Bibliographie d'histoire coloniale ( 1900-1930 )

Page 203

189

ÉTATS-UNIS

to the remarkable investigations sponsored by the Peabody Museum, the Smithsonian and Carnegie Institutions, and Yale University, the secrets of pre-Columbian America are now fast being laid bare. Thus, by the use of the new tree ring method, it has been possible definitely to date timbered ruins in the southwestern part of the United States as early as the eighth century A. D., while correlation of the Christian and Maya calendars has shown monuments in Central America to have been erected nearly 1900 years ago. Hrdlicka has traced the crossing of Asiatics to North America by way of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands, while Farrand and Huntington have made excellent surveys of indigenous civilizations on the continent as a whole. Morley and Spinden have both studied Maya chronology ; Morley, Maya hieroglyphs ;

Tozzer,

the

intricacies

of

Maya

grammar ;

and

Thompson, the racial structure of this amazing people. Maya Architecture, by Totten, is an erudite and sumptuously printed work. Gann and Thompson's History of the Maya is the first scholarly work in the field with real appeal for the layman. Wiener is an authority on Aztec, Toltec and Mayan origins. The brilliant past of tin Incas, too, has been brought to light. yielded

Hrdlicka's highly

anthropological

important

results.

researches Bingham's

in

Peru

have

explorations,

recorded in his three volumes, Inca Land, Machu Picchu and Vitcos, the Last Inca Capital, revealed the glories of a vanished people. Peru Before the Conquest, by Benham, Means' Ancient Civilizations of the Andes, his A Survey of Ancient Peruvian Art, Poindexter's The Ayar-Incos and Mead's work on Inca culture have popularized knowledge on the subject. Douglass' spectacular The Secret of the Southwest Solved by... Tree Rings describes his now famed method of dating pueblo ruins which has opened a new chapter in the study of Indian pre-history. The use of source material on the colonization of North America has been greatly facilitated by the publication of a series of guides to manuscripts in European, Cuban and Mexican archives by the Carnegie Institution and the University


Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.