THE TEMPLE OF THE JAGUARS 



REPORT OF WORK PRELIMINARY TO THE REPRODUCTION OF 



THE FRONT FACADE 1 



By Edward H. Thompson 



ONE of the most important archaeological problems of the day is that 

 of the ruined cities, vestiges of an ancient American civilization, 

 that lie strewn over the surface of the Yucatan peninsula. Who 

 were their builders and where did these builders come from are among the 

 queries of to-day as they were in the days of Stephens, Von Humboldt and 

 Brasseur de Bourbourg. 



Whether the ancestors of these ancient builders with their undecipherable 

 glyphs, their ornaments and tools of jade, came from Asia by the way 

 of Behring Strait, were broken branches of a lost Atlantic stem, or grew 

 up by gradual evolution from purely indigenous roots we may not yet 

 know, but we do know that in times ancient even as science now interprets 

 the word, civilized races were born in the Americas, that these races lived 

 out their days and then sank back into the dust from whence they came, 

 leaving faint traces of their having been, to mock our ignorance. No one 

 wise in the knowledge of these things even thinks to name, much less to fix 

 by time, the origin of these most ancient, long-forgotten and temple-build- 

 ing races of America. 



The last of these earlier races was the one from whose fast-dying fires the 

 Aztecs and allied people kindled the fierce flames of their civilization. This 

 earlier race, call it Toltec if you will, was probably the one that built the 

 now ruined cities of Yucatan of which Chichen Itza was the great mother 

 •city. 



Chichen Itza was the largest and most important ancient city on the 

 peninsula of Yucatan, if not indeed over the whole area, influenced by that 

 distinctively American civilization that students now call the Maya. Its 

 great pyramid temple with its four broad stairways and nine parallel ter- 

 races rises from the midst of a man-made plain and looms against the sky 

 in massive grandeur. Seven other structures still rear their sculptured walls, 

 -defying time, and hundreds more lie prostrate, their carved stone walls and 

 what were once their chambers now but shapeless heaps of stone, lime and 

 fallen columns. 



» Mr. Thompson was engaged by the Museum to make molds for a full-sized model of 

 the ruined Temple of the Jaguars in Yucatan to be erected as an architectural feature of the 

 ■Columbus Avenue entrance to the Museum when that extension of the building is erected. 

 He owns the site upon which the temple stands and has long been a student of the ancient 

 ^architecture of the Maya race. In addition to the molds Mr. Thompson has prepared 

 ■drawings and selected photographs all of which will make it easy to reproduce this aboriginal 

 masterpiece. 



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