surrounded by deep barrancas, and approachable only by a single neck of land, and each was guarded on the outer edge of the barranca by a girdle of "atalayas" or watch-towers, which were most probably small truncated pyramids supporting a cue or shrine which served for the religious use of the outlying population.
All the tribes or nations whom the Spaniards encountered in the subjugation of Guatemala and its neighbourhood appear to have had as their headquarters such strongholds as Utatlan and Iximché, or towns built on rocky islands in the lakes. Such was the stronghold in the lake of the Lacandones and the island town of Puchutla, described in the pages of Remesal, which was conquered in the year 1559. Such, too, was the island of Tayasal in the Lake of Peten, the headquarters of the Itzas, captured in 1697, of which some account will be given in a later chapter and with these may be classed the ruins on the hill-top at Uspantan and the curious groups of temples and houses which crown the ridges of the hills round the valley of Rabinal. None of them appear to have possessed walls and bastions such as we are accustomed to associate with fortresses; but all were placed in naturally strong positions, and were easily defensible, and their existence tends to the conclusion that the condition of society was one of continual intertribal warfare.
None of the sites of these strongholds have yielded any examples of the carved hieroglyphic inscriptions, highly ornamented stone buildings, or elaborately-sculptured monolithic monuments which are to be found at Copan, Quirigua, or Palenque; and it cannot be too strongly insisted on that between the civilization revealed to us by those great ruins and the culture of the Indian tribes conquered by the Spaniards there is a great gap which at present we have no means of bridging.
