Reports of Central American ruins were also available. A year after Parish authored his book, a book by famous traveler Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, appeared simultaneously in London and New York. Humboldt detailed the dimensions of the pyramids of the sun and moon at Teotihuacan, Mexico, as well as other pyramids in Central America, including the pyramid of Cholula. He believed the pyramids dated to the eighth or ninth century A.D. but reported that others held that they were the work of the Olmecs, making them "still more ancient." He also described the "military entrenchment" of Xochicalco:
It is an insulated hill of 117 metres elevation, surrounded with ditches or trenches, and divided by the hand of man into five terraces covered with masonry. The whole forms a truncated pyramid, of which the four faces are exactly laid down according to the four cardinal points. ... The platform of this extraordinary monument contains more than 9000 square metres, and exhibits the ruins of a small square ediface, which undoubtedly served for a last retreat to the besieged.(6)
Ethan Smith later included Humboldt's description of the pyramid of Cholula in his book View of the Hebrews.(7)
Antonio del Rio's 1822 book, Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City, Discovered Near Palenque, in the Kingdom of Guatemala, was another important early source of information about Central America.(8) Published in London, Rio's book was cited two years later in The History of the State of New York, by John Yates and Joseph Moulton.(9) In addition, Mark Beaufoy, William Bullock, Domingo Juarros, and John Ranking, all publishing books in London during the 1820s, knew of Rio's book and the Palenque ruins.(10)
Beaufoy also described the pyramids at Teotihuacan, Cholula, and other locations in Central America.(11) Bullock reported that the Mexican antiquities included "the remains of pyramids, castles, fortifications, temples, bridges, houses, ... [and] towers ... seven stories high."(12) Juarros described "well defended cities," "magnificent palaces," "fortresses constructed with ... much art," "buildings of pure ostentation and grandeur," and "the remains of a magnificent building ... constructed of hewn stone."(13) In 1823 Tennessean John Haywood described Mexican temples, towers, and roads, including an account of a ruin found deep in the jungle.(14) Six years later the American Monthly Magazine (Boston) published a detailed description of South, Central, and North American antiquities. According to the periodical, one palace found in Mexico City had "twenty doors of entrance, and one hundred rooms," and many "spacious temples and palaces for the nobility" were found in Peru.(15)
Surprisingly detailed, if not completely accurate, accounts of Central and South American ruins were thus more or less readily available to nineteenth-century Americans. Perhaps more significant, however, were the reports of impressive antiquities closer to home. The eastern portion of North America was dotted with hundreds of artificial earthen mounds, or tumuli as they were often called. The Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris, who toured the region northwest of the Allegheny Mountains in 1803, wrote:
The vast mounds and walls of earth, discovered in various parts of this western region have excited the astonishment of all who have seen or heard of them. ... These works are scattered over the whole face of the country. You cannot ride twenty miles in any direction without finding some of the mounds, or vestages of the ramparts.(16)
Ethan Smith reported more than 3,000 tumuli along the Ohio River alone. Based on the number of mounds in eastern North America, one observer, Henry Brackenridge, estimated "that there were 5,000 cities at once full of people. ... I am perfectly satisfied," he wrote, "that cities similar to those of ancient Mexico, of several hundred thousand souls ... have existed in this country."(17)
Three general types of mounds were described: temple or altar mounds, believed to have been erected for worship, either as altars or as platforms for temples which had long since deteriorated; burial mounds, believed to contain the bodies of mound builders who had been slain in a terrible battle; and fortification mounds, believed to have been built by mound builders in defense against attack by savages.
On 19 February 1823 western New York's Palmyra Herald opined that "many of these fortifications were not forts, but religious temples, or places of public worship."(18) Not unexpectedly, Ethan Smith was also interested in mounds associated with religious worship. According to Smith, the ancient North Americans built not only "walled towns," "forts," and "watch-towers" but also "temples." He compared the temple mounds with the altars or "high places" of ancient Israel.(19) In his 1808 book The History of America, Congregational clergyman Jedidiah Morse asserted that many of the large mounds in North America, especially the Grave Creek mound of Ohio, "were intended to serve as bases of temples."(20)