226 FieLp CoLumMBIAN MusEUM—ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL. II. 
by means of heavy stones cemented over the mouth, and many con- 
tained fragments of human bones, but in Xkichmook none were sealed 
and no human bones were found in them. 
INCISED FIGURES. 
Upon the northern wall of Chamber No. 7, which is on the west 
side of the stairway of the Palace, we found the rudely incised devices 
reproduced in Figs.,32 and 33. They consist of geometrical figures 
that might have been used in some prehistoric boys’ game, fragments 
of a head-dress with penaches and long flowing plumes, a rudimentary 
human figure and various hieroglyphics. The work does not seem to 
be of a serious or significant nature, but rather the random effort of 
some young idler, who used his flint or obsidian knife with the same 
disregard of parental warnings that characterizes the modern youth 
wielding his keen-edged jack-knife. 
MURAL PAINTINGS. 
Mural paintings once covered the inner wall surfaces of a large 
number of chambers in most of the ruin groups of Yucatan; in fact I 
have never found these ruins without some traces of pigment upon 
walls or ceiling. Sometimes the work is hardly more than outline 
drawing done in thick lines of intense blackness. In other places a 
dark brown pigment was used, and often lines of figures or glyphs in 
red, blue, green, brown and yellow embellished the walls. Unfortu- 
nately these paintings have for the most part disappeared, being 
represented to-day only by detached patches of color or bits of form, 
interesting and valuable as the only traces of the color-art still left 
us, but nearly valueless to the historian or the student of art. Chi- 
chen-Itza alone of all the ruin groups has furnished mural paintings 
so nearly intact that the subjects they present can be intelligently 
studied; these paintings have been faithfully copied and thus pre- 
served to science. Would that this had been the case with the hidden 
chambers at Tilam. These when opened were found to contain mural 
paintings like those at Chichen-Itza, but they were neglected and 
before coming to my notice were completely destroyed. 
At Xkichmook the flat under-surfaces of the ceiling stones of the 
vaulted chambers seem to have contained the most elaborate designs: 
