94 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 97 



occurrence of much charcoal and small amounts of animal bone bears 

 out the evidence of the broken pottery in suggesting that this, too, 

 was primarily a habitation site. Our workers, accustomed to under- 

 cutting and burrowing in general, in their zeal, ruined our trench 

 profiles at mound 2, and we decided to try another site. 



Attention may be called in passing to a small collection obtained from 

 a rock mound similar to and very close to site i, at La Ceiba. These 

 objects were dug up by a local pot hunter who heard us working and 

 visited us. They included an excellent tetrapod dish (pi. 12, /) with 

 conventionalized Mayoid designs, and feet representing an alligator's 

 head and containing rattles. The colors are dark red and black on a 

 yellow background. A small tripod dish with low, solid feet had a 

 textile knot design with three pairs of crudely executed " dancing 

 figures." These two vessels are of interest since they have Mayoid 

 designs on a vessel form usually decorated in the Bold Geometric or 

 Bold Animalistic style. One large broken whistle of unslipped brown 

 pottery was unusually interesting since it represented a tusked monster 

 almost identical to one found on the Ulua at Santa Rita (pi. 13, c, cf. 

 fig- 7' P)- There were also a number of Mayoid figurine and bulbous 

 animal whistles, including howling dogs, similar to those from the 

 Ulua. The same mound had also yielded a rectangular and an ovoid 

 bark beater, excellently made of polished gray stone. 



Site 2 



This excavation was on the southern border of the area intensively 

 dug over 2 years earlier by J. B. Edwards. The rise or mound 

 selected was less than i meter west of the remains of his headquarters 

 shack (La Ceiba, site 2, map, fig. 20). From this point north there 

 are a great number of irregular excavations both in mounds and in 

 the areas between. There are numerous mounds in this immediate 

 vicinity, and all of them are badly pitted. According to our men a 

 very great number of pots came from this general area. The small 

 rise or mound which we selected for work was not more than 30 

 centimeters high and had three irregular pot holes on its surface. It 

 sloped slightly from the volcanic dyke on the west, extended about 

 18 meters to the east, and was 13 meters from north to south. Its 

 surface was very irregular, owing to numerous volcanic rocks and to 

 the old dirt heaps. We completed an east to west cross trench i meter 

 wide through the center of the mound, but, finding that there were no 

 regular structural details to be observed in this fashion, we carried 

 out various extensions to the north and south. In cross-section the 

 " mound " showed a top layer of darker soil averaging ten centimeters 



