Annual Report of the Executive Committee (Volume 1); With Accompanying Papers (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A STUDY OF THE HOUSES OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. great object of the Archaeological Institute, so far as it relates to America, should be to explore, delineate, and describe the house architecture of the Indian tribes as represented by the houses now to be found in ruins, or in actual occupation, in the region of the San Juan River, in New Mexico and Arizona, in Mexico and Central America, and to study such fictile wares, implements, and utensils as may be found therein, and may tend to illustrate the condition of the people. The whole of this area should be covered by the plan of operations of the Institute, for it contains but one system of works, similar in broad features, but with minor, mutually illustrative varieties in different localities. To the Archaeological Institute pre-eminently belongs the important and meritorious enterprise of gathering up a knowledge of these remains, and of presenting to the world a comparison and interpretation of them. There is yet time to do this work well: it cannot be done by any single individual; and unless the present organization succeed in its accomplishment, there is little hope that it will ever be done. The great houses of stone of the Village Indians within the areas named, and particularly in Yucatan and Central America, are the highest constructive works of the Indian tribes. It seems to me probable that, from the beginning, a wrong interpretation has been put upon this architecture,from a failure to understand its object and uses, and the condition and mode of domestic life of the people who occupied these structures. The design and object for which these edifices were constructed still await an intelligent explanation. There are reasons for assuming that all the tribes of the American aborigines were of one comm...