I. Origin of the Indians of America. II. Origin and Civilizations of the Indigenous

Prince, Carlos, 1836-1919Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
671K words
Chapters
68

Tags

Foreign Language Books World HistoryHistory and Culture AnthropologyHistorical ResearchSocial ObservationAcademic StudyCivilization ComparisonOrigins of a SpeciesPost-ColonialEthnographyIndigenous PeoplesCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.I. Origen de los indios de América. II. Origen y civilizaciones de los indígenasAuthor: Prince, Carlos, 1836-1919,Language: Spanish, Class: E011: History: America: America, Release Date: Dec 21, 2017

Editor's review

Carlos Prince's work combines two interrelated topics: the origin of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the civilizations they created. Writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the author bears the clear imprint of the ethnology and archaeology of his time, reflecting the main hypotheses then current about the human peopling of the Americas while preserving a wealth of early observations and documentary leads. For today's reader its value lies not in final answers but in showing how a question was posed: where did the peoples of the American continent come from, and how did they develop complex societies? The survey of civilizations can be read against modern scholarship to trace the shift in paradigms of knowledge. The Spanish original is substantial and its argumentation rather scholarly; it rewards slow, critical reading as a source for the history of science and ideas rather than as a definitive general history.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and concluding sections first to grasp the overall framework of both parts before delving into details.
  2. Note as you read which types of evidence the author relies on, and compare with modern research findings.
  3. Make a small Spanish-Chinese glossary of key terms and ethnic names to ease the reading burden.
  4. Treat the book's hypotheses as historical documents rather than rushing to judge their correctness.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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FAQ

Do the book's conclusions still hold today? They should not be treated as contemporary certainties. The author wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and both the materials and theoretical frameworks he relied on have since been updated; many of his hypotheses have been revised or superseded. Its value lies mainly in showing how scholars of the time posed questions and what evidence they used, making it suitable as a source for the history of science and ideas.
Can I read it without knowing Spanish? The original is in Spanish, and direct reading requires some language foundation. Without Spanish, you can use translation tools section by section, or first read general works in your own language on the origins of indigenous Americans to build background, then consult selected chapters of this book; otherwise the cognitive cost will be relatively high.
What is the difference between the two parts? The first part focuses on the question of the origins of the American Indians, discussing various hypotheses about where the peoples came from; the second turns to the indigenous peoples and their civilizations, surveying civilizational forms across different regions. The two parts are complementary: the former is the question itself, the latter the concrete object to which the question points.

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About the author

Prince, Carlos, 1836-1919 Author

Carlos Prince (Prince, Carlos, 1836-1919) was a Spanish-American scholar of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Details of his life and nationality are scant in publicly available sources, and only one work by him is held in the collection. That representative work consists of two parts: the first, Origen de los indios de América (On the Origin of the Indians of America), and the second, Origen y civilizaciones de los indígenas (On the Origin and Civilizations of the Indigenous Peoples), published together as one book. Judging from the titles and structure, the author was concerned with the origins of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the development of their ancient civilizations, placing the work within early American anthropology and historiography. Such themes were popular in the nineteenth century, when authors commonly combined documentary records, missionary accounts, and archaeological observations to explain where the Indians came from and how their civilizations took shape. Prince follows this tradition, blending scholarship with conjecture, and his book offers some value for understanding contemporary scholarly debates on indigenous origins. Owing to limited sources, his academic standing and actual influence cannot yet be fully assessed.