ANCIENT RACES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17346, 10 May 1924, Page 12

ANCIENT RACES.

(ARLY AMERICAN PEOPLES

What the ruins show.

'Contributed.) Jth-ntral America has proved for the * , i '“h*i>lo«ist ami yet how litLo is known <*i the early inhabitants of that couu- ***■'■ Recent discoveries, notably that Ci Mr Mitchell Hedges, in Honduras, a few treks ago, ami more recently still tho finding ot *a groat pyramid nuricd beneath Mexico City, have brought this country to our minds. This land ha; revealed much to the archaeologist a! *eady, yet very litle is known ot the tarly inhabitants ot America. l a eru *od Mexico, by reason ot their histories! association with the-Spaniards, Have proved fertile fields for authors ami much has been published about them, though not alt of it has been correct. The two great races which have left their mark in Central and South Auiei i« a. are the Maya and Nuhua nations. The Maya nation, which is believed tr» fcave reached the height of its civilian* tmm about the beginning of the Christian Era, consisted of from twenty to twenty five separate tribes, and tin.' IVahua Empire, which is stated to have dominated Northern Mexico about five centuries later, consisted of about fifty tribes, each with its independent, tributary government. The great point ot difference between the two races, which the ruins show, is that the natives "built- permanent houses lor the masses of the people to dwell in, whilst tlie Mayas, who were an agricultural nation built temples and palaces ior their myriad gods and priests, whilst the people lived in lowly wooden huts or. their farms. The majority of the ruins arc temples and burial pyramids. "Scientists are almost unanimous in agreeing that these peoples came from the East, though the means by which they came are in dispute The natives are Ot a Mongoloid type, have straight, black hair and on the whole, broad, flat- • tlsh faces, though the latter character lStic is not by any means universal. Diologicallv they show no traces of Caucasoid or Negroid origin. Their mode o: living was simple, but they had many of the comforts of modern man. using chairs of wood and stone, and in some or the ruins on the Pacific Coast bunks have been found That the civilisation of the Maya race was much more highly developed ■than that of the Nahuas. i s shown by the fact that they appear to have, if not a somplete alphabet, at least a standardised character for each word, « :• group of words, in their language. <>n the other hand the Nahuas’ only inscriptions arc ideographic, consisting of picture-writing, and being, therefore almost certainly impossible of translation, for to do so it is necessary to hare the basic idea in the mind of the picturewliter and this modern man has lost. W ith the Maya language, therefore, more is likely to be ac- < omplisbed. I roni the size and nature of construction of the'massive ruins that remain, one may safely assume that both the constructing nations must have been very powerful, for in the course of their construction great masses of carved stone had to be raised to considerable heights, and, as the races appear to hcv been completely lacking in engineering devices of any kind, enormous numbers of men must have Wn required to haul them up to the inclined planes of earth, which were med for raising them into position. Instances are to be found where blocks o'- stone 400 tons have been hauled 17 miles from the quarry to the site of a building. When the build nigs were erected, the heaps of earth up which the stones had been dragged, v ere then removed and the buildings were left standing sometimes hundreds of .feet high. These edifices are remarkable for their massiveness, as compared with actual habitable interior space. In the great palace at UxmaJ, in the Yucatan, Mexico, for instance, the mass of masonry is to the chamber spaces as 40 to 1. In Peru, however, massiveness of structure does not exist to the same extent, due. it is said, to volcanic activity chiefly. Tlie building of huge temples and palaces was not the only out let for tin construct ion a 1 genius of the May i and Nnlma, for the ruins of massive reservoirs and aqueducts in Arizona. Mexico, and Peru, show that they had a : so a very intimate knowledge of the principles of hydrotecherv. When u is realised that in all these work*, these early builders had not the benefits of the use of metal tools, buc were confined to implements of stone, something of their skill, doggedness and perseverance will l»o recognised. All their carving and hewing of stone v, as done with stone implements. Huge blocks of building stone were chipped away from lerges and broken off by means of overs. Stone-hammers were need for chipping, sawing was done b' means of other pieces of thin hard none, or with sand, and boring wadone with a sand-drill. These early masons showed great wastefulness in all their carving and hewing, and the large piles of chips and partly-carved blocks of stone found to-day near their old ouarrie- ar«> ! ! ut ? evidence of tins primitive trah ui their characters. Although lack of a uniformity and grouping marks all their buildi.u these rums are the best remaining in. 1-7 of early American’s mode of hfe and character. The construction r s J Kh « reat buildings as the palace r,r,L ' 01 '’ . tWt - «* the o,t,P- ---" at ruins, indicates that tliev hud * ™„d,rf u , grip of architectural deSo tar onl> the .nrraee of this fas. .-mating study of the early American hai. been scratched and inurli \ct renil*.ins uurevealed. There exists folinstance, in the State of Ta based -Mexico, an old ruin of vast area, coy‘‘"P'l;l' jungle and earth, t hieb tt !s the behef of the authori--t.es of the Mexican National Museum Trufv a tif s f " von Ma - v;i liub the future of arehteloey in Central and South America holds „ «■<„, derlul pium.se of information as to the tally races of the earth.