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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Not Only The Maypures, But Also The
Guaypunaves, The Caribs, The Ottomacs, And Even The Guamos, Are
Distinguished At The
Orinoco as makers of painted pottery, and this
manufacture extended formerly towards the banks of the Amazon.
Orellana was struck
With the painted ornaments on the ware of the
Omaguas, who in his time were a populous commercial nation.
The following facts throw some light on the history of American
civilization. In the United States, west of the Allegheny mountains,
particularly between the Ohio and the great lakes of Canada, on
digging the earth, fragments of painted pottery, mingled with brass
tools, are constantly found. This mixture may well surprise us in a
country where, on the first arrival of Europeans, the natives were
ignorant of the use of metals. In the forests of South America, which
extend from the equator as far as the eighth degree of north latitude,
from the foot of the Andes to the Atlantic, this painted pottery is
discovered in the most desert places, but it is found accompanied by
hatchets of jade and other hard stones, skilfully perforated. No
metallic tools or ornaments have ever been discovered; though in the
mountains on the shore, and at the back of the Cordilleras, the art of
melting gold and copper, and of mixing the latter metal with tin to
make cutting instruments, was known. How can we account for these
contrasts between the temperate and the torrid zone? The Incas of Peru
had pushed their conquests and their religious wars as far as the
banks of the Napo and the Amazon, where their language extended over a
small space of land; but the civilization of the Peruvians, of the
inhabitants of Quito, and of the Muyscas of New Grenada, never appears
to have had any sensible influence on the moral state of the nations
of Guiana.
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