NO. 14 ARCHEOLOGY OF BAY ISLANDS, HONDURAS STRONG 161 



River, in rain-forest country, an impressive three-roomed rectangular 

 enclosure was discovered. This building, or foundation, was 105 feet 

 long by about 40 feet wide and consisted of three rooms surrounded 

 by well-made stone walls about 4 feet in height and thickness. The 

 central room contained five tables or altars consisting of great flat- 

 topped, mushroom-shaped stones, each set on three rounded boulders. 

 These have a general similarity to three altars at Uaxactun (Gann, 

 1927, pp. 193, 196). In the center of the rear wall was a walled-in 

 pit, and paralleling the west wall a cobbled ditch. Architecturally, 

 this " Temple of the Five Tables " was the most impressive ruin we 

 encountered. In the dense bush to the south and east were long, high 

 mounds of stone and earth. No artifacts were found at this site. All 

 along the upper Bonito occur small earth and rock mounds and stone- 

 walled terraces, and monochrome pottery is abundant. Slightly to the 

 north one comes to the strip back from the coast visited by Spinden, 

 which has already been mentioned. 



East of this traverse from Juticalpa to Trujillo is a vast mountain- 

 ous and jungle-covered region, which is practically unknown. Aside 

 from a small section on the lower Sico, Black, and Paulaya Rivers, 

 the only sites reported on are an ofifertory on the upper Plantain 

 visited by Spinden (1925, pp. 538-539) and some mound groups on 

 the middle Patuca, which we visited in 1933. Spinden does not 

 describe any ruins but mentions the occurrence of stone bowls with 

 animal and bird heads, and great metates and slabs similar to those 

 at Mercedes in Costa Rica. Local tradition locates the famed " White 

 City " of the Paya in the region of the upper Plantain. In 1933 we 

 discovered a very large mound site about 100 miles up the Patuca 

 River at Wankybila. This consists of a complex arrangement of 

 great mounds, some 100 yards long and 30 feet high, around a series 

 of plazas. Excavation showed that the mounds were of earth with 

 cores of burned red clay. The pottery from this site was mostly 

 monochrome, red to brown in type, consisting of broken bowls with 

 a basal ring and loop handles or vessels with three short, cylindrical 

 or long, curved conical feet. A small proportion of the ware had a 

 dull red slip and simple black line decoration. Elaborate feet and 

 lugs were rare. Other artifacts included three-legged metates, a small 

 green stone bowl (Strong, 1934 a, fig. 52, c), several bevelled slate 

 disks (one of which had well-carved heads on it), roller pestles, and 

 crude quartzite scrapers. On the Wampu, and on a branch of the 

 Cuyamel, we found small earth and stone mounds with coarse mono- 

 chrome pottery. A mace head and a small stone stool with an animal 

 head from the Wampu (Strong, 1934 a, fig. 52, b) are of interest. 



