Book Description

Excerpt from Archaeologia Nova Caesarea No It has been maintained that the term Archæology docs not I apply to North, Central or South America, but that this considerable portion of the earth's habitable surface was not a scene of human activity until Asia, Europe and Africa and the isles of the South Seas had been so long populated that humanity was an old and not very creditable story, and then about the dawn of what we know as the historic period some wandering unfortunates from other lands found some one of the three Americas, and finally drifted into the other two. According to these authors, and they are about all who have given attention to the subject, the history of America is about the heaviest, dreariest, most somnolent matter ever preserved in print, until Columbus made his discovery, or possibly from the supposed visit of the Norseman, four or five centuries earlier. All this may be true, but, happily for those archaeologically inclined, the probability of its so being is still an open question, and, despite the earnest, and we hope sincere, efforts of the ethnologists to modernize every phase of the subject, the thought will persist in coming to the fore, when fieldwork is in progress, can all this be within the range of history, or, at most, on the shadowy border of it, just prior to Columbus sighting land in the Antilles? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.