Evening Star Newspaper, July 20, 1930, Page 82

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JULY 20, New Clues to Mound Hozw the Indians of the Middle West Were Related to the Indians of the South, Far West and Old Mexico Can Now Be Explained, but Why Their Civilization Had Declined at the Time of Columbus Still Puzzles the Scientists. BY FRANK THONE. ERE the Indians who built the mysterious mounds of the great interior valley of North America kinsmen to the Maya of Yucatan and the other highly cultured peoples of the Mexican plateau? Are the decidedly Maya and Aztec like sculp- tures taken from mounds in the Southeast really witnesses to an evolution from the same racial stock and an inheritance -of the same art traditions, or merely evidences of an ancient commerce with the countries across the Gulf of Mexico? Dr. H. C. Shetrone, director of the Ohio State Museum at Columbus and one of the most active imvestigators of Indian mounds in America, thinks it not unlikely that the van- ished people who built the great earthen monu- ments came as a great wave of migration from tiie South. They developed over the Mississippi Valley, overran the gulf coastal plain south- ward to peninsular Florida, they penetrated to the Great Lakes region. They developed sev- eral different cultures or types of civilization, ' as they spread, and the outer edges of the spreading wave became less and less like their origins in their ways of living, while the group nearest the ancient homeland remained more like the stay-at-home descendants of their own forefathers. ‘They had their day, a day of no mean glory, but at last they ceased to be. But why and how their culture came to an end is still nearly as much of a mystery as it was a century and a half ago, when such notables as Thomas Jef- ferson first puzzled over the riddle of the mounds. This in brief is Dr. Shetrone’s hypothesis. It is set forth (with due tentativeness and mod- esty, after the fashion of a scientist when he has something startling to say) along toward the end of a new book which he has written and which will be off the press in a short time. OP course, Dr. Shetrone’s idea is bound to start an argument. Not all of his col- leagues are going to agree with him, at least at the outset. That the Mound Builders in all probability had some sort of contact with the high civiliza- tions to the south is believed now by practically all students of American antiquity. In several mounds, particularly in the Southeastern States, elaborately worked figures in sheet copper, shell, and other materials have been found, in a workmanship that strongly suggests the con- ventions of Maya and Aztec art. The favorite subject is a full-panoplied brave (or possibly a god) doing a war dance. His regalia is de- cidedly like that of some of the figures in Mex- ican “Sculptures, and what is e\>n more sug- gestive, he holds in one hand a severed human head, presumably the gory trophy of an enemy. And in addition to these lively figures of human beings, there are other conventional designs that also bear a notable resemblance to the great though grotesque art of the Southern lands. Another suggestion that the Mound Builders and the Mayas had a common inheritance is found in the occasional effigy of a plumed rattlesnake discovered in the Southeast. The plumed serpent was a favorite religious emblem of the Mayas; it symbolized their great sun deity. Its images in stone dominate the archi- tectural decorations of the temples at Chichen Itza and the other great cities of the ancient Yucatecan civilization. And although the cult of the Serpent was not so highly develop~ ‘A burial urn containing the skeleton of a child, found on St. Cathrine's Island, Georgia. Science would like to know ' if his ancestors came from Siberia by way of Mexica” "~ - " among the Aztecs, some of their temples do show highly elaborated rattlesnake images. The snake dances among the Indians of the Southwest may be a survival of the same cult. There are further marked resemblances be- tween the culture of the Mound Builders and that of the Mexican area. Another noted American archaeologist, Prof. Warren K. Moore- head of Phillips Academy, has made a list of them. He mentions especially’ the building of flat-topped pyramids or temple mounds. For many of the earthen mounds, especially in the South, have flat tops, and once had religious structures, probably of wood, built on them. It is worth noting that the so-called pyramids of the Mayas, Aztecs and other Mexican na- tions were not solid stone pyramids like those of the Egyptians, but were built of earth and covered with stone. They were really stone- plated mounds, rather than true pyramids. ANO‘I'HER thing which the Mound Builders and the Mexican peoples held in common was the wearing of spool-shaped ear orna- ments of copper. In several types of mounds, presumably built by different tribes and pos- sibly at widely different times, these some- what ponderous pieces of jewelry have been found. In Dr. Shetrone’s own particular pet mounds in Ohio, of the type known as Hope- well, these ear spools have been turned up by thousands. Apparently everybody wore them. And ear spools of almost identical pattern adorn the heads in Mexican sculptures and appear on the carved figures found in Ala- bama mounds. There is considerable similarity also in two types of the ceremonial objects which prob- ably played a large part in the religious ritual of the mound peoples, and certainly did in the rituals of the Mexican nations. These are one- piece axes made of stone, handle and all, and tremendously large chipped stone blades. Some of the latter are as much as 18 inches in length. Neither of these could have been of any practical use. The ceremonial character of the monolithic axes is further indicated by the carving of use- less projections and notches on them, in imita- tion of the shape of the wood-and-stone orig- inals. A typical burial ground near Bainbridge, Ohio. scattered all through the Middle Western States. 1930. (I - — Builders’ Mystery A mound builder probably looked like this figure in the Ohio State Museum. Similar mounds are found They seem closely akin to the flat-topped earthen “pyramids” of Mexico, which are really earthen mounds faced with stone. THE trouble to which the Hopewell Mound Builders went to get obsidian, or volcanic glass, for their big ceremonial blades is pos- sibly an outstanding example of this religious conservatism. Hundreds of these beautifully chipped blades have been taken from mounds in Ohio, and bushels upon bushels of flakes knocked off in their manufacture. All the hundreds of pounds of obsidian for making these had to be carried on human backs for long distances. The nearest source of this shining black volcanic glass is Obsidian CUff in Yellowstone National Park. There is no doubt that much of the Hopewell obsidian came from this far-away source. % And the makers of these blades had the heavy blocks of obsidian imported, too; or pos- sibly they made personal pilgrimages to obtain it. They were not content to have their blades made by strangers over a thousand miles away, even though that would have meant much less weight to carry. This is attested In several ways. For one thing, no finished blades have ever been found at the quarries, nor anywhere else except in the mounds of this particular culture. But rough blocks of obsidian have been found in the mounds, often battered and chipped on the edges, as though from handling on the long journey. And blades in all stages of workmanship are found in the mound area, together with great quantities of chips knocked off by the workmen. Finally, the finished blades are always of the same general pattern; nothing “foreign” about them, Probably the wrong shape would never have been acceptable for the ritual. This insistence of the Mound Builders in Ohio and the upper Mississippi Valley on just this one kind of stone, obsidian, even though they had to make long and toilsome journeys to get it, is well worth noting. For obsidian was the material favored for ceremonial blades by the Aztecs and their forerunners on the Mexican plateau. In that volcanic region it is relatively easy to get, and therefore a na- tural thing to use. It cannot be a coincidenca that a people in the remote middle valley would go to such trouble to get obsidian. 'HESE parallels in the cultures of easterm North America and the Mexican area by no means exhaust the list, but they are suffi- cient to indicate at least that the Mound Builders and the Mexicans were in no wise strangers to each other. The study of the details of these similarities has occupied the lifetime of certain scientists, and the more dis< coveries are made, the closer the parallels run. But Dr. Shetrone goes farther than to make a mere hypothesis of how Mexican Indian cul- ture diffused itself northward. He goes back centuries before even the Mexican civilizations, and formulates a theory of whence came the people of old Mexico and all the North Ameri- can aborigines. And strangely enough, his theory involves an original migration from Asia across Bering Strait, a southward exten- sion along the Pacific coast into Mexico, and later migrations northward which resulted in the Mound Builder civilization that imme- diately preceded the Indians as the European invasion found them. But let Dr. Shetrone tell the story in his own words: “Although several theories have been ade- vanced as to the route of entry into Amenca of the Asiatic migrants, all others, including the Polynesian Islands, the mythical Atlantis, and the Aleutian Islands, have been abandoned in favor of the only logical and easy point of access—Bering Strait,” he says. “At its nar- rowest the strait is buf 60 miles in width, with the Diomede Islands, midway of the channel, visible under favorable conditions from either shore. “The arrival of the vanguard of the native race on the American threshold, as envisioned by the anthropologist, is one of the most fas~ cinating episodes of human history.™ (Copyright. 1930.)