rocks bounding the ancient river bed of the Nile below Philæ, which show their employment in a manner similar to that in parts of North America:
These inscriptions, together with others found in the adjacent quarries, range over a period of between three and four thousand years, beginning with the early reigns of the ancient empire and ending with the Ptolemies and Cæsars. Some are mere autographs. Others run to a considerable length. Many are headed with figures of gods and worshippers. These, however, are for the most part mere graffiti, ill drawn and carelessly sculptured. The records they illustrate are chiefly votive. The passer-by adores the gods of the cataract, implores their protection, registers his name, and states the object of his journey. The votaries are of various ranks, periods, and nationalities; but the formula in most instances is pretty much the same. Now it is a citizen of Thebes performing the pilgrimage to Philæ, or a general at the head of his troops returning from a foray in Ethiopia, or a tributary prince doing homage to Rameses the Great and associating his suzerain with the divinities of the place.
SOUTH AFRICA.
Dr. Richard Andree, in Zeichen bei den Naturvölkern (a), presents well-considered remarks, thus translated:
The Hottentots and the Bantu peoples of South Africa produce no drawings, though the latter accomplish something in indifferent sculptures. The draftsmen and painters of South Africa are the Bushmen, who in this way, as well as by many other striking ethnic traits, testify to their independent ethnic position. The extraordinary multitude of figures of men and animals drawn by this people within its whole area, now greatly reduced, from the cape at the south to the lands and deserts north of the Orange river, and which they still draw at this day in gaudy colors, testify to an uncommonly firm hand, a keenly observing eye, and a very effective characterization. The Bushman artist mostly selects the surfaces of the countless rock bowlders, the walls of caves, or rock walls protected by overhanging crags, to serve as the canvas whereon to practice his art. He either painted his figures with colors or chiseled them with a hard sharp stone on the rock wall, so that they appear in intaglio. The number of these figures may be judged from the fact that Fritsch at Hopetown found “thousands” of them, often twenty or more on one block; Hubner, at “Gestoppte Fontein,” in Transvaal, saw two hundred to three hundred together, carved in a soft slate. The earth colors employed are red, ochre, white, black, mixed with fat or also with blood. What instrument (brush?) is employed in applying the colors has not yet been ascertained, since, so far as I know, no Bushman artist has yet been observed at his work. As regards the paintings themselves, various classes may be distinguished, but in all cases the subjects are representations of figures; ornaments and plants are excluded. First of all, there are fights and hunting scenes, in which white men (boers) play a part, demonstrating the modern origin of these paintings. Next there are representations of animals, both of domestic animals (cattle, dogs) and of game, especially the various antelope species, giraffes, ostriches, elephants, rhinoceroses, monkeys, etc. A special class consists of representations of obscene nature, and, by way of exception, there has been drawn in one instance a ship or a palm tree.
Dr. Emil Holub (a) says:
The Bushmen, who are regarded as the lowest type of Africans, in one thing excel all the other South African tribes whose acquaintance I made between the south coast and 10° south latitude. They draw heads of gazelles, elephants, and hippopotami astonishingly well. They sketch them in their caves and paint them with ochre or chisel them out in rocks with stone implements, and on the tops of mountains we may see representations of all the animals which have lived in those parts in former times. In many spots where hippopotami are now unknown I found beautiful sketches of these animals, and in some cases fights between other native races and Bushmen are represented.
G. Weitzecker (a) gives a report of a large painting, in a cave at Thaba Phatsoua district of Léribé, here presented as Fig. 142, containing eighteen characters, with the addition of eight boys’ heads. It represents the flight of Bushman women before some Zulu Kaffirs (Matebele). The description, translated, is as follows:
As usual, the Bushmen are represented as dwarfs and painted in bright color as contrasted with the Kaffirs, who are painted large and of dark color. The scene is full of life, a true artistic conception, and in the details there are many important things to be noted. For this reason I add a sketch of it, with the figures numbered, in order to be able to send you some brief annotations.
I will premise that as far as the women are concerned, in the small figures, no mistaken notion should be entertained in regard to the anterior appendages which catch, or rather strike, the eye in some of them. There is question simply of the pudendal coverings of the Bushman women, consisting of a strip of skin, and flapping in the wind.
a seems to represent a woman in an advanced interesting condition, who in her headlong flight has lost even her mantle. She holds in her hand a mogope (disproportionate); that is to say, a gourd dipper, such as are found, I believe, among all the south African tribes.
b. This figure, besides the mogope which she holds in her left hand, carries away in her flight, steadying it on her head with her right hand, a nkho (sesuto), a baked earthenware vessel, in which drinks are kept, and of which the ethnographic museum now contains some specimens. This woman, too, has lost all her clothing except the pudendal covering, and she looks pregnant. The attitudes of flight, while maintaining equilibrium, I deem very fine.
c, f, g, h, l, m, and perhaps j. Women carrying their babies on their backs, as is the practice of the natives, in the so-called thari; that is, a sheepskin so prepared that they can fasten it to their bodies and hold it secure, even while bent to the ground or running.
l and m. Women with twins. It may be worthy of note that the painter has placed them last, hampered as they are with a double weight.
c. Apparently a woman who has fallen in her flight. Figures e and i represent men, who by their stature might be thought to be Bushmen, as also by their color, which, so far as I remember, is not the same as that of the men coming up after them, being rather similar to that of the women. In that case e would stoop to raise the woman c who has fallen, and i would point the way to the others. Otherwise, if there is question of Matebeles, which is rendered plausible by the fact that n (which evidently represents an enemy) is not larger in stature than those two, then e would stoop to snatch the baby of the fallen woman, and i would strive to catch up with the two women g and h, who flee before it.
j. I can not explain this unless as a diffusion of color, which has transformed into something unrecognizable the figure of the child carried by its mother, who has fallen, like b.
k seems to be a woman resigned to her fate, who touches her neck with the left hand, unless, indeed, the line which I take to be the arm is the sketch of the thari with the baby.
l. A woman who runs toward the looker-on.
m represents a woman who has sat down, perhaps in order to place her twins better in the thari, while behind her n arrives, preparing to spear her. With n the band of enemies begins plainly, o seeming to be the leader, who, standing still, gives the signal. But this figure must have been altered by the water, which by diluting the color of the body has made it appear as a garment.
p and q. These admirable portraits of impetuosity and menace are a pictorial translation of the saying “having long legs so as to run fast.”
r. A fine type of an attitude in the poise of running.
The author’s discussion respecting the difference in size between the male human figures mentioned as indicating their respective tribes would have been needless had he considered the frequent expedient of representing chiefs or prominent warriors by figures of much larger stature than that of common soldiers or subjects. This device is common in the Egyptian glyphs, and examples of it also appear in the present work. (See Figs. 138, 139, and 1024.)
The same author, loc. cit., gives a brief account of two petroglyphs found by him near Leribo, in Basutoland, South Africa. They were on a large hollow rock overlooking a plain where the bushmen might spy game. The rock was all covered with pictures to a man’s height. Many of them were entirely or almost entirely spoiled, both by the hands of herdsmen and by water running down the walls in time of rain. Some of them, however, are still very well preserved. They are shown on Fig. 143.
The left hand character represents a man milking an animal; the latter, judging by the back part, especially by the legs, was at first taken for an elephant; but the fore parts, especially the fore legs, evidently are those of a bovine creature or of an elk (eland). The enormous proportions of the back part are probably due to diffusion of colors, through the action of water running down the rock. The right hand character represents the sketch of an elk (eland), on which and under which are depicted four monkeys, admirable for fidelity of expression. The legs, with one exception, are not finished.
CANARY ISLANDS.
These islands are considered in connection with the continent of Africa.
S. Berthelot (a) gives an account, referring to Figs. 144 and 145, from which the following is extracted and translated:
A site very little frequented, designated by the name of Los Letreros, appears to have been inhabited in very ancient times by one of the aboriginal tribes established on the Island of Fer, one of the Canary islands. At a distance of about three-quarters of a league from the coast all the land sloping and broken by volcanic mounds extends in undulations to the edge of the cliffs which flank the coast. It is on this desert site, called Los Letreros, that inscriptions are found engraved on an ancient flow of basaltic lava, with a smooth surface, over an extent of more than 400 meters. On all this surface, at various distances and without any relation to each other, but placed where the lava presents the smoothest spots, rendered shining and glassy by the light varnish left by the volcanic matter in cooling, are the various groups of characters.
When we examine closely these different signs or characters so deeply engraved [pecked] on the rock, doubtless by means of some hard stone (obsidian or basalt), the first thing observed is that several identical signs are reproduced several times in the same group. These are, first, round and oval characters, more or less perfect, sometimes simple and isolated, again agglomerated in one group. These characters so often reproduced are again seen in juxtaposition or united, sometimes to others which are similar, sometimes to different ones, and even inclosed in others similar to them; for example, a in Fig. 144.
Round or more or less oval characters reappear several times in b.
Others, which are not met with more than once or twice among the groups of signs, also present notable variations; examples in c.
Of these are formed composite groups d, which belong, however, to the system of round signs.
Other analogous but not identical signs appear to assume rather the ovoid form than the round, and seem to have been so traced as not to be confounded with the round symbols. Some of them resemble leaves or fruit.
Another system of simple characters is the straight line, which can be represented by a stroke of the pen, isolated or repeated as if in numeration, and sometimes accompanied by other signs.
Other peculiar signs shown in e, which are not repeated, figure in the different groups of characters which the author has reproduced.
We notice further, in f, a small number of signs which bear a certain analogy to each other, and several of which are accompanied by other and more simple characters.
Several others still more complicated are in eccentric shapes which it is attempted to present in g.
Including the common oval characters often repeated and those consisting of a simple stroke similar to the strokes made by school children, all the various engraved characters scarcely exceed 400.
Fig. 145 gives a view of a series of different groups of signs in the length of the whole lava flow. The copyist has expressed by dots those symbols which were confused, partly defaced by the weather, or destroyed by fissures in the rock.
The same author (b) gives an account of several strange characters found engraved on a rock of the grotto of Belmaco, in the island of La Palma, one of the Canaries. He says:
These drawings, presented that they may be compared with those of Fer Island (Los Letreros), show some fifteen signs, some of which are repeated several times and others partly effaced by weather, or at least feebly traced. But what seems most remarkable is that six or seven signs are recognized as exactly similar to those of Letreros, of the island of Fer, and almost all the others are analogous, for we recognize at once in comparing them the same style of bizarre writing, formed of hieroglyphic characters, mainly rude arabesques.
SECTION 5.
ASIA.
A considerable number of petroglyphs found in Asia are described and illustrated under other headings of this work. The following are presented here for geographic grouping:
CHINA.
Prof. Terrien de Lacouperie (c) says:
It is apparently to the art of the aboriginal non-Chinese that the following inscription [not copied] belongs, should it be proved to be primitive; and it is the only precise mention I have ever found of the kind in my researches.
Outside of Li-tch’eng (in N. Shangtang), at some 500 li on the west towards the north, is a stone cliff mountain, on the upper parts of which may be seen marks and lines representing animals and horses. They are numerous and well drawn, like a picture.
JAPAN.
Prof. Edward S. Morse (a) kindly furnishes the illustration, reduced from a drawing made by a Japanese gentleman, Mr. Morishima, which is here reproduced (1/30 original size) as Fig. 145 a:
Prof. Morse in a letter gives further information as follows: “The inscriptions are cut in a rough way on the side of the cliff on the northwestern side of the bay of Otaru. Otaru is a little town on the western coast of Yezo. The cliffs are of soft, white tufa about 100 feet high, and the inscriptions were cut possibly with stone axes, and were 1 inch in width and from 1/4 to 1/2 of an inch in depth. They are about 4 feet from the ground.”
Prof. John Milne (a) remarks upon the same petroglyph, of which he gives a rude copy, as follows:
So far as I could learn the Japanese are quite unable to recognize any of the characters, and they regard them as being the work of the Ainos.
I may remark that several of the characters are like the runic m. It has been suggested that they have a resemblance to old Chinese. A second suggestion was that they might be drawings of the insignia of rank carried by certain priests; a third idea was that they were phallic; a fourth that they were rough representations of men and animals, the runic m being a bird; and a fifth that they were the handicraft of some gentleman desirous of imposing upon the credulity of wandering archæologists.
I myself am inclined to think that they were the work of the peoples who have left so many traces of themselves in the shape of kitchen middens and various implements in this locality. In this case they may be Aino.
Another illustration from Japan is presented in Pl. LII.
INDIA.
Mr. Rivett-Carnac, in Archæologic Notes on Ancient Sculpturings on Rocks in Kumaon, India (a), gives a description of the glyphs copied in Fig. 146:
At a point about two miles and a half south of Dwara-Hath, and twelve miles north of the military station of Ranikhet in Kumaon, the bridle-road leading from the plains through Naini Tal and Ranikhet to Baijnath, and thence on to the celebrated shrine of Bidranath, is carried through a narrow gorge at the mouth of which is a temple sacred to Mahadeo, ... which is locally known by the name of Chandeshwar.
About two hundred yards south of the temple, toward the middle of the defile, rises a rock at an angle of forty-five degrees presenting a surface upon which, in a space measuring fourteen feet in height by twelve in breadth, more than two hundred cups are sculptured. They vary from an inch and a half to six inches in diameter and from half an inch to an inch in depth, and are arranged in groups composed of approximately parallel rows.
The cups are mostly of the simple types and only exceptionally surrounded by single rings or connected by grooves.
SIBERIA.
N. S. Shtukin (a) referring to certain picture-writings on the cliffs of the Yenesei river, in the Quarterly Isvestia of the Imperial Geographical Society for 1882, says: “These are figured, but are not particularly remarkable, except as being the work of invaders from the far south, perhaps Persians. Camels and pheasants are among the animals represented.”
Philip John von Strahlenberg, in An Historico-Geographical Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia, etc., reported inscriptions relating to the chase, on the banks of the river Yenesei. He says of one: “It takes its characteristic features from the natural history of the region; and we may suppose it to embrace rude representations of the Siberian hare, the cabarda or musk deer and other known quadrupeds.”
He also furnishes a transcript of inscriptions found by him on a precipitous rock on the river Irtish. This rock, which is 36 feet high, is isolated. It has four sides, one of which faces the water and has a number of tombs or sepulchral caves beneath. All of the four faces have rude representations of the human form, and other unintelligible characters are drawn in red colors in a durable kind of pigment, which is found to be almost indestructible and is much used for rock inscriptions.
Prof. Terrien de Lacouperie, op. cit., makes the following remarks:
Symbolical marks, incised or drawn graffitti, not properly speaking inscriptions, have been found in Siberia, but they are not the expected primitive remains of ancient writings. Some are purely Tartar, being written in Mongolian and Kalmuck; others, obviously the work of common people, may be Arabic, while some others found on the left bank of the Jenissei river are much more interesting. They seem to me to be badly written in Syriac, from right to left horizontally, before the time of the adaptation of this writing to the Uigur and Mongol. The characters are still separated one from the other. On one of these graffitti found at the same place several Chinese characters, as written by common people, are recognizable.
Some hieroglyphical graffitti have been discovered on rocks above Tomsk, on the right bank of the Tom river, in Siberia. They are incised at a height of more than 20 feet. They are very rude, and somewhat like the famous Livre de Sauvages of merry fame in palæography. Quadrupeds, men, heads, all roughly drawn, and some indistinct lines, are all that can be seen. It looks more like the pictorial figures which can be used as a means of notation by ignorant people at any moment than like an historical beginning of some writing. There is not the slightest appearance of any sort of regularity or conventional arrangement in them.
The last we have to speak of are quite peculiar and altogether different from the others. The signs are painted in red. They are made of straight lines, disposed like drawings of lattices and window shades, and also like the tree characters of the Arabs and like the runes. They are met with near the Irtisch river, on a rock over the stream Smolank.
Figs. 513, 721, 722, and 723, infra, have relation to this geographic region.
It is to be remarked that some of the Siberian and Tartar characters, especially those reproduced by Schoolcraft, I, Pls. 65 and 66, have a strong resemblance to the drawings of the Ojibwa, some of which are figured and described in the present work, and this coincidence is more suggestive from the reason that the totem or dodaim, which often is the subject of those drawings, is a designation which is used by both the Ojibwa and the Tartar with substantially the same sound and significance.
V. CUP SCULPTURES
The simplest form of rock inscription is almost ubiquitous. In Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceanica, shallow, round, cup-like depressions are found, sometimes in rows, sometimes singly, sometimes surrounded by a ring or rings, but often quite plain. The cup-markers often arranged their sculpturings in regularly spaced rows, not infrequently surrounding them with one or more clearly cut rings; sometimes, again, they associated them with concentric circles or spirals. Occasionally the sculptors demonstrated the artificial character of their work by carving it in spots beyond the reach of atmospheric influences, such as the interiors of stone cists or of dwellings. It must, however, be noted that, although there is thus established a distinction between those markings which are natural and those which are artificial, it is possible that there may have been some distant connection between the two, and that the depressions worn by wind and rain may have suggested the idea of the devices, now called cup-markings, to those who first sculptured them.
Vast numbers of these cup stones are found in the British islands, often connected with other petroglyphs. In the county of Northumberland alone there are 53 stones charged with 350 sculptures, among which are many cup depressions. So also in Germany, France, Denmark, and indeed everywhere in Europe, but these forms took their greatest development in India.
The leading work relating to this kind of sculpture is that of Prof. J. Y. Simpson (a), afterward known as Sir James Simpson, who reduces the forms of the cup sculptures to seven elementary types, here reproduced in Fig. 147. His classification is as follows:
First type. Single cups.--They are the simplest type of these ancient stone-cuttings. Their diameter varies from 1 inch to 3 inches and more, while they are often only half an inch deep, but rarely deeper than an inch or an inch and a half. They commonly appear in different sizes on the same stone or rock, and although they sometimes form the only sculptures on a surface they are more frequently associated with figures of a different character. They are in general scattered without order over the surface, but occasionally four or five or more of them are placed in more or less regular groups, exhibiting a constellation-like arrangement.
Second type. Cups surrounded by a single ring.--The incised rings are usually much shallower than the cups and mostly surround cups of comparatively large size. The ring is either complete or broken, and in the latter case it is often traversed by a radial groove which runs from the central cup through and even beyond the ring.
Third type. Cups surrounded by a series of concentric complete rings.--In this complete annular form the central cup is generally more deeply cut than the surrounding rings, but not always.
Fourth type. Cups surrounded by a series of concentric, but incomplete rings having a straight radial groove.--This type constitutes perhaps the most common form of the circular carvings. The rings generally touch the radial line at both extremities, but sometimes they terminate on each side of it without touching it. The radial groove occasionally extends considerably beyond the outer circle, and in most cases it runs in a more or less downward direction on the stone or rock. Sometimes it runs on and unites into a common line with other ducts or grooves coming from other circles, till thus several series of concentric rings are conjoined into a larger or smaller cluster, united together by the extension of their radial branch-like grooves.
Fifth type. Cups surrounded by concentric rings and flexed lines.--The number of inclosing or concentric rings is generally fewer in this type than in the two last preceding types, and seldom exceeds two or three in number.
Sixth type. Concentric rings without a central cup.--In many cases the concentric rings of the types already described appear without a central cup or depression, which is most frequently wanting in the complete concentric circles of the third type.
Seventh type. Concentric circular lines of the form of a spiral or volute.--The central beginning of the spiral line is usually, but not always, marked by a cup-like excavation.
It often occurs that two, three, or more of these various types are found on the same stone or rock, a fact indicating that they are intimately allied to each other.
Prof. Simpson presents what he calls “the chief deviations from the principal types” reproduced here as Fig. 148.
The first four designs represent cups connected by grooves, which is a noticeable and frequently occurring feature. In Fig. 149 views of sculptured rock surfaces at Auchnabreach, Argyleshire, Scotland, are given. Simple cups, cups surrounded by one ring or by concentric rings, with radial grooves and spirals, appear here promiscuously mingled. Fig. 150 exhibits isolated as well as connected cups, a cup surrounded by a ring, and concentric rings with radial grooves, on a standing stone (menhir), belonging to a group of seven at Ballymenach, in the parish of Kilmichael-Glassary, in Argyleshire, Scotland.
Dr. Berthold Seeman remarks concerning the characters in Fig. 105, supra, copied from a rock in Chiriqui, Panama, that he discovers in it a great resemblance to those of Northumberland, Scotland, and other parts of Great Britain. He says, as quoted by Dr. Rau (d):
It is singular that, thousands of miles away, in a remote corner of tropical America, we should find the concentric rings and several other characters typically identical with those engraved on the British rocks.
The characters in Chiriqui are, like those of Great Britain, incised on large stones, the surface of which has not previously undergone any smoothing process. The incised stones occur in a district of Veraguas (Chiriqui or Alanje), which is now thinly inhabited, but which, judging from the numerous tombs, was once densely peopled.
From information received during my two visits to Chiriqui and from what has been published since I first drew attention to this subject, I am led to believe that there are a great many inscribed rocks in that district. But I myself have seen only one, the now famous piedra pintal (i. e., painted stone), which is found on a plain at Caldera, a few leagues from the town of David. It is 15 feet high, nearly 50 feet in circumference, and rather flat on the top. Every part, especially the eastern side, is covered with incised characters about an inch or half an inch deep. The first figure on the left hand side represents a radiant sun, followed by a series of heads or what appear to be heads, all with some variation. It is these heads, particularly the appendages (perhaps intended for hair?), which show a certain resemblance to one of the most curious characters found on the British rocks, and calling to mind the so-called “Ogham characters.” These “heads” are succeeded by scorpion-like or branched and other fantastic figures. The top of the stone and the other sides are covered with a great number of concentric rings and ovals, crossed by lines. It is especially these which bear so striking a resemblance to the Northumbrian characters.
Fig. 151 presents five selected characters from the rock mentioned: a attached to the respective numbers always refers to the Chiriqui and b to the British type of the several designs; 1_a_ and 1_b_ represent radiant suns; 2_a_ and 2_b_ show several grooves, radiating from an outer arch, resembling, as Dr. Seeman thinks, the Ogham characters; 3_a_ and 3_b_ show the completely closed concentric circles; 4_a_ and 4_b_ show how the various characters are connected by lines; 5_a_ and 5_b_ exhibit the groove or outlet of the circle.
Mr. G. H. Kinahan, in Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1889, p. 171, gives an account of Barnes’s Inscribed Dallâus, County Donegal, Ireland. One of his figures bears four cups joined together by lines forming a cross. The remainder of the illustrations consist of concentric rings and cups resembling others already figured in this paper.
Marcano (c) describes Fig. 152 as follows:
The chain of Cuchivero, situated in Venezuela between the Orinoco and the Caura, shows on its flanks small plateaus on which are numerous stones which seem to have been aligned. This chain is separated by a deep valley from that of Tiramuto, from which were copied the petroglyphs here presented. The one represents a single sun, the other two suns joined together. The rays of the former run from one circumference to the other. The other two are joined together by a central stroke, and the rays all start from the outer circumference.
The same author (loc. cit.) thus describes Fig. 153:
These designs, taken on the little hills of the high Cuchivero, differ altogether from the preceding. a is a very regular horizontal grouping. It begins by a spiral joined to three figures similar among themselves, and similar also to the eyes of jaguars which we have often met with. There follows a sort of isolated fret; at its right is another, larger and joined to a circle different from the preceding; it has a central point, and the second circumference is interrupted. The figure terminates in a spiral like the one at the beginning of the line, and which, being turned in the opposite direction, serves as its pendant.
b is formed of two horizontal rows one above the other. We there find first of all two frets united by a vertical stroke ending in a hook. The characters which follow, resembling those of a, are distinct in each row, but on closer inspection they are seen to have a peculiar correspondence.
Dr. Ladisláu Netto (b) gives copies of carvings on the rocks in Brazil on the banks of the Rio Negro, from Moura to the city of Manaus, and remarks upon the characters reproduced here as Fig. 154, that they represent the figure of the multiple concentric circles joined together two by two, as were found on several other rocks in the same region, and as they appear in many inscriptions of Central America and at various points of North America.
Senhor Araripe (b) gives the following account:
In Banabuiu, Brazil, about three-quarters of a league from the plantation of Caza-nova, on the road to Castelo, is a stone resting upon another, at the height of a man, which the inhabitants call Pedra-furada (pierced stone) having on its western face the inscription in Fig. 155.
The characters have been much effaced by the rubbing of cattle against them; the stone has also cracked. Some fragments lying at the foot of it bear on their upper faces round holes made by a sharp tool, and resembling those shown in this figure.
Cup stones, called by the French pierres à ecuelles and pierres à cupules and by the Germans Schalensteine, are found throughout Hindustan, on the banks of the Indus, at the foot of the Himalayas, in the valley of Cashmere, and on the many cromlechs around Nagpoor. At this very day one may see the Hindu women carrying the water of the Ganges all the way to the mountains of the Punjab, to pour into the cupules and thus obtain from the divinity the boon of motherhood earnestly desired.
The cup sculptures often become imposing by their number and combination. In the Kamaon mountains there are numerous blocks that support small basins. One of them is mentioned as being 13 feet in length by 9 in breadth and 7 in height, and showing five rows of cupules. At Chandeswar (see Fig. 146) the rocks themselves are covered with these signs. They present two different types. One of the most frequent groups shows a simple round cavity; in the others, the cupels are encircled by a sort of ring carved in intaglio and encircling figures. One of these figures recalls the swastika, the sacred sign of the Aryans. The present Hindus are absolutely ignorant of the origin of these sculptures; they are fain to attribute them to the Goalas, a mysterious race of shepherd kings who preceded the great invasions which imprinted an indelible stamp on the Indies as well as on Europe. These cupels are correlated with the worship of Mahadeo, one of the many names given to Siva, the third god of the Hindu triad, whose emblem is the serpent. Chandeswar is reached through a narrow gorge; at the entrance is found a temple sacred to Mahadeo. The columns and slabs bear cupules similar to those seen on the rocks.
Some of the Mahadeo designs engraved on stone slabs in this temple (see Rivett-Carnac, loc. cit.) are represented in Fig. 156, showing a marked resemblance to and approaching identity with this class of cuttings on bowlders, rocks, and megalithic monuments in Europe.
A large number of stones with typical cup markings have been found in the United States of America. Some of those illustrated in this paper are presented in Pl. V, and Figs. 19 and 48.
Among the many attempts, all hitherto unsatisfactory, to explain the significance of the cup stones as distributed over nearly all parts of the earth, one statement of Mr. Rivett-Carnac (b) is of value as furnishing the meaning now attached to them in India. He says:
Having seen sketches and notes on rock sculptures in India which closely resemble unexplained rock carvings in Scotland, and having myself found one of the Scotch forms cut on a bowlder in Kángrá, * * * being at Ayodhyá with a Hindu who speaks good English, I got a fakir and drew on the sand of the Gogra the figure [Illustration: concentric circles]. I asked what that meant. The fakir at once answered, “Mahadeo.” I then drew [Illustration: concentric circles with line from center] and got the same answer. At Delhi my old acquaintance, Mr. Shaw, told me that these two signs are chalked on stones in Kángrá by people marching in marriage processions. The meaning given to these two symbols now in India is familiarly known to the people.
Mahadeo, more accurately Mahadiva, is the god of generation. He is worshiped by the Sawas, one of the numerous Hindu sects, under the form of a phallus, often represented by a simple column, which sometimes is placed on the yoni or female organ. It is suggested that in a common form of the sculptures the inner circle represents the Mahadeo or lingam, and the outer or containing circle the yoni. No idea of obscenity occurs from this representation to the Hindus, who adore under this form the generative power in nature.
Prof. Douglas, in the Saturday Review, November 24, 1883, furnishes some remarks on the topic now considered:
In Palestine and the country beyond Jordan some of the marks found are so large that it has been supposed that they may have been used as small presses of wine, or as mortars for pounding the gleanings of wheat. But there is an objection to these theories as accounting for the marks generally, which is fatal to them. To serve these purposes the rocks on which the marks occur should be in a horizontal position, whereas in a majority of cases all over the world the “cups” are found either on shelving rocks or on the sides of perpendicular stones. This renders worthless also the ideas which have at different times been put forward that they may have been used for some sort of gambling game, or as sun-dials. A Swiss archæologist who has lately devoted himself to the question believes that he has recognized, in the sculpturings under his observation, maps of the surrounding districts, the “cups” indicating the mountain peaks. In the same way others have thought that similar markings may have been intended as maps or plans pointing out the direction and character of old circular camps and cities in their neighborhood. But if any such resemblances have been discovered they can hardly be other than fortuitous, since it is difficult to understand how rows of cup marks, arranged at regular intervals and in large numbers, could have served as representatives either of the natural features of a country or of camps and cities. But a closer resemblance may be found in them as maps if we suppose that they were intended to represent things in the heavens rather than on earth. The round cup-like marks are reasonably suggestive of the sun, moon, and stars, and if only an occasional figure could be found representing a constellation, some color might be held to be given to the idea; but unfortunately this is not the case. Nevertheless the shape of the marks has led many to believe that they are relics of the ancient sun worship of Phœnicia, and that their existence in Europe is due to the desire of the Phœnician colonists to convert our forefathers to their faith. But there are many reasons for regarding this theory, though supported by the authority of Prof. Nilsson, as untenable. The observations of late years have brought to light cup marks and megalithic circles in parts of Europe on which a Phœnician foot never trod; and it is a curious circumstance that in those portions of the British Isles most frequented by these indefatigable traders there are fewer traces of these monuments than in the northern and inland districts, which were comparatively inaccessible to them.
The Swiss archæologist mentioned above by Prof. Douglas is Fritz Roediger (a), of whose theory the following is a translated abstract:
What renders the deciphering of these sign stones exceedingly difficult (I purposely avoid the words “map stones” because not all are such) is their great variety in size, position, material, workmanship, and meaning. I will here speak of the latter only, inasmuch as there are stones which in their smallest and their largest form are yet frequently nothing else than boundary stones, whose origin can often not be definitely established as prehistoric, while on the other hand again we discover well-marked boundary stones, which at the same time show the outline of the piece of ground which they guard. Similarly we find prehistoric (Gallic) “Leuk” stones, differing from the meter-high communal and state boundary stones of modern times in nothing but this, that they have some indistinct grooves and one or two hooks, while on the other hand we meet “Leuk” stones, which on their restricted heads, often also on the side walls, indicate their environs for (Leuk) miles around, up, down, and sidewise, while a third class of this form merely adorn crossroads, and indicate deviations by means of lines and points (waranden). Thus we find quite extensive slabs or structures that signify only some hectares, often only one, while we meet very small ones, or, at any rate, of moderate size, which, one man can move, that represent very large districts, some presenting only lines and grooves, others with shells of various sizes, a third kind with both kinds of ornaments and samples of ornaments, and again others with no sign at all, but yet respected as stones of special meaning by the population, and called “hot stone,” “pointed stone,” “heath stone,” “child’s stone,” etc. Other stones have basin-like or platter-like depressions, and finally there are outcropping rocks with marks of one kind or another, holes, rents, clefts, etc. A further great difficulty hampering the deciphering of these wonderful stones is the lack of opportunities for comparison and experience. I have been markedly favored in this respect by my sojourn and wanderings in valley, mountain and alp. Western Switzerland is a very paradise for investigations of this kind, especially the lake country and the upper part of the canton of Solothurn (Soleure). A third difficulty, often insuperable, lies in the nonexistence of appropriate good maps for comparison. In this respect too we are well off in Switzerland.
According to my observations in this field, now continued nearly 12 years, prehistoric man had: (1) His land or province survey; (2) his circle, district, and communal surveys, in reference to which (3) the Alpine surveys deserve special mention, in cantons which down to the present day know nothing of such surveys; (4) private and special surveys. Thus it seems that my observations lend full confirmation to the oldest historic or traditional statements concerning the tenure of land of the Kelto-Germans or Germano-Kelts.
Among the Ojibwa concentric circles, according to Schoolcraft (d), constituted the symbol of time. It would be dangerous to explain the many markings of this character by the suggested symbolism, which also recalls that of Egypt in relation to the circle-figure. Inquiries have often been made whether the North American Indians have any superstitious or religious practices connected with the markings under consideration, e. g., in relation to the desire for offspring, which undoubtedly is connected with the sculpturing of cup depressions and furrows in the eastern hemisphere. No evidence is yet produced of any such correspondence of practice or tradition relating to it. In the absence of any extrinsic explanation the prosaic and disappointing suggestion intrudes that circular concentric rings are easy to draw and that the act of drawing them suggests the accentuation of depressions or hollows within their curves. Much stress is laid upon the fact that the characters are found in so many parts of the earth, with the implication that all the sculptors used them with the same significance, thus affording ground for the hypothesis that anciently one race of people penetrated all the regions designated. But in such an implication the history of the character formed by two intersecting straight lines is forgotten. The cross is as common as the cup-stone, and has, or anciently had, a different signification among the different people who used it, beginning as a mark and ending as a symbol. Therefore, it may readily be imagined that the rings in question, which are drawn nearly as easily as the cross, were at one time favorite but probably meaningless designs, perhaps, in popular expression, “instinctive” commencements of the artistic practice, as was the earliest delineation of the cross-figure. Afterward the rings, if employed as symbols or emblems, would naturally have a different meaning applied to them in each region where they now appear.
It must, however, be noted that the figures under discussion can be and often are the result of conventionalization. A striking remark is made by Mr. John Murdoch (a), of the Smithsonian Institution, that south of Bering strait the design of the “circle and dot,” which may be regarded as the root of the cup sculpture, is the conventionalized representation of a flower, and is very frequently seen as an ornamental device.
An elucidation of some of the most common forms of cup sculptures is given, without qualification and also without authority, but with the serene consciousness of certainty, by the Rev. Charles Rogers, “D.D., LL. D., F. S. A., Scot., etc.,” as follows:
The sculptures are sacred books, which the awe-inspired worshipper was required to revere and, probably, to salute with reverence. A single circle represented the sun, two circles in union the sun and moon--Baal and Ashtaroth. The wavy groove passing across the circle pointed to the course of water from the clouds, as discharged upon the earth. Groups of pit marks pointed to the stars or, more probably, to the oaks of the primeval temples.
VI. PICTOGRAPHS GENERALLY
In leaving the geographic distribution of petroglyphs to examine the comprehensive theme of pictographs in general, the first and correct impression is that the mist of the archaic and unknown is also left and that the glow of current significance is reached. The pictographs of the American Indians are seldom if ever cryptographs, though very often conventional and sometimes, for special reasons, preconcerted, as are their signals. They are intended to be understood without a key, and nearly all of those illustrated below in the present work are accompanied by an interpretation. As the art is in actual daily use it is free from the superstition pending from remote antiquity.
It will be noticed that a large proportion of the pictographs to be now presented, which are not petroglyphs, are Micmac, Abnaki, Dakota, and Ojibwa, although it is admitted that as many more could be obtained from other tribes, such as the Zuñi and the Navajo. The reason for the omission of details regarding the latter is that they are already published, or are in the course of publication, by Mrs. Stevenson, Dr. Matthews, Mr. Cushing, Mr. Fewkes, and other writers, who have specially devoted themselves to the peoples mentioned and the region occupied by them.
The present writer obtained a valuable collection of birch-bark pictographs immemorially and still made by the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes of Abnaki in Maine, showing a similarity in the use of picture-writing between the members of the widespread Algonquian stock in the regions west of the great lakes and those on the northeastern seaboard. He also learned that the same art was common to the less known Montagnais and Nascapees in the wooded regions north of the St. Lawrence. This correlation of the pictographic practice, in manner and extent, was before inferentially asserted, but no satisfactory evidence of it had been furnished until the researches of the Bureau of Ethnology, in 1887 and 1888, made by the writer, brought into direct comparison the pictography of the Ojibwa with that of the Micmacs and the Abnaki. Many of the Indians of the last-named tribes still use marks and devices on birch bark in the ordinary affairs of life, especially as notices of departure and direction and for warning and guidance. The religious use of original drawings among them, which is still prominent among the Ojibwa, has almost ceased, but traces of it remain.
The most interesting of all the accounts regarding the pictographs of the North American Indians published before the last decade was contained in the works of Henry R. Schoolcraft, issued in 1853 and subsequent years, and the most frequently quoted part of his contributions on this subject describes the pictographs of the Ojibwa. He had special facilities for obtaining accurate information with regard to all matters relating to that tribe on account of his marriage to one of its women, a granddaughter of a celebrated chief, Waub-o-jeeg and daughter of a European named Johnson. She was educated in Ireland and had sufficient intelligence to understand and describe to her husband the points of interest relating to her tribe.
The accounts given by Mr. Schoolcraft, with numerous illustrations, convey the impression that the Ojibwa were nearly as far advanced in hieroglyphic writing as the Egyptians before their pictorial representations had become syllabic. The general character of his voluminous publications has not been such as to assure modern critics of his accuracy, and the wonderful combination of minuteness and comprehensiveness attributed by him to the Ojibwa “hieroglyphs” has of late been generally regarded with suspicion. It was considered in the Bureau of Ethnology an important duty to ascertain how much of truth existed in these remarkable accounts, and for that purpose the writer, with Dr. Hoffman as assistant, examined the most favorable points in the present habitat of the tribe, namely, the northern regions of Minnesota and Wisconsin, to ascertain how much was yet to be discovered.
The general results of the comparison of Schoolcraft’s statements with what is now found show that he told the truth in substance, but with much exaggeration and coloring. The word “coloring” is particularly appropriate, because in his copious illustrations various colors were used freely and with apparent significance, whereas, in fact, the general rule in regard to the birch-bark rolls was that they were never colored at all; indeed, the bark was not adapted to coloration. The metaphorical coloring was also flourished by him in a manner which seems absurd to any thorough student of the Indian philosophy and religions. Metaphysical concepts are attached by him to some of the devices which he calls “symbols,” which could never have been entertained by a people in the stage of culture of the Ojibwa. While some symbolism, in the wide sense of the term, may be perceived, iconography and ideography are more apparent.
The largest part of the bark rolls and other pictographs of the Ojibwa obtained by the Bureau, relates to the ceremonies of the Midē' and of the shamanistic orders; another division refers to the Jessakid performances, which can be classed under the head of jugglery; and a third part embraces the more current and practical uses. Examples of all of these are given, infra.
The difficulties sometimes attending the pursuit of ceremonial pictographs were exemplified to the writer at Odanah, Wisconsin. Very few of the Ojibwa in that neighborhood, who are generally civilized and in easy circumstances, had any more than a vague knowledge that such things as inscribed bark rolls had ever existed. Three, however, were traced and one was shown. The owner, an uncompromising heathen, was called Kitche-sha-bads. “Kitche” means big, “sha” is an attempt at the French form of John, and “bads” is a bad shot at Baptiste, the whole translation, therefore, being “Big John the Baptist.” This old fellow, though by no means as enterprising or successful as some of the younger generation, had a snug house and farm and $300 in the savings bank at Ashland. One thing, however, he needed, viz, whisky. The strictest regulations prevailed on the reservation, really prohibitory to the introduction of spirits, and, indeed, there was at the nearest town, Ashland, a severe penalty for selling any form of liquor to an Indian. To obtain whisky, therefore, was the only consideration which would tempt him to allow a copy of the roll to be taken or by which he could be induced to recite or rather to chant it in the manner prescribed. He was undoubtedly accomplished in the knowledge of the Midē' rites, and the roll, which was shown in his hands, but not out of them, is substantially the same as one of those copied in the present work, which was discovered several hundred miles farther northwest among a different division of the same tribe. The shaman began rather mildly to plead that he was an old man and could not remember well unless his spirit was made good by a little whisky. This difficulty might have been obviated by a traveler’s pocket flask, but his demands increased with great rapidity. He said that the roll could only be sung at night, that he must have another old man to help him, and the old man must have whisky; then that there must be a number of young men, who would join in the chorus, and all the young men must have whisky too. These demands made it evident that he was intending to have a drunken orgy, which resulted in a cloture of the debate. And yet the idea of the old shaman was in its way correct. The ceremonial chants could be advantageously pronounced only under inspiration, which was of old obtained by a tedious form of intoxication, now expedited by alcohol.
The fact that this work shows a large proportion of pictographs from the Siouan linguistic family, and especially from the Dakota division of that family, may be explained partly by the greater familiarity of the present writer with it than with most other Indian divisions. Yet probably more distinctive examples of evolution in ideography and in other details of picture-writing are found still extant among the Dakota than among any other North American tribe. The degree of advance made by the Dakota was well expressed by the Rev. S. D. Hinman, who was born, lived, married, and died in their midst, and, though unfortunately he committed to writing but little of his knowledge, was more thoroughly informed about that people than any other man of European descent.
To express his views clearly he gave to this writer in a manuscript communication his own classification of pictography (which is not in all respects approved) as follows:
I. Picturing.--[This is the method called by Prof. Brinton (b) iconographic writing.] This shows a simple representation of a thing or event in picture, as of a bear, a man’s hand, a battle.
II. Ideography.--This arbitrarily, though significantly, recalls an idea or abstract quality, as love or goodness.
III. Picture-writing.--This will, in picture and character, arbitrarily or otherwise, recite a connected story, there being a picture or character for every word, even for conjunctions and prepositions.
IV. Phonetic writing.--This gives phonetic value to every picture and spells out the words by sound, almost as in later alphabets, as if a lion should stand for the “l” sound, a bear for the “b” sound, etc., and from this last by modification came alphabets. [This is the familiar theory, which is accurate so far as it is applicable, of the initial sound, but other elements are disregarded, such as the “rebus,” for which special class Prof. Brinton, loc. cit., has invented the title of the Iconomatic method.]
Accepting this chronologic if not evolutionary arrangement, Mr. Hinman decided that the Dakota picture-writing had passed through stage I and was already entering upon stage II when it was first observed by the European explorers. Of III and IV he found no examples in Dakota pictography, though in sign language the Dakota had progressed further and had entered upon III.
As a summary of the topic it seems that pictographs other than petroglyphs which presumably are more modern than most of the latter, can be studied, not by geographic distribution, but by their ascertainable intent and use. Unless the classification of the remaining part of this work under its various headings has been defective, further discussion in this chapter is unnecessary.
VII. SUBSTANCES ON WHICH PICTOGRAPHS ARE MADE
Substances on which pictographs are made may be divided into--
I. The human body. II. Natural objects other than the human body. III. Artificial objects.
SECTION 1.
THE HUMAN BODY.
Markings on human bodies are--(1) Those expressed by painting or such coloration as is not permanent. It has been found convenient to treat this topic under the heading of “Significance of Colors,” Chap. XVIII, Sec. 3. (2) Those of intended permanence upon the skin, generally called tattoo, but including scarification. This enormous and involved topic is discussed, so far as space allows, under the heading of “Totems, Titles, and Names,” Chapter XIII, Sec. 3, where it seems to be most convenient in the general arrangement of this work. Though logically it might have been divided among several of the headings, that course would have involved much repetition or cross reference.
SECTION 2.
NATURAL OBJECTS OTHER THAN THE HUMAN BODY.
Other natural objects may be divided into--(1) Stone; (2) bone; (3) skins; (4) feathers and quills; (5) gourds; (6) shells; (7) earth and sand; (8) copper; (9) wood.
STONE.
This caption comprises the pictographs upon stone surfaces or tablets which are not of the dimensions or in the position to be included under the heading of petroglyphs, as elsewhere defined. Accounts, with and without illustrations, have been published of several engraved tablets, regarding which there has been much discussion, and some examples appear, infra, under the appropriate heading. (See Chapter XXII, Sec. 1.) Other examples, in which the genuine aboriginal character of the work is undisputed, appear in the present work, and a large number of other engraved and incised stone objects could be referred to, some of which are in the possession of the Bureau of Ethnology, unpublished, others being figured in its several reports. It is sufficient now for illustration of this subject to refer to the account accompanying Pl. LI, infra, describing and copying the Thruston tablet, which is, perhaps, the most interesting of any pictograph on stone yet discovered, the genuineness of which as Indian work has not been called in question.
BONE.
For instances of the use of bone, several Alaskan and Eskimo carvings figured in this work may be referred to, e. g., Figs. 334, 459-462, 534, 703, 704, 742, 771, 844, and 1228.
Fig. 157, copied from Schoolcraft (e), is taken from the shoulder-blade of a buffalo found on the plains in the Comanche country of Texas. He says:
It is a symbol showing the strife for the buffalo existing between the Indian and white races. The Indian (1) presented on horseback, protected by his ornamented shield and armed with a lance, (2) kills a Spaniard (3) after a circuitous chase (6), the latter being armed with a gun. His companion (4), armed with a lance, shares the same fate.
It may be questioned whether Mr. Schoolcraft was not too active in the search for symbols in his explanation of (6) as a circuitous chase. The device is either a lasso or a lariat, and relates to the possession or attempt to take possession of the buffalo. The design (5), however, well expresses ideographically the fact that the buffalo at the time was in contention, and therefore was the property half of the Indians and half of the whites.
SKINS.
A large number of pictographs upon the hides of animals are mentioned in the present paper. Pl. XX, with its description in the Dakota Winter Counts, infra, Chap, X, Sec. 2, is one instance. Rawhide drum-heads are also used to paint upon, as by the shamans of the Ojibwa.
The use of robes made of the hides of buffalo and other large animals, painted with biographic, shamanistic, and other devices, is also mentioned in various parts of this work. A description of very early observation is now introduced, taken from John Ribault in Hakluyt (a).
The king gaue our Captaine at his departure a plume or fanne of Hernshawes feathers died in red, and a basket made of Palmeboughes after the Indian fashion, and wrought very artificially and a great skinne painted and drawen throughout with the pictures of diuers wilde beasts so liuely drawen and pourtrayed, that nothing lacked but life.
With the American use of pictographic robes may be compared the following account of the same use by Australian natives by Dr. Richard Andree (b).
The inner side of the opossum skins worn by the blacks is also often ornamented with figures. They scratch lines into the skin, which afterward are rubbed over with fat and charcoal.
FEATHERS AND QUILLS.
Edward M. Kern, in Schoolcraft (f), reports that the Sacramento tribes of California were very expert in weaving blankets of feathers, many of them having beautiful figures worked upon them.
The feather work in Mexico, Central America, and the Hawaiian Islands is well known, often having designs properly to be considered among pictographs, though in modern times not often passing beyond ornamentation.
Worsnop (op. cit.) mentions that on grand occasions of the “Mindarie” (i. e., peace festival) the Australian natives decorate the bodies, face, legs, and feet with the down of wild fowl, stuck on with their own blood. The ceremony of taking the blood is very painful, yet they stand it without a murmur. It takes five or six men four to five hours to decorate one man. The blood is put on the body wet and the down stuck on the blood, showing, when finished, outlines of man’s head, face, feet, snakes, emu, fish, trees, birds, and other outlines representing the moon, stars, sun, and Aurora Australis, the whole meaning that they are at peace with the world.
Mr. David Boyle (a) gives an account of a piece of porcupine quill work, with an illustration, a part of which is copied in Fig. 158.
Among the lost or almost lost arts of the Canadian Indians is that of employing porcupine quills as in the illustration. Partly on account of scarcity of material, but chiefly, it is likely, from change of habits and of taste, there are comparatively few Indian women now living who attempt to produce any fabric of this kind. * * *
The central figure is meant to represent the eagle or great thunder-bird, the belief in which is, or was, widely spread among the Indians over the northern part of this continent. * * *
This beautiful piece of quill work was produced from Ek-wah-satch, who resides at Baptiste lake. He informed me that it had belonged to his grandfather, who resided near Georgian bay.
See also Fig. 685 for another illustration of pictographic work by colored porcupine quills.
GOURDS.
After gourds have dried the contents are removed and small pebbles or bones placed in the empty vessel. Handles are sometimes attached. They serve as rattles in dances and in religious and shamanistic rites. The representations of natural or mythical objects, connected with the ceremonies, for which the owner may have special reverence are often depicted upon their outer surfaces. This custom prevails among the Pueblos generally, and also among many other tribes, notably those of the Siouan linguistic stock.
Fig. 159 is a drawing of the Sci-Manzi or “Mescal Woman” of the Kiowa as it appears on a sacred gourd rattle in the mescal ceremony of that tribe, and was procured with full explanations in the winter of 1890-’91 by Mr. James Mooney of the Bureau of Ethnology.
It shows the rude semblance of a woman, with divergent rays about her head, a fan in her left hand, and a star under her feet.
The peculiarity of the drawing is its hermeneutic character, which is rarely ascertained by actual evidence as existing among the North American Indians. It has a double meaning, and while apparently only a fantastic figure of a woman, it conveys also to the minds of the initiated a symbolic representation of the interior of the sacred mescal lodge. Turning the rattle with the handle toward the east, the lines forming the halo about the head of the figure represent the circle of devotees within the lodge. The head itself, with the spots for eyes and mouth, represents the large consecrated mescal which is placed upon a crescent-shaped mound of earth in the center of the lodge, this mound being represented in the figure by a broad, curving line, painted yellow, forming the curve of the shoulders. Below this is a smaller crescent curve, the original surface of the gourd, which symbolizes the smaller crescent mound of ashes built up within the crescent of earth as the ceremony progresses. The horns of both crescents point toward the door of the lodge on the east side which, in the figure, is toward the feet. In the chest of the body is a round globule painted red, emblematic of the fire within the horns of the crescent in the lodge. The lower part of the body is green, symbolic of the eastern ocean beyond which dwells the mescal woman who is the ruling spirit or divinity to whom prayers are addressed in the ceremony, and the star under her feet is the morning star which heralds her approach. In her left hand is a device representing the fan of eagle feathers used to shield the eyes from the glare of the fire during the ceremony.
SHELLS.
The admirable and well illustrated paper, Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans, by Mr. W. H. Holmes, in the Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, and a similar paper, Burial Mounds of the Northern Section of the United States, by Prof. Cyrus Thomas, in the Fifth Annual Report of the same Bureau, render unnecessary present extended discussion under this head.
One example, however, which is unique in character and of established authenticity, is presented here as Pl. XV.
Dr. Edward B. Tylor (a) gives a description of the mantle copied upon that plate, which is condensed as follows:
Among specimens illustrative of native North American arts, as yet untouched by European influence, is the deerskin mantle ornamented with shellwork, recorded to have belonged to the Virginian chief, Powhatan. Of the group of Virginian mantles in Tradescant’s collection there only now remains this shell embroidered one. It is entered as follows in the MS. catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum, in the handwriting of the keeper, Dr. Plot, the well-known antiquary, about 1685: “205 Basilica Powhatan Regis Virginiani vestis, duabus cervorum cutibus consuta, et nummis indicis vulgo cori’s dictis splendidè exornata.” He had at first written “Roanoke,” but struck his pen through this word, and wrote “cori’s” (i. e. cowries) above, thus by no means improving the accuracy of his description.
The mantle measures about 2.2^{m} in length by 1.6^{m} in width. The two deerskins forming it are joined down the middle; no hair remains. The ornamental design consists of an upright human figure in the middle; divided by the seam; a pair of animals; 32 spirally-formed rounds (2 in the lowest line have lost their shells) and the remains of some work in the right lower corner. The marks where shellwork has come away plainly show the hind legs and tapering tails of both animals. It is uncertain whether the two quadrupeds represent in the conventional manner of picture-writing some real animal of the region, or some mythical composite creature such as other Algonquin tribes are apt to figure. The decorative shellwork is of a kind well known in North America. The shells used are Marginella; so far as Mr. Edgar A. Smith is able to identify them in their present weathered state, M. nivosa. They have been prepared for fastening on, in two different ways, which may be distinguished in the plate. In the animals and rounds, the shells have been perforated by grinding on one side, so that a sinew thread can be passed through the hole thus made and the mouth. In the man, the shells are ground away and rounded off at both ends into beads looking roughly ball-like at a distance.
The artistic skill of the North American Indians was not, as a rule, directed to represent the forms of animals with such accuracy as to allow of their identification as portraitures. Instead of attempting such accuracy they generally selected some prominent feature such as the claws of the bear, which were drawn with exaggeration, or the tail of the mountain lion which was portrayed of abnormal length over the animal’s back. Those animals were, therefore, recognized by those selected features in much the same manner as if there had been a written legend--“this is a bear” or “a mountain lion,” the want of iconographic accuracy being admitted. In the animals represented on the mantle no such indicating feature is obvious, and the general resemblance to the marten is the only guide to identification.
The habitat of the marten does not include Virginia as a whole, but the animal is found in the elevated regions of that state. This local infrequency is not, however, of much significance. If regarded as a clan totem, as is probable, it may well be that the clan of Powhatan was connected with the clans of the more northern Algonquian tribes among whom the marten frequently appears as a clan totem. What is generally termed the Powhatan confederacy was a union, not apparently ancient, of a large number of tribal divisions or villages, and it is not known to which clan (probably extending through many of these tribal divisions) the head chief Powhatan belonged. There is almost nothing on record of the clan system of those Virginian Indians, but it is supposed to be similar to that of the northern and eastern members of the same linguistic family, among whom the marten clan was and still is found.
The topic of wampum which, considered as to its material, belongs to the division of shellwork, is with regard to the purposes of the present paper, discussed under the head of “Mnemonic,” Chap. IX, Sec. 3.
EARTH AND SAND.
The highly important work, The Mountain Chant, a Navajo Ceremony, in the Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, by Dr. Washington Matthews, U. S. Army, and that of Mr. James Stevenson, Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailjis and Mythical Sand Painting of the Navajo Indians, in the Eighth Annual Report of that Bureau, give accounts of most interesting sand paintings by the Navajo Indians, which were before unknown. These paintings were made upon the surface of the earth by means of sand, ashes, and powdered vegetable and mineral matter of various colors. They were highly elaborate, and were fashioned with care and ceremony immediately preceding the observance of specific rites, at the close of which they were obliterated with great nicety. The subject is further discussed by Dr. W. H. Corbusier, U. S. Army, in the present paper (see Chap. XIV, Sec. 5).
Mr. Frank Hamilton Cushing, of the Bureau of Ethnology, kindly contributes the following remarks with special reference to the Zuñi:
A study of characteristic features in these so-called sand pictures of the Navajos would seem to indicate a Pueblo origin of the art, this notwithstanding the fact that it is to-day more highly developed or at least more extensively practiced amongst the Navajos than now, or perhaps ever, amongst the Pueblos. When, during my first sojourn with the Zuñi, I found this art practice in vogue among the tribal priest magicians and members of cult societies, I named it dry or powder painting. I could see at a glance that this custom of powder painting had resulted from the effort to transfer from a vertical, smooth, and stable surface, which could be painted on, to a horizontal and unstable surface, unsuited to like treatment, such symbolic and sacramental pictographs as are painted on the walls of the kivas, temporarily, as appurtenances to the dramaturgic ceremonials of the cult societies, and as supposed aids to the magical incantations and formulæ of all the monthly, semiannual, and quadrennial observances and fasts of the tribal priests; sometimes, also, in the curative or “Betterment” ceremonials of these priests. It is noteworthy that, with the exception of the invariable “Earth terrace,” “Pathway of (earth) life,” and a few other conventional symbols of mortal or earthly things (nearly always made of scattered prayer meal), powder painting is resorted to amongst the Zuñi only in ceremonials pertaining to all the regions or inclusive of the lower region. In such cases paintings typical of the North, West, South, and East are made on the four corresponding walls of the kiva, whilst the lower region is represented by appropriately powder or paint colored sand on the floor, and the upper region either by paintings on the walls near the ceiling or on stretched skins suspended from the latter. Thus the origin of the practice of floor powder painting may be seen to have resulted from the effort to represent with more dramatic appropriateness or exactness the lower as well as the other sacramental regions, and to have been incident to the growth from the quaternary of the sextenary or septenary system of world division so characteristic of Pueblo culture. Hence it is that I attribute the art of powder or sand painting to the Pueblos, and believe that it was introduced both by imitation and by the adoption of Pueblo men amongst the Navajos. Its greater prevalence amongst them to-day is simply due to the fact that having, as a rule, no suitable vertical or wall surfaces for pictorial treatment, all their larger ceremonial paintings have to be made on the ground, and can only or best be made, of course, by this means alone.
It is proper to add, as having a not inconsiderable bearing on the absence generally of screen or skin painting among the Navajos, that, with the Pueblos at least, these pictures are--must be--only temporary; for they are supposed to be spiritually shadowed, so to say, or breathed upon by the gods or god animals they represent, during the appealing incantations or calls of the rites; hence the paint substance of which they are composed is in a way incarnate, and at the end of the ceremonial must be killed and disposed of as dead if evil, eaten as medicine if good.
Further light is thrown on this practice of the Zuñi in making use of these suppositively vivified paintings by their kindred practice of painting not only fetiches of stone, etc., and sometimes of larger idols, then of washing the paint off for use as above described, but also of powder painting in relief; that is, of modeling effigies in sand, sometimes huge in size, of hero or animal gods, sacramental mountains, etc., powder painting them in common with the rest of the pictures, and afterwards removing the paint for medicinal or further ceremonial use.
The construction of the effigies in high relief last above mentioned should be compared with the effigy mounds mentioned below in this section.
In connection with the ceremonial use, for temporary dry painting on the ground, of colored earth and sand and also that of sacred corn meal, a remarkable parallel is found in India. Mr. Edward Carpenter (a) mentions that the Devadásis, who are popularly called Nautch girls, as a part of their duty, ornament the floor of the Hindu temples with quaint figures drawn in rice flour.
The well known mounds or tumuli more or less distinctly representing animal forms and sometimes called effigy mounds, found chiefly in Wisconsin and Illinois, come in this category, but it is not possible to properly discuss them and also give space to the many other topics in this paper, the facts and authorities upon which are less known or less accessible. A large amount of information is published by Rev. S. D. Peet (a). Other articles are by Mr. T. H. Lewis in Science, September 7, 1888, and No. 318, 1889. One upon the Serpent mound of Ohio, by Prof. F. W. Putnam (a), is of special interest. It may be suggested as a summation that there is not sufficient evidence of the erection of this class of effigy mounds merely for burial purposes. They seldom exceeded 6 feet in height and varied in expanse from 30 to 300 feet. The animals most frequently recognizable in the constructions are lizards, birds, and several more or less distinct quadrupeds; serpents and turtles also are identified. The species of fauna represented are those now or lately found in the same region. There is a strong probability that the forms of the mounds in question were determined by totemic superstitions or tribal habitudes.
In England the pictographs styled “turf monuments” are sometimes made by cutting the natural turf and filling with chalk the part of the surface thus laid bare. Sometimes the color depends wholly upon the limestone, granite, or other rock exposed by removing the turf. Rev. W. C. Plenderleath (a) gives a full account of this variety of pictograph.
COPPER.
This is the only metal on which it is probable that the North American Indians made designs. To present comparisons of pictures by other peoples on that or other metals or alloys would be to enter into a field, the most interesting part of which is classed as numismatic, and which would be a departure from the present heading. That virgin copper was used for diverse purposes, generally ornamental, by the North American Indians, is now established, and there is a presentation of the subject in Prof. Cyrus Thomas’s (a) Burial Mounds. The most distinct and at the same time surprising account of a true pictographic record on copper is given by W. W. Warren (a), an excellent authority, and is condensed as follows:
The Ojibwa of the Crane family hold in their possession a circular plate of virgin copper, on which are rudely marked indentations and hieroglyphics denoting the number of generations of the family who have passed away since they first pitched their lodges at Shang-a-waum-ik-ong and took possession of the adjacent country, including the island of La Pointe.
When I witnessed this curious family register in 1843 it was exhibited to my father. The old chief kept it carefully buried in the ground and seldom displayed it. On this occasion he brought it to view only at the entreaty of my mother whose maternal uncle he was.
On this plate of copper were marked eight deep indentations, denoting the number of his ancestors who had passed away since they first lighted their fire at Shang-a-waum-ik-ong. They had all lived to a good old age.
By the rude figure of a man with a hat on its head, placed opposite one of these indentations, was denoted the period when the white race first made its appearance among them. This mark occurred in the third generation, leaving five generations which had passed away since that important era in their history.
Mr. I. W. Powell (a), Indian superintendent, in the report of the deputy superintendent-general of Indian affairs of Canada for 1879, gives an account of some tribes of the northwest coast, especially the Indians called in the report Newittees, a tribe now known as the Naqómqilis of the Wakashan family, who treasure pieces of copper peculiarly shaped and marked. The shape is that of one face of a truncated pyramid with the base upward. In the broad end appear marks resembling the holes for eyes and mouth, which are common in masks of the human face. The narrower end has a rough resemblance to an ornamental collar. These copper articles were made by the Indians originally from the native copper, and in 1879 a few were held by the chiefs who used them for presentation at the potlaches or donation feasts. The value which is attached to these small pieces of copper, which are intrinsically worthless, is astounding. For one of them 1,200 blankets were paid, which would at the time and place represent $1,800. Sometimes a chief in presenting one of them, in order to show his utter disregard of wealth, would break it into three or four pieces and give them away, each fragment being perhaps repurchased at an exorbitant sum. This competition in extravagance for display, under the guise of charity and humility, has had parallels in the silver-brick and flour-barrel auctions in parts of the United States, when the actors were white citizens. Apart from such public exhibitions, the copper tokens seem to partake of the natures both of fiat money and of talismans.
WOOD.
This division comprises:
(1) The living tree, of the use of which for pictographic purposes there are many descriptions and illustrations in this paper. In addition to them may be noted the remark made by Bishop De Schweinitz (a) in the Life and Times of Zeisberger, that in 1750 there were numerous tree carvings at a place on the eastern shore of Cayuga lake, the meaning of which was known to and interpreted by the Cayuga Indians.
This mode of record or notice is so readily suggested that it is found throughout the world, e. g., the “hieroglyph” in New Guinea, described by D’Albertis (a), being a drawing in black on a white tree.
(2) Bark.--The Abnaki and Ojibwa have been and yet continue to be in the habit of incising pictographic characters and mnemonic marks upon birch bark. Many descriptions and illustrations of this style are given in this paper, and admirable colored illustrations of it also appear in Pl. XIX of the Seventh Ann. Rept. Bureau of Ethnology. The lines appear sometimes to have been traced on the inner surface of young bark with a sharply pointed instrument, probably bone, but in other examples the drawings are made by simple puncturing. The strips of bark, varying from an inch to several feet in length, roll up after drying, and are by heating straightened out for examination.
Another mode of drawing on birch bark which appears to be peculiar to the Abnaki is by scratching the exterior surface, thus displaying a difference in color between the outermost and the second layer of the rind, which difference forms the figure. The lower character in Pl. XVI shows this mode of picturing. It is an exact copy of part of an old bark record made by the Abnaki of Maine.
They also use the mode of incision, many examples of which appear in the present work, but their mode of scratching produced a much more picturesque effect, as is shown also in Fig. 659, than the mere linear drawing.
(3) Manufactured wood.--The Indians of the northwest coast generally employ wood as the material on which their pictographs are to be made. Totem posts, boats, boat paddles, the boards constituting the front wall of a house, and wooden masks, are among the objects used.
Many drawings among the Indians of the interior parts of the United States are also found upon pipestems made of wood, usually ash. Among the Arikara boat paddles are used upon which marks of personal distinction are reproduced, as shown in Fig. 578.
Mortuary records are also drawn upon slabs of wood. (See Figs. 728 and 729). Mnemonic devices, notices of departure, distress, etc., are also drawn upon slips of wood.
The examples of the use of wood for pictographs which are illustrated and described in this paper are too numerous for recapitulation; to them, however, may be added the following from Wilkes’s (a) Exploring Expedition, referring to Fig. 160.
Near an encampment on Chickeeles river, near Puget Sound, Washington, were found some rudely carved painted planks, of which Mr. Eld made a drawing. These planks were placed upright and nothing could be learned of their origin. The colors were exceedingly bright, of a kind of red pigment.
Mr. James O. Pattie (a) gives an account of a wooden passport given to him in 1824 by a Pawnee chief. He describes it, without illustration, as a small piece of wood curiously painted with characters something like “hieroglyphics.” The chief told Mr. Pattie’s party if they saw any of his warriors to give them the stick, in which case they would be kindly treated, which promise was fulfilled a few days later when the party met a large band of the same tribe on the warpath.
SECTION 3.
ARTIFICIAL OBJECTS.
Artificial objects may be classified, so far as is important for the present work, into, I, fictile fabrics and, II, textile fabrics.
FICTILE FABRICS.
A large number of articles of pottery bearing pictographs are figured in the illustrated collections by Mr. James Stevenson in the Second Annual Report, and by Mr. Stevenson and Mr. William H. Holmes in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Pipes on which totemic designs and property marks appear are also common.
The art of pottery was at first limited to vessel-making. In the earlier stages of culture, vases were confined to simple use as receptacles, but as culture ripened they were advanced to ceremonial and religious offices and received devices and representations in color and in relief connected with the cult to which they were devoted. Among some tribes large burial vases were fashioned to contain or cover the dead. An infinite variety of objects, such as pipes, whistles, rattles, toys, beads, trowels, calendars, masks, and figurines, were made of pottery. Clays of varying degrees of purity were used, and sometimes these were tempered with powdered quartz, shell, or like materials. The vessels were frequently built by coiling. The surface was smoothed by the hands or the modeling implement or was polished with a stone or other smoothing tool. Much attention was given to surface embellishment. The finger nails and various pointed tools were used to scarify and indent, and elaborate figures and designs were incised. Stamps with systematically worked designs were sometimes applied to the soft clay. Cords and woven fabrics were also employed to give diversity to the surface. With the more advanced tribes, though these simple processes were still resorted to, engraving, modeling in relief and in the round, and painting in colors were employed.
TEXTILE FABRICS.
Textile fabrics include those products of art in which the elements of their construction are filamental and mainly combined by using their flexibility. The processes employed are called wattling, interlacing, plaiting, netting, weaving, sewing, and embroidery. The materials generally used by primitive people were pliable vegetal growths, such as twigs, leaves, roots, canes, rushes, and grasses, and the hair, quills, feathers, and tendons of animals.
Unlike works in stone and clay, textile articles are seldom long preserved. Still, from historic accounts and a study of the many beautiful articles produced by existing Indian tribes, a fair knowledge of the range and general character of native fabrics may be obtained. In many cases buried articles of that character have been preserved by the impregnation of the engirding earths with preservative salts, and also some fabrics which had been wrapped about buried utensils, or ornaments of copper remained without serious decay. Charring has also been a means of preserving cloth, and much has been learned of the weaving done by ancient workers through impressions upon pottery which had been made by applying the texture while the clay was still soft. The weaving appliances were simple, but the results in plain and figured fabrics, in tapestry, in lace-like embroideries, and in feather-work are admirable.
This subject is discussed by Mr. W. H. Holmes in his paper, A Study of the Textile Art, etc., in the Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, in a manner so comprehensive as to embrace the field of pictography in its relation to woven articles.
Several examples of this application also appear in the present work. See Figs. 821, 976 and 1167. In addition the following are now presented.
Some of the California tribes are expert workers in grass and roots in the manufacture of baskets, upon which designs other than for mere ornamentation are frequently worked. The Yokuts, at Tule river Agency, in the southeastern part of the State, sometimes incorporate various human forms in which the arms are suspended at the sides of the body with the hands directed outward to either side. Above the head is a heavy horizontal line.
The following is extracted from Prof. O. T. Mason’s (a) paper on basket work, describing Fig. 161:
a is a rain hat of twined basketry in spruce root from Haida Indians. This figure is the upper view and shows the ornamentation in red and black paint. The device in this instance is the epitomized form of a bird, perhaps a duck. Omitting the red cross on the top the beak, jaws, and nostrils are shown; the eyes at the sides near the top, and just behind them the ears. The wings, feet, and tail, inclosing a human face, are shown on the margin. The Haida, as well as other coast Indians from Cape Flattery to Mount Saint Elias, cover everything of use with totemic devices in painting and carving.
b shows the conical shape of a. The painted ornamentation on these hats is laid on in black and red in the conventional manner of ornamentation in vogue among the Haidas and used in the reproduction of their various totems on all of their houses, wood and slate carvings, and implements.
Mr. Niblack (b) says, describing Fig. 162:
The Chilkat and cedar-bark blankets are important factors in all ceremonial dances and functions. Other forms of ceremonial blankets or mantles are made from Hudson Bay Company blankets, with totemic figures worked on them in a variety of ways. The usual method is to cut out the totemic figure in red cloth and sew it on to the garment (ornamenting it with borders of beads and buttons) by the method known as appliqué work; another method is to sew pieces of bright abalone or pearl shell or pearl buttons on to the garment in the totemic patterns. The illustration is a drawing of a vestment which hangs down the back, representing the totem or crest of the wearer.
This specimen is mentioned as the workmanship of the Tsimshian Indians, at Point Simpson, British Columbia, and represents the halibut.
VIII. INSTRUMENTS AND MATERIALS BY WHICH PICTOGRAPHS ARE MADE
So far as appears on ancient pictographic works the kind of instruments and materials with which they were made can be inferred only from its aspect, though microscopic examination and chemical analysis have sometimes been successfully applied. A few examples relating to the topic are given as follows, though other descriptions appear elsewhere in this treatise.
SECTION 1.
INSTRUMENTS FOR CARVING.
This title, as here used, is intended to include cutting, pecking, scratching, and rubbing. The Hidatsa, when scratching upon stone or rocks, as well as upon pieces of wood, employ a sharply pointed piece of hard stone, usually a fragment of quartz. The present writer successfully imitated the Micmac scratchings at Kejimkoojik lake, Nova Scotia, by using a stone arrow point upon the slate rocks.
The bow-drill was largely used by the Innuit of Alaska in carving bone and ivory. Their present method of cutting figures and other characters is by a small steel blade, thick, though sharply pointed, resembling a graver.
Many petroglyphs, e. g., those at Conowingo, Maryland, at Machiasport, Maine, and in Owens valley, California, present every evidence of having been deepened if not altogether fashioned by rubbing, either with a piece of wood and sand or with pointed stone.
To incise or indent lines upon birch bark the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and other Algonquian tribes used a sharply pointed piece of bone, though they now prefer an iron nail. Examples of scratching upon the outer surface of bark are mentioned elsewhere.
Several examples of producing characters on stone by pecking with another stone are mentioned in this paper, and Mr. J. D. McGuire (a), of Ellicott City, Maryland, has been remarkably successful in forming petroglyphs with the ordinary Indian stone hammer. Some of the results established by him are published in The American Anthropologist.
SECTION 2.
INSTRUMENTS FOR DRAWING.
Drawings upon small slabs of wood, found among the Ojibwa, were made with a piece of red-hot wire or thin iron rod hammered to a point. Such figures are blackened by being burned in.
When in haste or when better materials are not at hand, the Hidatsa sometimes drew upon a piece of wood or the shoulder-blade of a buffalo with a piece of charcoal from the fire or with a piece of red chalk or red ocher, with which nearly every warrior is at all times supplied.
Mr. A. W. Howitt, in Manuscript Notes on Australian Pictographs, says:
Not having any process such as is used by some of the savage tribes to soften skins, the harshness of these rugs is remedied by marking upon them lines and patterns, which being partly cut through the skin give to it a certain amount of suppleness. In former times, before the white man enabled the black fellow to supplement his meager stock of implements with those of civilization, a Kumai made use of the sharp edge of a mussel shell (unio) to cut these patterns. At the present time the sharpened edge of the bowl of a metal spoon is used, partly because it forms a convenient instrument, partly, perhaps, because its bowl bears a resemblance in shape to the familiar ancestral tool.
SECTION 3.
COLORING MATTER AND ITS APPLICATION.
Painting upon robes or skins is executed by means of thin strips of wood or sometimes of bone. Tufts of antelope hair are also used, by tying them to sticks to make a brush, but this is evidently a modern innovation. Pieces of wood, one end of which is chewed so as to produce a loose fibrous brush, are also used at times, as has been specially observed among the Teton Dakota.
The Hidatsa and other Northwest Indians usually employ a piece of buffalo rib or a piece of hard wood having an elliptical form. This is dipped in a solution of glue, with or without color, and a tracing is made, which is subsequently filled up and deepened by a repetition of the process with the same or a stronger solution of the color.
Of late years in the United States colors of civilized manufacture are readily obtained by the Indians for painting and decoration. Frequently, however, when the colors of commerce can not be obtained, the aboriginal colors are still prepared and used. The ferruginous clays of various shades of brown, red, and yellow occur in nature so widely distributed that these are the most common and leading tints. Black is generally prepared by grinding fragments of charcoal into a very fine powder. Among some tribes, as has also been found in some of the “ancient” pottery from the Arizona ruins, clay had evidently been mixed with charcoal to give better body. The black color made by some of the Innuit tribes is made with blood and charcoal intimately mixed, which is afterwards applied to incisions in ivory, bone, and wood.
Among the Dakota, colors for dyeing porcupine quills were obtained chiefly from plants. The vegetable colors, being soluble, penetrate the substance of the quills more evenly and beautifully than the mineral colors of eastern manufacture.
The black color of some of the Pueblo pottery is obtained by a special burning with pulverized manure, into which the vessel is placed as it is cooling after the first baking. The coloring matter--soot produced by smoke--is absorbed into the pores of the vessel, and does not wear off as readily as when colors are applied to the surface by brushes.
In decorating skins or robes the Arikara Indians boil the tail of the beaver, thus obtaining a viscous fluid which is thin glue. The figures are first drawn in outline with a piece of beef-rib, or some other flat bone, the edge only being used after having been dipped into the liquor. The various pigments to be employed in the drawing are then mixed with some of the same liquid, in separate vessels, when the various colors are applied to the objects by means of a sharpened piece of wood or bone. The colored mixture adheres firmly to the original tracing in glue.
When similar colors are to be applied to wood, the surface is frequently pecked or slightly incised to receive the color more readily.
Jacques Cartier, in Hakluyt (b), reports the Indian women of the Bay of Chaleur as smearing the face with coal dust and grease.
A small pouch, discovered on the Yellowstone river in 1873, which had been dropped by some fleeing hostile Sioux, contained several fragments of black micaceous iron. The latter had almost the appearance and consistence of graphite, so soft and black was the result upon rubbing with it. It had evidently been used for decorating the face as war-paint.
Mr. Wm. H. Dall (a), treating of the remains found in the mammalian layers in the Amakuak cave, Unalaska, remarks:
In the remains of a woman’s work-basket, found in the uppermost layer in a cave, were bits of this resin [from the bark of pine or spruce driftwood], evidently carefully treasured, with a little birch-bark case (the bark also derived from drift logs) containing pieces of soft hematite, graphite, and blue carbonate of copper, with which the ancient seamstress ornamented her handiwork.
The same author reports (f):
The coloration of wooden articles with native pigments is of ancient origin, but all the more elaborate instances that have come to my knowledge bore marks of comparatively recent origin. The pigments used were blue carbonates of iron and copper; the green fungus, or peziza, found in decayed birch and alder wood; hematite and red chalk; white infusorial or chalky earth; black charcoal, graphite, and micaceous ore of iron. A species of red was sometimes derived from pine bark or the cambium of the ground willow.
Stephen Powers (a) states that the Shastika women “smear their faces all over daily with choke-cherry juice, which gives them a bloody, corsair aspect.”
Mr. A. S. Gatschet, of the Bureau of Ethnology, reports that the Klamaths of southwestern Oregon employ a black color, lgú, made of burnt plum seeds and bulrushes, which is applied to the cheeks in the form of small round spots. This is used during dances. Red paint, for the face and body, is prepared from a resin exuding from the spruce tree, pánam. A yellow mineral paint is also employed, consisting probably of ocher or ferruginous clay. He also says that the Klamath spál, yellow mineral paint, is of light yellow color, but turns red when burned, after which it is applied in making small round dots upon the face. The white infusorial clay is applied in the form of stripes or streaks over the body. The Klamaths use charcoal, lgúm, in tattooing.
Mud and white clay were used by the Winnebago for the decoration of the human body and of horses. Some of the California Indians in the vicinity of Tulare river used a white coloring matter, consisting of infusorial earth, obtained there. The tribes at and near the geysers north of San Francisco bay procured vermilion from croppings of cinnabar. The same report is made with probability of truth concerning the Indians at the present site of the New Almaden mines, where tribes of the Mutsun formerly lived. Some of the black coloring matter of pictographs in Santa Barbara, California, proved on analysis to be a hydrous oxide of manganese. The Mojave pigments are ocher, clay, and charcoal mingled with oil.
Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, of the Bureau of Ethnology, reports regarding the Osage that one of their modes of obtaining black color for the face was by burning a quantity of small willows. When these were charred they were broken in small pieces and placed in pans, with a little water in each. The hands were then dipped into the pan and rubbed together and finally rubbed over the parts to be colored.
Dr. Hoffman reports that among the Hualpai, living on the western border of the Colorado plateau, Arizona, some persons appeared as if they had been tattooed in vertical bands from the forehead to the waist, but upon closer examination it was found that dark and light bands of the natural skin were produced in the following manner: When a deer or an antelope had been killed the blood was rubbed over the face and breast, after which the spread and curved fingers were scratched downward from the forehead over the face and breast, thus removing some of the blood; that remaining soon dried and gave the appearance of black stripes. The exposed portion of the skin retained the natural dark-tanned color, while that under the coating of coagulated blood became paler by being protected against the light and air. These persons did not wash off the marks and after a while the blood began to drop off by desquamation, leaving lighter spots and lines which for a week or two appear like tattoo marks. Similar streaks of blood have been held to have originated tattoo designs in several parts of the world to record success in hunting or in war, but such evolution does not appear to have resulted from the transient decoration in the case mentioned.
It is well known that the meal of maize called kunque is yet commonly used by the Zuñi for ceremonial coloration of their own persons and of objects used in their religious rites. Hoddentin is less familiarly known. It is the pollen of the tule, which is a variety of cat-tail rush growing in all the ponds of the southwestern parts of the United States. It is a yellow powder with which small buckskin bags are filled and those bags then attached to the belts of Apache warriors. They are also worn as amulets by members of the tribe. In dances for the cure of sickness the shaman applied the powder to the forehead of the patient, then to his breast in the figure of a cross; next he sprinkles it in a circle around his couch, then on the heads of the chanters and the assembled friends of the patient, and lastly upon his own head and into his own mouth.
Everard F. im Thurn (c) gives the following details concerning British Guiana:
The dyes used by the Indians to paint their own bodies, and occasionally to draw patterns on their implements, are red faroah, purple caraweera, blue-black lana, white felspathic clay and, though very rarely, a yellow vegetable dye of unknown origin.
Faroah is the deep red pulp around the seed of a shrub (Bixa orellana) which grows wild on the banks of some of the rivers, and is cultivated by the Indians in their clearings. It is mixed with a large quantity of oil. When it is to be used either a mass of it is taken in the palm of the hand and rubbed over the skin or other surface to be painted, or a pattern of fine lines is drawn with it by means of a stick used as a pencil.
Caraweera is a somewhat similar dye, of a more purplish red, and by no means so commonly used. It is prepared from the leaves of a yellow-flowered bignonia (B. chicka) together with some other unimportant ingredients. The dried leaves are boiled. The pot is then taken from the fire and the contents being poured into bowls are allowed to subside. The clear water left at the top is poured away and the sediment is of a beautiful purple color.
Lana is the juice of the fruit of a small tree (Genipa americana) with which without further preparation, blue-black lines are drawn in patterns, or large surfaces are stained on the skin. The dye thus applied is for about a week indelible.
Paul Marcoy (a), in Travels in South America, says the Passés, Yuris, Barrés and Chumanas of Brazil, employ a decoction of indigo or genipa in tattooing.
F. S. Moreat, M. D., in Jour. Roy. Geog. Soc., XXXII, 1862, p. 125, says that the Andaman Islanders rubbed earth on the top of the head, probably for the purpose of ornamentation.
Dr. Richard Andree (b) says:
Long before Europeans came to Australia, the Australian blacks knew a kind of pictorial representation, exhibiting scenes from their life, illustrating it with great fidelity to nature. An interesting specimen of that kind was found on a piece of bark that had served as cover of a hut on Lake Tyrrell. The black who produced this picture had had intercourse with white people, but had had no instruction whatever in drawing. The bark was blackened by smoke on the inside, and on this blackened surface the native drew the figures with his thumb nail.