254 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
There are two material questions which require priority of considera- 
tion: First, whether or not the houses now in ruins in Yucatan and Central 
America were occupied at the time of the Spanish conquest ; and, second, 
whether or not the present Indians of the country are the descendants of 
the people who constructed them. There is no basis whatever for the 
negative of either proposition ; but it is assumed by those who regard the 
so-called palace at Palenque and the Governor’s House at Uxmal as the 
ancient residences of Indian potentates that great cities which once sur- 
rounded them have perished, and, further, that these ruins have an antiquity 
reaching far back of the Spanish conquest. 
Mr. Stephens adopts the conclusion “that at the time of the conquest, 
and afterwards, the Indians were living in and occupied these very cities.” 
He also regarded the present Indians of the country as the descendants of 
those in possession at the time of the conquest. He might have added that 
as the Maya was the language of the aborigines of Yucatan at the epoch 
of the discovery, and is now the language of the greater part of the natives 
who have not lost their original speech, there was no ground for either sup- 
position. Herrera remarks of the inhabitants of Yucatan, that the “ people 
were then found living together very politely in towns, kept very clean; 
* * * and the reason of their living so close together was because of 
the wars which exposed them to the danger of being taken, sold, and sacri- 
ficed; but the wars of the Spaniards made them disperse’? This last 
statement is very significant. Mr. Stephens, whose works and whose obser- 
vations are in the main so valuable, is responsible to no small extent for the 
delusive inferences which have been drawn from the architecture of Yuca- 
tan, Honduras, and Chiapas. If he had repressed his imagination and con- 
fined himself to what he founds namely, certain Indian pueblos built of 
dressed stone, and in good architecture, which are sufficiently remarkable 
just as they are, in ruins, and had omitted altogether such terms as “palaces” 
and great cities, his readers would have escaped the deceptive conclusions 
with respect to the actual condition of society among the aborigines which 
his terminology and mode of treatment were certain to suggest. 
It is sufficiently ascertained that within a few vears after the conquest 
, y 
‘Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, ii, 348, 375. 2 History of America, iv, 168. 
