MAYA INDIANS OF YUCATAN AND BRITISH HONDURAS 



95 



duras, still in a fairly good state of i)r('scrvation. This is a twg-story 

 temple standing upon a small natural elevation. Each story contains 

 12 small rooms, tliree on the north side and tliree on the south side, 

 each of wliich has a narrower room in the rear. The central rooms 

 are 27 feet in length, the side rooms 17 feet 6 inches. The breadth 

 of the smaller rooms is 4 feet 6 inches; the divi(Ung walls are 3 feet 

 thick. ^Ul the rooms in the lower story are filled in with large blocks 

 of stone, loosely held together with a small amount of mortar. Tliis 

 seems to have been a favorite device among the Maya architects, its 

 object probably having been to give greater strength and stability 

 to the new upper story erected upon a building of older date. All the 

 rooms are roofed with 

 the triangular so-called 

 ''American arch." 

 The height of the rooms 

 is 5 feet 10 inches to 

 the top of the wall, and 

 5 feet 10 inches from 

 the top of the wall to 

 the apex of the arch. 

 All the rooms had been 

 covered with stucco, 

 and upon the wall of 

 one of the inner cham- 

 bers completely cov- 

 ered over with green 

 mold the devices shown 

 in figure 39 were found, 

 rudely scratched upon 

 the stucco. In both 

 the upper and the lower 

 part of the drawing 

 are what may be taken 

 as crude representa- 

 tions of "Cimi," the God of Death, probably, hke the "grafiti" of 

 Rome and Pompeii, scratched on the wall after the abandonment 

 of the temple by its original builders.^ Whoever executed the 

 drawing must have had some knowledge, however crude, of Maya 

 art and mythology, as the Cimi head shown in the lower and the 

 conventional feather ornaments in the upper part of figure 39 are 

 unmistakably of Maya origin. To the north of tliis building hes a 

 considerable group of ruins. Among these tliree large pyramidal 



1 Similar grafiti were discovered on the wall of a temple at Nakum, in Guatemala. See Tozzer, Pre- 

 liminary Study of the Prehistoric Ruins of Nakum, Guatemala, p. 160, fig. 4Sa. 



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-Devices scratched on stucco in aboriginal building. 



