another time it extended as far as Honduras (actual department of Choluteca) and into eastern Salvador as far as the state of Chiapas in Mexico, where the Chorotega penetrated amongst the Mixe. The Chorotega or Mangue language, so closely affiliated to the Chiapanec, is now extinct, but its former extension is to be recognized by many Indian local names. It seems that there was formerly a mutual interpenetration between Lenca, Sumo and Chorotega tribes. The territories of all these tribes can be, more or less exactly, calculated by the existence of Indian local names. The Misquito country is characterized by names terminating in laya, water, or auala, river; the Sumo and Ulua country by names in uas, water; the Matagalpan by names in li, water; the Lenca by names in tique, ligue, isgue and (ai) quin. Such Lenca names occur on the north-eastern boundary of the Ultra-Lempa country of Salvador. It is strange that there is not a single place-name in Salvador either of Mayan origin, or, as it seems, of Chorotegan origin. Probably the Mexican elements superseded the Maya so completely that there remained no trace of the Maya except archaeological objects; it is to be supposed that the Lenca and Sumo tribes superseded the Chorotega in Salvador. If we can be sure—and the linguistic evidence admits of no doubt—that the Chorotega had their centre in Nicaragua and thence extended north-westwards, it may be hoped that Chorotegan remains will be found in the vast territory occupied for many centuries by the Maya peoples in the Pacific part of Guatemala. These remains would, of course, be archaeological or place-names.
How closely related some of the Central-American nations were in institutions to the Mexicans appears, not only in their using the same peculiar weapons, but in the similarity of their religious rites; the connexion is evident in such points as the ceremony of marriage by tying together the garments of the couple, or in holding an offender’s face over burning chillies as a punishment; the native legends of Central America make mention of the royal ball-play, which was the same as the Mexican game of tlachtli already mentioned. At the same time many of the Central-American customs differed from the Mexican; thus in Yucatán we find the custom of the youths sleeping in a great bachelor’s house, an arrangement common in various parts of the world, but not in Mexico; the same remark applies to the Maya exogamous law of a man not taking a wife of his own family name (see Diego de Landa, Relacion de Yucatan, ed. Brasseur de Bourbourg, p. 140), which does not correspond with Mexican custom. We have the means of comparing the personal appearance of the Mexicans and Central Americans by their portraits on early sculptures, vases, &c.; and, though there does not appear any clear distinction of race-type, the extraordinary back-sloping foreheads of such figures as those of the bas-reliefs of Palenque prove that the custom of flattening the skull in infancy prevailed in Central America to an extent quite beyond any such habit in Mexico. The notion that the ruined cities now buried in the Central-American forests were of great antiquity and the work of extinct nations has no solid evidence; some of them may have been already abandoned before the conquest, but others were inhabited by the ancestors of the Indians who now build their mean huts and till their patches of maize round the relics of the grander life of their ancestors. In comparing these ruins in Yucatán, Chiapas, Guatemala and Honduras, it is evident that, though they are the work of two or more nations highly distinct in language, yet these nations had a common system of pictorial or written characters. One specimen of a Central-American inscription may give a general idea of them all, whether it be from the sculptured façade of a temple sketched by Catherwood, or from the painted deerskin called the Dresden Codex (reproduced in Kingsborough), or from the chapter of Diego de Landa where he professes to explain and translate the characters themselves. These consist of combinations of faces, circles, lines, &c., arranged in compartments in so complex a manner that hardly two are found alike. How they conveyed their meaning, how far they pictorially represented ideas or spelt words in the different languages of the country, is a question not yet answered in a complete way; Landa’s description (p. 320) gives a table of a number of their elements as phonetically representing letters or syllables, but, though there may be a partial truth in his rules, they are insufficient or too erroneous to serve for any general decipherment. One point as to the Central-American characters is clear, that part of them are calendar-signs recording dates. From the accounts given by Landa and other writers it is plain that the Central-American calendar, reckoning the year in twenty-eight periods of thirteen days, was the same in its principle of combining signs as that of Mexico. The four leading Maya signs called kan, muluc, ix, cauac corresponded in their position to the four Aztec signs rabbit, reed, flint, house, but the meanings of the Maya signs are, unlike the Aztec, very obscure. A remarkable feature of the Central-American ruins is the frequency of truncated pyramids built of hewn stone, with flights of steps up to the temple built on the platform at top. The resemblance of these structures to the old descriptions and pictures of the Mexican teocallis is so striking that this name is habitually given to them. The teocallis built by the Nahua or Mexican nations have been mostly destroyed, but two remain at Huatusco and Tusapan (figured in Bancroft, iv. 443, 456), which bear a strong resemblance to those of Palenque. On the whole it' is not too much to say that, in spite of differences in style, the best means of judging what the temples and palaces of Mexico were like is to be gained from the actual ruins in Central America. On the other hand, there are features in Central-American architecture which scarcely appear in Mexican. Thus at Uxmal there stands on a terraced mound the long narrow building known as the governor’s house (Casa del Gobernador), 322 ft. long, 39 ft. wide, 26 ft. high, built of rubble stone and mortar faced with square blocks of stone, the interior of the chambers rising into a sloping roof formed by courses of stonework gradually overlapping in a “false arch.” The same construction is seen in the buildings forming the sides of a quadrangle and bearing the equally imaginary name of the nunnery (Casa de Monjas); the resemblance of the interior of one of its apartments to an Etruscan tomb has often been noticed (see Fergusson, History of Architecture, vol. i; Viollet-le-Duc, in Charnay).
The explorations made by Dr Lehmann in 1909 in the famous ruins of Teotihuacan, near Mexico city throw new light upon certain chronological problems. Like the excavations made by Dr Max Uhle in Peru, they tend to determine the relative antiquity of the different periods of the ancient civilization. They also show that these various culture-periods followed one another among the Mexicans in much the same sequence as among the Peruvians. At a considerable depth below the foundations of a temple-palace at Teotihuacan, Dr Lehmann discovered certain ceramic fragments of a type quite different from any hitherto classed as Mexican. These are painted on a fine stucco in beautiful colours (notably a kind of turquoise-green) and represent archaic forms of flowers and butterflies. The relation between the wall paintings of Teotihuacan and ornaments at Chichen Itza, as also the existence of sculptured stone yokes in Teotihuacan, in the country of the Totonacs, in Guatemala and in Salvador, furnish important material for the investigation of the obscure problems of the Toltecs and Olmecs, and of the extension of Maya peoples on the Atlantic coast of the Mexican Gulf from Campeche as far as Tabasco and Vera Cruz.
Attempts to trace the architecture of Central America directly from Old-World types have not been successful, while on the other hand its decoration shows proof of original invention, especially in the imitations of woodwork which passed into sculptured ornament when the material became stone instead of wood. Thus the architectural remains, though they fail to solve the problem of the culture of the nations round the Gulf of Mexico, throw much light on it when their evidence is added to that of religion and customs. At any rate two things seem probable—first, that the civilizations of Mexico and Central America were pervaded by a common influence in religion, art, and custom; second, that this common element shows traces of the importation of Asiatic ideas into America.
Bibliography.—The most illuminating and fundamental work on Mexican archaeology is the Gesammelte Abhandlungen, of Eduard Seler (vol. i. Berlin, 1902; vol. ii., 1904). For the earliest descriptions of the ancient cities of Mexico the writings of Cogolludo, Landa, Antonio del Rio, Sahagun, Torquemada and others are of the greatest value, The account by Antonio de Leon y Gama, Descripcion historica y cronologica de las dos piedras que . . . se hallaron en la plaza principal de Mexico el año de 1790 (Mexico, 1792; 2nd ed. by C. M. de Mustamentel), may be specially mentioned. Much of this material is to be found in Lord Kingsborough’s monumental work in 9 vols., seq., on the Antiquities of Mexico (London, 1831–1848). Alexander von Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amerique was published in Paris in 1816. At the beginning of the 19th century the colonial government undertook a comprehensive exploration of the best known groups of ruins and three expeditions were made in 1805–1808 under the direction of Captain Guillaume Dupaix, accompanied by Luciano Castañeda as artist. The reports were not published, however, until Kingsborough included them in his work, though some of the drawings appeared in other works. In many respects these reports are the best of the early accounts. Another early explorer was the French artist Frédéric de Waldeck, who published Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la province d’Yucatan (Paris, 1838), and whose collection of drawings appeared in 1866, with the descriptive text by Brasseur de Bourbourg, under the title Monuments anciens du Mexique. Among other and later works, including some who have devoted themselves more especially to Maya inscriptions, are: Arnold and Frost, The American Egypt (London, 1909); H. H. Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States (5 vols., New York, 1874–1876, vol. iv. is devoted to “Antiquities”); A. F. Bandelier, Report on an Archaeological Tour in Mexico, 1881 (Archaeol. Inst. of America, papers, Am. Ser. II.); Leopoldo Batres, Cuadro arqueológico y etnográfico de la República Mexicana (Mexico, n.d.); W. W. Blake, Catalogue of the Historical and Archaeological Collections of the National Museum of Mexico (Mexico, 1884); Eug. Boban, Cuadro arqueológico y etnográfico de la República Mexicana (Paris, 1885); Daniel G. Brinton, The American Race (New York, 1891) and Ancient Phonetic Alphabets of Yucatan; Desiré Charnay, The Ancient Cities of the New World (Transl. New York, 1887); Charnay and Viollet-le-Duc, Cités et ruines américaines (Paris, 1863); Alfredo Chavero (ed.) Antiguedades mexicanas (Mexico, 1892); Dupaix, Antiquités mexicaines (Paris, 1834–1836); E. Förstemann (Numerous articles in Globus and other German publications, 1893–1897, on Maya inscriptions); E. T. Hamy, Decades americanae (Paris, 1888,
1898, 1902); Wm. H. Holmes, Archaeological Studies among the
