THE MUSEUM RESTAURANT 95 
of painted buffalo hide, Mr. Lenders having made a special study of the 
buffalo. Among the objects, besides the two shields mentioned, is a 
small Shoshone medicine tipi painted with realistic designs. ‘There are 
also several saddle bags, a Winnebago drum with a painting of the 
Thunder Bird on one side, together with many ratties and other articies. 
The objects from the Indians of the Southern Piains were much 
needed in the Museum collections, which still are weak in material from 
the Southern Plains region and the Southeast in general, though rich in 
that from the Northern Plains. 
THE MUSEUM RESTAURANT 
REPRODUCTION OF TempPLE Rutns at Mirra, Mexico 
HE Museum has a new restaurant —a very novel one. ‘Taking 
the elevator to the east basement, we find ourselves within the 
three rooms that comprise this new restaurant, but strange to 
say we have passed through the low, broad doorway of an ancient 
Mexican temple and are surrounded by its mosaic-ornamented wails. 
To see the original in its prime, we must have lived centuries before 
the Spanish conquest and have known a race which even before the times 
of the 'Toltecs had developed a culture, at least a tempie building art, 
far exceeding that usualiy ascribed to the native races of this hemisphere. 
‘To look upon the ruins of this original to-day we should need to travel to 
southern Mexico. ‘There, thirty miles by stage from the large city of 
Oaxaca, we shouid come to the town of Mitla, a modern littie piace with 
thatched houses and cactus fences, lying in a great amphitheater-iike 
valiey surrounded by mountains. The stage ride leads through broad 
green valleys dotted with farms and villages and set here and there with 
signs of occupation at some time far past. As we approach Mitia, the 
surrounding hills show much of the gray and greenish colors of trachyte, 
an ancient volcanic rock. When we reach the town, we find the market 
place and some of the public buildings constructed of this trachyte, 
which probably was taken from its abiding place in the cliffs more than 
a thousand years ago and used in successive building operations by the 
predecessors of the homely Zapotecan race now living here. 
Mitla has long been known as the site of some of the best preserved 
