268 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
appreciation of their originality, ingenuity, and industry. They were 
working their way upward experimentally in architecture, as all other 
peoples have done, having richly earned the right to pomt with pride to 
these structures as extraordinary memorials of the progress they had made. 
An important conclusion follows, namely, that this “closed house” 
was the last, in the order of time, erected in this pueblo, and had not been 
emptied of its core and brought into use when the Spanish irruption forced 
the people to abandon this pueblo. It would fix the period of its construc- 
tion at or.after A. D. 1520, thus settling the question of its modern date and 
removing one of the delusions concerning the antiquity of the ruins in 
Yucatan and Central America. This structure is as much decayed as any 
other in Yucatan. There are many other structures even better preserved 
than this. 
A brief reference to Palenque will conclude this notice, but without 
dealing with the facts as fully as they deserve. There are four or five pyra- 
midal elevations at this pueblo quite similar in plan and general situation 
with those at Uxmal. One is much the largest, and the structures upon it 
are called the “Palace.” It has generally been regarded as the paragon of 
American Indian architecture. As a palace implies a potentate for its occu- 
pation, a character who never existed and could not exist under their insti- 
tutions, it has been a means of self-deception with respect to the condition 
of the Aborigines which ought to be permanently discarded. Several dis- 
tinct buildings are here grouped upon one elevated terrace, and are more 
or less connected. Altogether they are two hundred and twenty-eight feet 
long, front and rear, and one hundred and eighty feet deep, occupying not 
only the four sides of a quadrangle, but the greater part of what originally 
was, in all probability, an open court. The use of the interior court for 
additional structures shows a decadence of architecture and of ethnic life 
in the people, because it implies an unwillingness to raise a new pyramidal 
site to gain accommodations for an increased number of people. Thus to 
appropriate the original court so essential for light and air as well as room, 
and which is such a striking feature in the general plan of the architecture 
of the Village Indians, was a departure from the principles of this architect- 
ure. Nearly all the edifices in Yucatan and Central America agree in one 
