five hundred persons, makes an Indian village. Two or three such houses, as at Taos and Santo Domingo, form a large pueblo; and a group of several such houses, as at Zuñi, a pueblo of the largest size, which once contained perhaps five thousand persons, now reduced to fifteen hundred. There are no reasons for supposing that any pueblo in Yucatan or Central America contained as high a number as ten thousand inhabitants at the period of the Spanish conquest, although these countries were extremely favorable for an increase of Indian population. Their villages were numerous and small. Castañeda, who accompanied the expedition of Coronado to New Mexico in 1 540-1542, estimated the population of the seventy villages visited by detachments and situated between the Colorado River, Zuñi, and the Arkansas at twenty thousand men, which would give a total population in this wide area of a hundred thousand Indians.[1] There were seven villages each of Cibola, Tusayan, Quivira, and Hemes, and twelve of Tiguex; it would give an average of about fourteen hundred and fifty persons to each village. In all probability these are fair samples as to the number of inhabitants of the villages of the Mound-Builders, with exceptional cases, as the village on the site of Marietta, in Ohio, where there may have been five thousand, if an impression may be formed from the extent of the earth-works occupied in the manner hereafter suggested. Where several villages were found near each other on the same stream, as in New Mexico, the people usually spoke the same dialect, which tends to show that those in each group were colonists from one original village.
The earth-works of the Mound-Builders must be regarded as the sites of their villages. The question then recurs, for what purpose did they raise these embankments at an expenditure of so much labor? They must have lived somewhere, in, upon, or around them. No answer has been given to this question, and no serious attempt has been made to explain their uses. They have been called "defensive enclosures"; but it is not supposable that they lived in houses within the embankments, for this would turn the places into slaughter-pens in case of an attack. Some of them have been called "sacred enclosures", but this goes for nothing apart from some knowledge of their uses. They were constructed for a practical, intelligent purpose,
- ↑ Coll. Ternaux-Compans, vol. ix, pp. 181-183.
