“Savages Never Carved These Stones” (February 1959 | Volume: 10, Issue: 2)

“Savages Never Carved These Stones”

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Authors: André Emmerich

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February 1959 | Volume 10, Issue 2

On the afternoon of November 17, 1839, John Lloyd Stephens, a red-bearded New York lawyer, and Frederick Catherwood, an English artist, hacked their way through a jungle in Honduras and emerged at the edge of a broad river. Facing them across the wide ribbon of water was an ancient and massive stone wall, looming up a hundred feet out of the bush. As they crossed the river and explored the surroundings, they discovered stone altars, mysterious hieroglyphics, and giant idols richly carved; it was clear that they had come upon the ruins of an ancient city. Its only guardians were a chain of chattering monkeys moving through the treetops overhead; all else was eerie, humid silence. In wonder, Stephens wrote:

“America, say historians, was peopled by savages; but savages never reared these structures, savages never carved these stones. When we asked the Indians who made them, their dull answer was ‘ Quién sabe? ’ (Who knows?) There were no associations connected with this place, none of those stirring recollections which hallow Rome, Athens, and ‘The world’s great mistress on the Egyptian plain.’ But architecture, sculpture, and painting, all the arts which embellish life had flourished in this overgrown forest; orators, warriors and statesmen, beauty, ambition and glory had lived and passed away, and none knew that such things had been, or could tell of their past existence.… The city was desolate. … It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction …”

Copán, for that had been the city’s name, had lain deserted for 1,000 years, its ruins undisturbed even by Cortes and his small band of Spanish adventurers who in 1521 had vanquished the Aztec empire and, shortly afterward, most of Central America. Today, thanks to Stephens and Catherwood and those who came after them, we know a great deal more about these sophisticated Central and South American cultures than the Spaniards ever learned. The patient spades of modern archaeologists have uncovered a remarkable panorama of cultures going back some four thousand years.

As in all the other great culture-producing centers of the world—the Valley of the Euphrates, the Mediterranean littoral, the Valley of the Yangtze—culture succeeded culture in Mexico and in Peru, spreading out into neighboring areas, including much of the United States. This pattern, which fascinated Gibbon, Spengler, Toynbee, and the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, is an ancient one in the New World also. Many tribes settled here and grew into nourishing nations, only to decay in their turn—many different cultures succeeding one another, destroying one another, and giving birth to still others in a chain of history very much longer than was until recently suspected. The Aztec and lnca empires that Cortes and Pizarro conquered went back only some two