chapter 9._

AMBIVARETI, The.

A tribe in ancient Gaul which occupied the left bank of the Meuse, to the south of the marsh of Peel.

_Napoleon III., History of Cæsar, book 3, chapter 2, note._

AMBLEVE, Battle of (716.)

See FRANKS (MEROVINGIAN EMPIRE): A. D. 511-752.

AMBOISE, Conspiracy or Tumult of.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1559-1561.

AMBOISE, Edict of.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1560-1563.

AMBOYNA, Massacre of.

See INDIA: A. D. 1600-1702.

AMBRACIA (Ambrakia).

See KORKYRA.

AMBRONES, The.

See CIMBRI AND TEUTONES: B. C. 113-102.

AMBROSIAN CHURCH. AMBROSIAN CHANT.

See MILAN: A. D. 374-397.

AMEIXAL, OR ESTREMOS, Battle of (1663).

See PORTUGAL: A. D. 1637-1668.

[Image: ETHNOLOGICAL MAP OF MODERN EUROPE (right)]

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AMERICA, The Name.

See below: A. D. 1500-1514.

AMERICA, Prehistoric.

"Widely scattered throughout the United States, from sea to sea, artificial mounds are discovered, which may be enumerated by the thousands or hundreds of thousands. They vary greatly in size; some are so small that a half-dozen laborers with shovels might construct one of them in a day, while others cover acres and are scores of feet in height. These mounds were observed by the earliest explorers and pioneers of the country. They did not attract great attention, however, until the science of archæology demanded their investigation. Then they were assumed to furnish evidence of a race of people older than the Indian tribes. Pseud-archæologists descanted on the Mound-builders that once inhabited the land, and they told of swarming populations who had reached a high condition of culture, erecting temples, practicing arts in the metals, and using hieroglyphs. So the Mound-builders formed the theme of many an essay on the wonders of ancient civilization. The research of the past ten or fifteen years has put this subject in a proper light. First, the annals of the Columbian epoch have been carefully studied, and it is found that some of the mounds have been constructed in historical time, while early explorers and settlers found many actually used by tribes of North American Indians; so we know that many of them were builders of mounds. Again, hundreds and thousands of these mounds have been carefully examined, and the works of art found therein have been collected and assembled in museums. At the same time, the works of art of the Indian tribes, as they were produced before modification by European culture, have been assembled in the same museums, and the two classes of collections have been carefully compared. All this has been done with the greatest painstaking, and the Mound-builder's arts and the Indian's arts are found to be substantially identical. No fragment of evidence remains to support the figment of theory that there was an ancient race of Mound-builders superior in culture to the North American Indians. … That some of these mounds were built and used in modern times is proved in another way. They often contain articles manifestly made by white men, such as glass beads and copper ornaments. … So it chances that to-day unskilled archæologists are collecting many beautiful things in copper, stone, and shell which were made by white men and traded to the Indians. Now, some of these things are found in the mounds; and bird pipes, elephant pipes, banner stones, copper spear heads and knives, and machine-made wampum are collected in quantities and sold at high prices to wealthy amateurs. … The study of these mounds, historically and archæologically, proves that they were used for a variety of purposes. Some were for sepulture, and such are the most common and widely scattered. Others were used as artificial hills on which to build communal houses. … Some of the very large mounds were sites of large communal houses in which entire tribes dwelt. There is still a third class … constructed as places for public assembly. … But to explain the mounds and their uses would expand this article into a book. It is enough to say that the Mound-builders were the Indian tribes discovered by white men. It may well be that some of the mounds were erected by tribes extinct when Columbus first saw these shores, but they were kindred in culture to the peoples that still existed. In the southwestern portion of the United States, conditions of aridity prevail. Forests are few and are found only at great heights. … The tribes lived in the plains and valleys below, while the highlands were their hunting grounds. The arid lands below were often naked of vegetation; and the ledges and cliffs that stand athwart the lands, and the canyon walls that inclose the streams, were everywhere quarries of loose rock, lying in blocks ready to the builder's hand. Hence these people learned to build their dwellings of stone; and they had large communal houses, even larger than the structures of wood made by the tribes of the east and north. Many of these stone pueblos are still occupied, but the ruins are scattered wide over a region of country embracing a little of California and Nevada, much of Utah, most of Colorado, the whole of New Mexico and Arizona, and far southward toward the Isthmus. … No ruin has been discovered where evidences of a higher culture are found than exists in modern times at Zuni, Oraibi, or Laguna. The earliest may have been built thousands of years ago, but they were built by the ancestors of existing tribes and their congeners. A careful study of these ruins, made during the last twenty years, abundantly demonstrates that the pueblo culture began with rude structures of stone and brush, and gradually developed, until at the time of the exploration of the country by the Spaniards, beginning about 1540, it had reached its highest phase. Zuni [in New Mexico] has been built since, and it is among the largest and best villages ever established within the territory of the United States without the aid of ideas derived from civilized men." With regard to the ruins of dwellings found sheltered in the craters of extinct volcanoes, or on the shelves of cliffs, or otherwise contrived, the conclusion to which all recent archæological study tends is the same. "All the stone pueblo ruins, all the clay ruins, all the cliff dwellings, all the crater villages, all the cavate chambers, and all the tufa-block houses are fully accounted for without resort to hypothetical peoples inhabiting the country anterior to the Indian tribes. … Pre-Columbian culture was indigenous; it began at the lowest stage of savagery and developed to the highest, and was in many places passing into barbarism when the good queen sold her jewels."

_Major J. W. Powell, Prehistoric Man in America; in "The Forum," January, 1890._

"The writer believes … that the majority of American archæologists now sees no sufficient reason for supposing that any mysterious superior race has ever lived in any portion of our continent. They find no archæological evidence proving that at the time of its discovery any tribe had reached a stage of culture that can properly be called civilization. Even if we accept the exaggerated statements of the Spanish conquerors, the most intelligent and advanced peoples found here were only semi-barbarians, in the stage of transition from the stone to the bronze age, possessing no written language, or what can properly be styled an alphabet, and not yet having even learned the use of beasts of burden."

_H. W. Haynes, Prehistoric Archæology of North America (volume 1, chapter 6, of "Narrative and Critical History of America")._

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"It may be premised … that the Spanish adventurers who thronged to the New World after its discovery found the same race of Red Indians in the West India Islands, in Central and South America, in Florida and in Mexico. In their mode of life and means of subsistence, in their weapons, arts, usages and customs, in their institutions, and in their mental and physical characteristics, they were the same people in different stages of advancement. … There was neither a political society, nor a state, nor any civilization in America when it was discovered; and excluding the Eskimos, but one race of Indians, the Red Race."

_L. H. Morgan, Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines: (Contributions to North American Ethnology, volume 5.), chapter 10_.

"We have in this country the conclusive evidence of the existence of man before the time of the glaciers, and from the primitive conditions of that time, he has lived here and developed, through stages which correspond in many particulars to the Homeric age of Greece."

_F. W. Putnam, Report, Peabody Museum of Archæology, 1886._

ALSO IN _L. Carr, The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley_.

_C. Thomas, Burial Mounds of the Northern Sections of the United States: Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1883-84_.

_Marquis de Nadaillac, Prehistoric America_.

_J. Fiske, The Discovery of America,