CHAPTER XXII.

ARTIFICIAL CRANIAL DISTORTION.

THE evidences of an assumed cranial and physical unity pervading the aborigines of the American continent disappear upon a careful scrutiny, and the like results follow when the same critical investigation is applied to other proofs adduced in support of this attractive but insubstantial theory. Dr. Morton, after completing his elaborate and valuable illustrations of American craniology, introduces an engraving of a mummy of a Muysca Indian of New Granada, and adds: "As an additional evidence of the unity of race and species in the American nations, I shall now adduce the singular fact, that from Patagonia to Canada, and from ocean to ocean, and equally in the civilized and uncivilized tribes, a peculiar mode of placing the body in sepulture has been practised from immemorial time. This peculiarity consists in the sitting posture.' The author accordingly proceeds to marshal his evidence in proof of the practice of such a mode of interment among many separate and independent tribes; nor is it difficult. to do so, for it was a usage of greatly more extended recognition than his theory of "unity of race and species" implies. It was a prevailing, though by no means universal mode of sepulture among the tribes of the New World, as it was among many of those of the 1 Crania Americana, p. 244.

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bones of the dead, with all the offerings deposited beside them were consigned to one common grave. Ossaaries of great extent, forming the general recepsace of large communities, have been repeatedly brought to light both in Canada and the northern Creaxius quotes from Le Jeune an account of one of the great general burials of the Hurons which he witnessed. A grand celebration was solemnly convoked. Not only the remains of those whose bodies bad been stadded, but of all who had died on a journey or on the war-path, and been temporarily buried, were now gathered together and interred in one common sepulchre with special marks of regard. The pit was lined with furs; all the relies and offerings to the dead were deposited beside the bones, and the whole were covered with furs before the earth was thrown over them. When the Mandans buried the remains of their scaffolded dead, they left the skull uninterred; and Catlin describes their skulls as lying on the prairies arranged in circles of a hundred or more, with their faces towards the echtre, where a little mound is erected, surmounted by a male and female buffalo skull.

When we pass to the westward of the Rocky Mountains, new modifications vary the Indian sepulchral rites. Along the Cowlitz and Columbia rivers, and among various north-west tribes on the Pacific, the canoe of the deceased is converted into his bier. In this he is laid at full length, adorned in his gayest attire, and surrounded with his weapons and favourite property, as well as with the offerings of his friends; and after being towed in solemn funeral procession to the burialplace of the tribe, the canoe is elevated on poles, and protected by a covering of birch bark. Among the Chimpseyan or Babeen Indians the female dead are scaffolded, but the male are invariably burned; and

numerous evidences of the practice of cremation and urn-burial have been found in Georgia and South Carolina, as well as in the Brazils and other parts of the southern continent. Again, the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, and the caves at Golconda, Steubenville, and other localities, filled with the bones and desiccated remains of the dead, or with their carefully preserved mummies, illustrate other and varying customs which have their counterpart in the practices of the Old World; while the Ohio and Scioto mounds furnish unmistakable evidence that both cremation and incumbent mound sepulture were practised by the race whose works preserve to us so many traces of ancient arts and long extinct rites.

It is obvious, from such references, that there is little more proof of the universal prevalence of any single mode of sepulture among the American aborigines than can be traced in the practices of primitive nations of

the Old World; while the custom of interring the dead in a sitting posture, in so far as it prevails among them, is rather suggestive of borrowed Asiatic, or primitive European rites, than of anything peculiar to the western hemisphere. Of the latter, indeed, the exposure of the

corpse on its scaffolding, or elevated in its canoe-bier (Fig. 66), constitutes a far more characteristic peculiarity in the rites and customs of the New World; and if universal, might have seemed to justify the inference which Dr. Morton has attempted to maintain by assuming not only the universality of a different practice, but also its restriction to the continent of America.

But there is another remarkable characteristic of many American tribes and nations that is much more suggestive of widely diffused affinities throughout the Western Hemisphere, as well as of an aboriginal isolation, than anything else disclosed by prevalent customs or peculiar rites of sepulture. Much attention has naturally been attracted to the evidences of the singular practice of moulding the human head into artificial forms, which have been brought to light, alike in the cemeteries of ancient Peruvian seats of civilisation, and in those of the hunter tribes of the north. But this also, though unusually prevalent in the New World, proves to be no exclusive American characteristic, but one which had its counterpart among the customs of the ancient world, and so is rather suggestive of a borrowed usage, and of affinities with the nations of the eastern hemisphere. It seems, the further it is investigated, to suggest an Asiatic origin for this as for so much else which the European regarded with strange wonder when first noted by him among the peculiarities of that New World, unless indeed it be an ancient gift from America to Asia. References to the singular cranial conformation of certain tribes, and to the strange practice of artificially moulding the human head, were familiar to Europe not only prior to the first voyage of Columbus, but centuries before the Christian era. The earliest notice occurs in the writings of Hippocrates, who, in his treatise De Aeris, Aquis, et Locis, gives an account of a people in

habiting the shores of the Euxine, whose cranial conformation bore no resemblance to that of any other nation. He further states, that they considered those most noble who had the longest heads, and ascribes this peculiar form to an artificial elongation of the head by compression during infancy. To this people, accordingly, he gave the name of the Macrocephali, and both he and subsequent writers ascribe certain peculiar mental endowments to this long-headed race. Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela all allude to the subject at later dates, though assigning different localities to the nations or tribes they refer to, and also indicating diversities of form in their peculiar cranial characteristics. This tends still further to suggest that the name of Macrocephali does not properly belong to a distinct race or single tribe on the shores of the Euxine Sea; but that, like the term Flatheads, as used at the present day among the Indian tribes of the North-west, it was applied to all who practised the barbarous art of cranial distortion. Strabo, in the eleventh book of his geography, describes the western portion of Asia, of which alone he appears to have had any accurate ideas; and it is there that the remarkable passage occurs in which he speaks of an Asiatic tribe as having anxiously striven to give themselves a long-headed appearance, and to have foreheads projecting over their beards. Pomponius Mela also describes the Macrocephali he refers to as less hideous than other tribes in the same vicinity, among whom it may be inferred that cranial deformation was carried to a greater extent, as among the modern Chinook Indians, who depress the forehead until the skull assumes the form of that of a brute. The skulls of various ancient and modern American tribes can be discriminated by means of the peculiar form of head most in fashion with the tribe; and all