Probable origin of the American Indians, with particular reference to that of the Caribs : a paper read before the Ethnological Society, the 15th March 1854, and printed at their special request / by James Kennedy.

  • Kennedy, James, 1798-1859.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Probable origin of the American Indians, with particular reference to that of the Caribs : a paper read before the Ethnological Society, the 15th March 1854, and printed at their special request / by James Kennedy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    posed to have occurred since, though they are so constantly shifting their channels. As to the character of the mounds themselves, of which we shall have occasion to speak hereafter, it may be as well here at once to declare, that as there is nothing in them peculiar to America, so neither is there any type in them of antiquity. Dr. Beck, in his Gazetteer of the States of Illinois and Mis- souri (p. 308), says, One of the largest mounds in this country has been thrown up on this stream (the Wabash), within the last thirty or forty years, by the Osages, near the great Osage village, in honour of one of their deceased chiefs. This fact, he says, proves conclusively the original object of these mounds, and refutes the theory that they must neces- sarily have been erected by a race of men more civilized than the present tribes of Indians. Were it necessary, numerous other facts might be adduced to prove that these mounds are no other than the tombs of their great men. Without as- senting entirely to this last assertion, as Mr. Squier has satis- factorily shewn that some of the mounds must have been erected for other purposes, yet one such fact, recorded by so respectable an authority as the above, will be sufficient to dispel the idea of any mysteriousness hanging over their origin, or of that origin being of any very remote antiquity beyond that of their fellow mounds of the State of New York. Of the stone structures in Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America, neither can we predicate any very considerable antiquity. The buildings in course of erection at Mexico when the Spaniards first arrived there proved the date of all others of the same class in the country to be not far removed from that period ; and though the Mexican traditions pointed to an earlier peo- ple, the Toltecs, yet they shew that these were only a cognate people, speaking the same language, possessing the same reli- gious rites and civic characteristics, and only preceding them a short time in their migration. Even if the Mexican histories, therefore, are to be relied on, and the same remark applies to the Peruvian also, the era of their civilization, or pretensions to civilization, can only be referred, at the utmost, to a few centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. The ruins in Yucatan and Central America I feel empowered to say, from