MORGAN.] CEILING CONSTRUCTED OVER A CORE OF MASONRY. 265 
all the details of their internal economy, but it seemed to approximate that 
improved state of association which is sometimes heard of among us; and 
as this has existed for an unknown length of time, and can no longer be 
considered experimental, Owen and Fourier might perhaps take lessons 
from them with advantage. * * * I never before regretted so much 
my ignorance of the Maya language.”' A hundred working men indicate 
a total of five hundred persons who were then depending for their daily 
food upon a single fire, and a single cooking-house, the provisions being 
supplied from common stores, and divided from the kettle. It is not un- 
likely a truthful picture of the mode of life in the House of the Nuns, and 
in the Governor's House at the period of European discovery. Each group 
practising communism, for convenience and for economy, may have included 
all the inmates of a single house, or its occupants may have subdivided 
into lesser groups; but the presumption is in favor of the larger. Evidence 
has elsewhere been adduced of the existence of the organization into gentes 
among the Mayas, with descent in the male line, from which it may be 
Wl 
SS 
Scale of Feet. 
50 49 80 20 19 “0 
i 
Ss 
Fig. 55.—Ground Plan of Zayi. 
inferred that the occupation of these houses was on the basis of gentile 
kinship among the families in each, the fathers and their children belonging 
to the same gens, and the wives and mothers to other gentes. All the facts 
oe 
ge 
seem to indicate that communism in living was practiced among the Villa 
Indians in general upon a scale then unknown in other parts of the world, 
because they alone represented the culture and mode of life of the Middle 
‘Incidents of Travel, ete., ii, 14. 
