Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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In North America, Fragments Of Delf Ware Have Been
Discovered In Places Where There Exist Lines Of Fortification, And The
Walls Of Towns Constructed By Some Unknown Nation, Now Entirely
Extinct.
The paintings on these fragments have a great similitude to
those which are executed in our days on earthenware by the natives of
Louisiana and Florida.
Thus too, the Indians of Maypures often painted
before our eyes the same ornaments as those we had observed in the
cavern of Ataruipe, on the vases containing human bones. They were
grecques, meanders, and figures of crocodiles, of monkeys, and of a
large quadruped which I could not recognize, though it had always the
same squat form. I might hazard the hypothesis that it belongs to
another country, and that the type had been brought thither in the
great migration of the American nations from the north-west to the
south and south-east; but I am rather inclined to believe that the
figure is intended to represent a tapir, and that the deformed image
of a native animal has become by degrees one of the types that has
been preserved.
The Maypures execute with the greatest skill grecques, or ornaments
formed by straight lines variously combined, similar to those that we
find on the vases of Magna Grecia, on the Mexican edifices at Mitla,
and in the works of so many nations who, without communication with
each other, find alike a sensible pleasure in the symmetric repetition
of the same forms.
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