Spinden and Mason, Investigating Mayan Temples, Solve Riddle of Lost Civilization

Dr. Herbert J. Spinden '06, Curator of the Peabody Museum, has just returned from a three months' expedition in the Yucatan. With Mr. Gregory Mason. Dr. Spinden explored mush of the territory which was previously unknown to archaeologists, in an attempt to get nearer the long sought solution of the Mayan riddle.

What was already known of these people as well as the new facts revealed by the Mason-Spinden expedition are set forth in the following article which Dr. Mason has written for the New York Times.

Because of the great importance of religion in Maya life the members of our expedition were not surprised to find that most of the buildings in the seven ruined cities we discovered were temples or edifices devoted to religious purposes. Under the latter heading, of course, would come tombs, observatories, monasteries and nunneries. One of the most interesting buildings Dr. Spinden and I found at Okop, a building that is now a mass of stone, 45 feet high 130 feet long and 110 feet wide--with most of its ceilings caved in--was perhaps of the latter category, for in some respects it suggests the "nunnery" at Chichen Itza.

Of the cities discovered by our expedition the oldest is Okop, some sixty miles form the coast, or much further inland than the others and further south than all except Muyll, which is in about the same latitude. We know by looking at its architecture that Okop is the oldest. Its walls are thicker, the whole construction of its buildings is heavier. When the Mayas first began to build they knew little about the laws governing thrust and strain. Their earliest two-story buildings have the second story set behind the first on a solid mass of masonry. They dared not put one room directly above another. Later they learned how to do this and the development of their skill can be traced through buildings of successive periods.

Temple Still Sacred

It is possible that some vague tradition of the extreme sacredness of this temple has come down to the modern Indians, who resented our entering this place more than anything we did. This interesting fact came out during a cross-examination to which we were subject near the end of our trip by General Francisco May military commander of all the Indians of the territory of Quintana Roo.

But a look at the grotesque faces decorating the four corners of Muyil's highest temple would alone incline the archaeologist to the opinion that Muyil is not a First Empire city. Such faces or "mask panels" are common in Maya architecture; but in the southern and older area the details of the face are generally built up of stucoo, whereas in the northern and later area they are in relief. These faces at Muyil are in relief that is, cut into the walls.

This tall temple with the grotesque faces of conventionalized art at its four corners presents one entirely new feature in Maya architecture. This is a round cupola or small tower, which rises from the roof of the temple proper, itself set upon a pyramidal mound of five terraces ascended by a wide stairway. The cupola enhances the effect of height and grandeur.

Dr. Spinden Whoops

The whoop of joy which Dr. Spinden let out when he found this cupola was good to hear. We had been clearing brush and trees a foot in diamter from the terraces and stairway for several hours. At the risk of a dangerous cave-in he climbed to the top of the temple, where the brush and cactus were so thick that he had hacked for fifteen or twenty minutes before he could discern the outline of the cupoia. I believe his elation did much to convince the Indians helping as that we were not hunting for gold as their kind persist in believing.

Our work has tended strongly to confirm the belief of the scientific world that Maya history saw a gradual shifting of population from the south to the north. Why magnificent southern cities like Copan in Northern Honduras and Tikal in Guatemala were abandoned is still a riddle. The exodus from them about 600 A. D. may have been caused by exhaustion of the soil or by epidemic or by some other danger yet unproved. But there seems no doubt that the Mayas did migrate gradually northward and that their cities in Northern Yucatan were the last ones they built.

To this last period, fascinating because of its mysterious and disastrous termination, belong most of the archaeological sites our expedition visited, including five on the mainland opposite Cozumel Island, as close together as towns on the Connecticut shore between Stamford and New Haven.

The southernmost of these is some thirty miles north of Muyil and about two miles back of the coastal village of Acomal, the northernmost settlement of the independent Indians. Acomal shows a use of realistic instead of conventionalized sculpture for mural decorations. This consists of the use of realistic human heads, sculptured in stone and affixed to temple exteriors. We found similar things on Cozumel Island, and the realistic head of a parrot on a building at Xkaret, which is on the coast north of Acomal.

Conventionalized art, of course, is apt to spring from a later stage of culture development than realistic art; but the Mayas continued some use of realistic sculpture up to the downfall of their civilization. Hence, the finding of these heads at Acoma does not imply that the ruins there are of great antiquity. In fact the evidence is all to the contrary.

Found Tomb-Like Building

We found at Paalmul a perfectly round building, 31 feet 8 inches high, but bigger than that measurement indicates, for it is roughly cone shaped and has a considerable diameter at the bottom. There are two stairways and four different walls or belts of masonry, looking not unlike four turrets of a battleship, placed one above another, the smallest at the top. The only room we could find was a small one in the next to the highest turned. An altar at the back of this room had been broken, exposing crevices that ran down several feet.

Cold air emerged from these perpendicular cracks, suggesting the possibility of hidden chambers, such as those E. H. Thompson found in the pyramidal structure at Chichen Itza, called the Grave of the High Pries.

In other words, this building may be a tomb. Or it may have been associated with worship of Kukulcan. God of the Air. There is one more possibility which suggests itself with much force that this peculiar edifice, like the only other round building now known to be standing in the entire Maya area the so-called Caracol at Chichen Itza was an astronomical observatory. Most of the 30 per cent of the Maya hieroglyphs that have been translated relate to the calendar and astronomy of the ancients or to methods of counting. We realize how advanced was the science of these first Americans when we consider the fact in an old Maya book, the Dresden Codex, are computations involving nearly twelve and a half million days, or about 34.000 years.

Four miles south of Paalmul, at Chakalal, we found a temple, on whose interior walls were painted red hands and the jaguar and the feathered serpent.

Mayas Used Much Color

The Mayas, like the Greeks, made much use of color. Sometimes a whole building would be painted one tint. Mural paintings are not uncommon, and from them alone has been learned much of what we know about the ancients. The red hand, a very common symbol, has been something of a puzzle. The suggestion has been made that it signifies strength, power, and mastery, and that it is the sign of some secret brotherhood.

There is reason to believe that some of the impressions of this sign were put in Maya buildings after the conquest: in short that here is a tangible piece of the old ritual remembered by degenerate descendants of great ancestors. On Cozumel Island our expedition found examples of the red hand so conventionalized by the artist that the five fingers looked like five petals of a flower or the five flames of a lamp.

Sometimes the impression was made by placing the human hand against a surface and painting around it and between the fingers. In other cases the red paint was daubed over the hand of the artist and that slapped against a wall.

Jaguars were favorite subjects of Maya artists, and the Rain Gods of the Four Quarters were given the forms of jaguars. The gods of the Mayas were many and included planets and forces of nature, as well as animals endowed with human or superhuman intelligence. In addition there seems to have been a belief in a formless Supreme Being.

Of the gods commonly portrayed in painting and sculpture the jaguar was second in importance only to the plumed serpent, Kukulcan. This serpent of ours has no plume, but he does have a bird's foot with distended claws at the extremity of a sort of dragon's leg attached to his body. This foot is held angrily below his open jaws. These would not be recognizable as a snake's jaws by a person unfamiliar with Maya art, which advanced over a course of conventionalization that took it to the pole opposite that of such realistic portrayal as is now all the rage in the literature of the United States.

All the buildings we found were of religious significance. This is true of the mysterious round building at Paalmul even if that was an observatory, for in that case it was an observatory manned by priests. It is difficult to name another race in which the religious emotion so dominated the high artistic expression of a whole people or worked to produce so ardent a search for the secrets of the universe.