. Bulletin. Ethnology. MAYA INDIANS OF YUCATAN AND BRITISH HONDURAS 95 duras, still in a fairly good state of i)r('scrvation. This is a twg-story temple standing upon a small natural elevation. Each story contains 12 small rooms, tliree on the north side and tliree on the south side, each of wliich has a narrower room in the rear. The central rooms are 27 feet in length, the side rooms 17 feet 6 inches. The breadth of the smaller rooms is 4 feet 6 inches; the divi(Ung walls are 3 feet thick. ^Ul the rooms in the lower story are filled in with large blocks of stone, loosely held together with a
. Bulletin. Ethnology. MAYA INDIANS OF YUCATAN AND BRITISH HONDURAS 95 duras, still in a fairly good state of i)r('scrvation. This is a twg-story temple standing upon a small natural elevation. Each story contains 12 small rooms, tliree on the north side and tliree on the south side, each of wliich has a narrower room in the rear. The central rooms are 27 feet in length, the side rooms 17 feet 6 inches. The breadth of the smaller rooms is 4 feet 6 inches; the divi(Ung walls are 3 feet thick. ^Ul the rooms in the lower story are filled in with large blocks of stone, loosely held together with a small amount of mortar. Tliis seems to have been a favorite device among the Maya architects, its object probably having been to give greater strength and stability to the new upper story erected upon a building of older date. All the rooms are roofed with the triangular so-called ''American ; The height of the rooms is 5 feet 10 inches to the top of the wall, and 5 feet 10 inches from the top of the wall to the apex of the arch. All the rooms had been covered with stucco, and upon the wall of one of the inner cham- bers completely cov- ered over with green mold the devices shown in figure 39 were found, rudely scratched upon the stucco. In both the upper and the lower part of the drawing are what may be taken as crude representa- tions of "Cimi," the God of Death, probably, hke the "grafiti" of Rome and Pompeii, scratched on the wall after the abandonment of the temple by its original builders.^ Whoever executed the drawing must have had some knowledge, however crude, of Maya art and mythology, as the Cimi head shown in the lower and the conventional feather ornaments in the upper part of figure 39 are unmistakably of Maya origin. To the north of tliis building hes a considerable group of ruins. Among these tliree large pyramidal 1 Similar grafiti were discovered on the wall of a temple at Nakum, in Guatemala. See Tozzer, Pre- liminary Study of t
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectethnolo, bookyear1901
