120 INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY—PUBLICATION NO. 4 
as many Pedrano rope vendors per week as Pableno. 
And at Chicacao, where sogas, or halters, are much 
in demand for livestock, I have always seen more 
men from San Pedro, who have the advantage of 
greater proximity to the coast, and close relationship 
with their colony of Cutzan. Pedranos occasionally 
sell Lowland products on a small scale in Highland 
markets, but for the most part they are resold at 
dwellings in San Pedro, where there is no market. 
SAN MARCOS 
The 3.3 sq. km. of arroyo land in San Marcos 
(map 20, pl. 45, b, c) is occupied by 490 people, 
which amounts to a density of 148 a sq. km., almost 
twice that of Santiago (about 81.5 per sq. km.). 
This area cannot keep the inhabitants supplied with 
corn, so much of which must be bought elsewhere, 
or obtained as compensation for work on the fincas. 
To pay for some of it, the Marquefios have under- 
taken various economic activities, all on an insig- 
nificant scale. These include some rope spinning from 
local maguey, mat weaving, raising certain money 
crops, such as tomatoes, jocotes, and citrus fruits 
(especially oranges and limas), and catching tiny 
fish and crabs (until fishing was outlawed in 1937). 
These products are marketed far afield. I have seen 
one or two men selling tomatoes and stringbeans in 
Quezaltenango; dried jocotes and oranges on the 
fincas (they also sell these in Santa Lucia, Nahuala, 
and Tecpan) ; dried fish strung on bunchgrass stems 
(p. 124), jocotes, and mats in Solola; and crabs in 
Santiago. There is apparently a little commerce in 
bananas and other Lowland fruit, which are sold.in 
the Highlands. 
The fish traps of San Marcos, corrallike enclosures 
of Lake weeds built against the shore, with two open- 
ings, were more elaborate than any I saw on the Lake 
except those of Santa Catarina. I was told that about 
one-third of the people fished at that time, and that 
there were eight crabbers. Though crabs were caught 
wherever it was practicable to do so around the Lake, 
T never saw them marketed except by Indians of San 
Marcos and Santa Catarina. Crabs were always sold 
alive in strings of 5 or 6 tied together with strips of 
yucca leaves ; Marquefios even bound all the crab legs 
together with rushes, and they could thus be recog- 
nized in the markets. Though there is little meat on 
these crabs, they make an excellent soup. The Mar- 
quefios were second to the Catarinecos in fishing, in 
terms of relative importance. More fish were caught 
in Santiago, but it had 11 times the population of San 
Marcos. San Marcos and Santa Catarina are by far 
the smallest of all municipios on the Lake (or of any 
others in Guatemala that I have yet seen), having 
areas of about 3.3 and 4.2 kms. respectively (largely 
cliffs and ridges, which, with one exception, form 
the boundaries in both instances). For want of land, 
they turned for resources to the water and what little 
it had to offer. Villages which engaged in commercial 
fishing and crabbing were hard hit when these activi- 
ties were prohibited by law. 
San Marcos, according to tradition,1®* has moved 
its site five times. The most recent change was from 
the alluvial valley bottom to the two terraces (where 
most of the inhabitants now live, in the “Barrio 
Oriental” and Barrio Occidental,” each with about 
150 persons) on either side of the streambed, fol- 
lowing the 1881 flood which destroyed the village 
(Panajachel and Finca Jaibal were known to have 
been partly destroyed in the same year). San Marcos 
had been moved to that valley under the direction of 
Alcalde Juan de Barranich, of Solola, who on Janu- 
ary 11, 1726, officially transferred the village trom 
“Jaibalito,’ the second arroyo west of Santa Cruz la 
Laguna (see map 20 and pl. 45, c, d, e), where they 
had settled in 1666 (?). A “terrible flood” at Jaibalito 
had destroyed the houses, sometime between 1724 and 
1726, leaving the church in ruins (where today 
brujos, or shamans, conduct pagan rites). A few 
Indian huts of Santa Cruz still occupy this hazardous 
arroyo site. The present territory of San Marcos was 
said to have been granted jointly by an old woman 
of the family “Sipac” in Santiago, and by Santa 
Lucia Utatlan and San Pablo, each contributing a 
parcel of land. ‘The first settlers of San Marcos, 
according to tradition, came to the Lake about 1666 
from a coast site below San Lucas Toliman, where 
they had lived near the present Finca Santo Tomas, 
until a “bat plague” drove them out, as they had 
previously been forced by these animals to move 
from their home two leagues below, near the present 
Finca San Jeronimo el Ingenio.1® Fuentes y Guz- 
466 Supported by historical data from an unpublished manuscript en- 
titled, ‘‘Monografia del Departamento,” dated September 9, 1926, ap- 
pended February 24, 1930. 
165 This is plausible, as it was probably the vampire bat. Destruction 
by this pest, and even annihilation of herds of cattle is recorded in 
1576 by Palacio (1866, p. 10). He says that on the “coast of 
Guazacapan,”’ below Escuintla and Amatitldn, there were many bats 
bleeding and killing animals, especially calves, so that entire ranches 
were in places bereft of their cattle: ‘‘So many bats that it is astonish- 
ing; and they are so bad that if they come upon a calf they kill it and 
bleed it.” In and about the large ruins of the colonial church of 
(Santiago) Zambo, formerly a town, now a finca, I have seen enough 
bats to make life disagreeable if they were true vampires, whether they 
attacked only animals or included human blood in their diet. 
