of an Iroquois house and with a New Mexican pueblo, and one is struck with the resemblance. All these houses seem obviously adapted to a communal life, and traces of this practice, varying in different places,

96 Ft.

PLAN OF IROQUOIS HOUSE

226 Ft.

PLAN OF NECHECOLEE HOUSE

come constantly before us. The Pueblo Indians, like other tribes, hold their lands in common. The traveller Stephens saw near the ruins of Uxmal the food of a hundred laboring-men prepared at one hut, and each family sending for its own portion-"a procession of women and children, each carrying a smoking bowl of hot broth, all coming down the same path, and dispersing among the huts." But this description might easily be paralleled among northern tribes. I will not dwell on the complex laws of descent and relationship, which are so elaborately described by Morgan in his Ancient Society, and which appear to have prevailed in general among all the aboriginal clans. The essential result of all these various observations is this, that whatever degree of barbarism or semi-civilization was attained by any of the early American races, it was everywhere based on similar ways of living; it never resembled feudal

ism, but came much nearer to communism; it was the condition of a people substantially free, whose labor was voluntary, and whose chiefs were of their own choosing. After a most laborious investigation, Bandelier in the Twelfth Report of the Peabody Institute came to the conclusion that "the social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans was a military democracy, originally based upon communism in living." And if this was apparently true even in the seemingly powerful and highly organized races of Mexico, it was certainly true of every North American tribe.

If we accept this conclusion-and most archæologists now accept it-much of what has been written about prehistoric American civilization proves to have been too hastily said. Tylor, for instance, after visiting the pyramid of Cholula, laid it down as an axiom: "Such buildings as these can only be raised under peculiar social conditions. The ruler must be a despotic sovereign, and the mass of the people slaves, whose subsistence and whose lives are sacrificed without scruple to execute the fancies of the monarch, who is not so much the governor as the unrestricted owner of the country and the people." He did not sufficiently consider that this is the first and easiest way to explain all great structures representing vast labor. A much-quoted American writer finds it necessary to explain even the works of the Mound-builders in a similar way. J. W. Foster thinks it clear that "the condition of society among the Mound-builders was not that of freemen, or, in other words, that the state possessed absolute power over the lives and fortunes of its subjects." But the theory of despotism is no more needed to explain a mound or a pueblo

than to justify the existence of the long houses of the Iroquois. Even the less civilized types of the aboriginal American race had learned how to unite in erecting their communal dwellings; and surely the higher the grade the greater the power.

The Mound-builders were formerly regarded as a

race so remote from the present Indian tribes that there could be nothing in common between them, yet all recent inquiries tend to diminish this distance. Many Indian tribes have built burial mounds for their dead. Squier, after the publication of his great work on the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, made an exploration of the mounds of western New York, and found, contrary to all his preconceived opinions, that these last must have been made by the Iroquois. Some of the most elaborate series of works, as those at Marietta and Circleville, Ohio, have yielded from their deepest recesses articles of European manufacture, showing an origin not further back than the historic period. Spanish swords and blue glass beads have been found in the mounds of Georgia and Florida. But we need not go so far as this to observe the analogies of structure. If we compare Professor F. W. Putnam's ground-plan of a fortified village of the Mound-builders on Spring Creek, in Tennessee, with a similar plan of a Mandan village as given by Prince Maximilian of Neuwied in 1843, we find their arrangement to be essentially the same. Each is on a promontory protected by the bend of a stream; each is surrounded by an embankment which was once, in all probability, surmounted by a palisade. Within this embankment were the houses, distributed more irregularly in Putnam's plan, more formally and conventionally in that of the Prince of Neuwied; in other respects the two villages are almost duplicates. It is clear that the Mound-builders had much in common with those well-known tribes of Indians the Mandans and Onondagas, in their way of placing and protecting their houses; and another comparison has been made which links their works

on the other side with the New Mexican pueblos. Morgan prepared a conjectural restoration of the High Bank mounds in Ross County, Ohio, on the

theory that in that instance the houses of the inhabitants were long houses in structure, and were built for defensive purposes on top of the embankment. This makes the villages into pueblos, and Morgan therefore baptized the settlement anew with the name of "High Bank Pueblo." A mere glance at his restoration will show how much there was in common between the various types of what he calls the aboriginal American race.

It remains to be considered whether the very highest forms of this race-the Aztecs and the Mayasare properly to be called civilized. It is a matter of definition; it depends upon what we regard as constituting civilization. Here was a people whose development showed strange contradictions. The ancient Mexicans were skilled in horticulture, yet