PART 2. MOUND EXCAVATION IN THE EASTERN MAYA AREA 



INTRODUCTION 

 Ct>assification of the Mounds 



In the following pages is a description of the mounds opened 

 during the last few years in that part of the Maya area now con- 

 stituting British Honduras, the southern part of Yucatan, and the 

 eastern horder of Guatemala (pi. 7). For descriptive purposes these 

 mounds may be divided, according to their probable uses, into six 

 main groups: 



1. Sepulchral Mounds. — This group includes mounds which, orig- 

 inally constructed for other purposes, were afterwards used as burial 

 sites. 



2. Refuse Mounds. — This group includes kitchen middens, shell 

 heaps, deposits of waste material remaining after the manufacture 

 of hme, and heaps of stones gathered from the surface of the ground. 



3. Foundation Mounds. — As the buildings themselves invariably 

 stood on the summits of flat-topped mounds, such mounds, capped 

 with the debris of the earher structures, formed the bases of later 

 ones. 



4. Defensive Mounds. — Some of these mounds were crescent-shaped ; 

 others were in the form of a horseshoe. 



5. LooTcout Mounds. — These mounds extend in chains, at intervals 

 of 6 to 12 miles, along the coast and up some of the rivers; they are 

 lofty, steep-sided, and usually form the nuclei of groups of other 

 mounds. As a rule they contain neither human remains nor arti- 

 facts, though in one or two of them superficial interments seem to 

 have been made at a comparatively late date. 



6. Mounds of Uncertain Use. — No trace of human interment was 

 found in these mounds. Many of them are too small at the summit 

 to have supported buildings, and it seems probable that they are 

 sepulchral mounds, in which no stone, pottery, or other indestruct- 

 ible objects were placed with the corpse, and in which the bones 

 have entirely disintegrated. The larger mounds of this class, many 

 of them flat topped, are carefully constructed of blocks of limestone, 

 marl dust, and earth, and no doubt at one time served as bases for 

 buildings — either small temples or houses — which, being built of 

 wood, have long since vanished. 



70806°— 18— Bull. 64 4 49 



