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SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS 



VOL. 61 



The great animal effigies of the Lake of Menagua in Nicaragua, 

 described by Dr. Carl Bovallius, belong to the group of monoliths 

 architectural rather than religious in character, being intermediate 

 between unworked monoliths and colossi. Perhaps the best known 

 Aztec megalithic statue is that called Huitzilopochtli. the God of War, 

 which Mr. Payne, 1 with good reason, identifies as the Corn Snake 

 goddess, a colossal representation of an effigy made of corn stalks used 

 in ceremonial dances. The great stone tiger found a short time ago 

 in excavations made in a street back of the cathedral near where the 



Fig. 31. — Turtle, Quirigua, Honduras, from Maudsley. 



old temple of the Aztecs once stood in Mexico City, is a colossus, and 

 the giant serpent's head, part of the ancient wall of the temple now 

 set in the foundation of an adjacent modern building, belongs to the 

 same category. 



Although expressions of the megalithic consciousness were less 

 pronounced among the Totonac and Huastec people of the coast of 

 the Gulf of Mexico than in Central America, or the valley of Mexico, 

 statues from Xico Viejo, near Jalapa in the state. Vera Cruz, and 

 the neighborhood of Tampico, in Taumalipas, have been figured in the 

 speaker's account of the antiquities of eastern Mexico." 



1 Edward John Payne, History of the New World called America, Vol. I, 

 p. 470. Oxford. 



2 Twenty-fifth Annual Report Bureau of American Ethnology. 



