972 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
support of such an assumption. It is quite probable that small numbers 
belonging to every pueblo lived a portion of the year in the forests in tem- 
porary habitations, engaged in cultivation, or in hunting and fishing; but 
enough is known from the brief accounts of the early explorers to show us 
that the body of the inhabitants of Yucatan and Central America were 
gathered in pueblos or villages. Moreover, they were animated by the 
same spirit as the Cibolans in what related to personal independence. Rather 
than live in subjection to Spanish taskmasters, the very Indians who erected 
these houses with so much labor, as Coronado states of the Cibolans, “ Set 
in order all their goods and substance, their women and children, and fled 
to the hills, leaving their towns, as it were, abandoned,” ' preferring a return 
to a lower stage of barbarism rather than a loss of personal freedom. In 
1524 Cortez sent an officer “to reduce the people of Chiapas, who had 
revolted, which that commander effectually performed, for, when they could 
resist no longer, these desperate wretches cast themselves with their wives 
and children headlong from precipices, so that not above two thousand of 
them remained, whose offspring inhabit that province at this time.”’ The 
inhabitants of Palenque may have been included in this description. 
The profiles of the Palenque Indians, copied by Stephens from repre- 
sentations in plaster in different parts of the several structures, show that 
they were flat-heads, like the Chinook Indians of the Columbia River; their 
foreheads having been flattened by artificial compression. Herrera, speaking 
generally of the inhabitants of Yucatan, remarks, “that they flattened their 
heads and foreheads..”*? Whether it was a general practice does not appear, 
aside from the Palenque monuments, and the off-hand statement of Herrera. 
Another important question still remains, namely, whether or not the 
Indians of Yucatan and Central America had reached the first stage of 
scientific architecture, the use of the post and lintel of stone as a principle 
of construction in stone masonry. The Egyptians used the post and lintel, 
whence their architecture has been characterized as the horizontal. The 
Greeks did not get beyond this, although they brought in the three orders 
of architecture. The round and the pointed arch, used as principles of 
construction, with all they gave to architecture, were beyond even the 
1 Herrera, History of America, ili, 346, cf. 348. 2Tb., iv, 169. 31b., iv, 169. 
