540 INDIAN SETTLEMENTS IN CENTRAL AMERICA. 



drawn 72,000 warriors from the capital, Gumarcah (Utatlan), alone, and 

 the royal palace of Utatlan was said to have been 728 steps long- and 370 

 steps wide. If we now recall these astonishing numbers in the light of 

 the ruins of Utatlan, we can hardly keep from smiling, for the habitable 

 surface of the real table-land of Utatlan is not quite 100 meters long, 

 and would, therefore, at best not be able to contain an edifice of dimen- 

 sions like the above mentioned. In order to be quite certain about this 

 question, I measured the plateau by walking along the edges, when I 

 visited the ruins in August, 1894, with my brother Bichard, but I had 

 not the time necessary to measure the buildings also. We agreed, 

 however upon the fact that the principal court of the so-called palacio 

 is only 100 yards long and GO yards wide, and that the disposition of 

 the surrounding buildings is almost identical with that of the so-called 

 Besguardo. (I have inserted in the plan of the site (fig. 10) the place 

 of the most important buildings from memory, because I subsequently 

 saw that the plan in Stephens's Incidents in Travel, page 235, gives an 

 erroneous impression.) These ruins have, moreover, since Stephens 

 and Catherwood visited them, suffered much from dilapidation, mainly 

 by the fault of diggers for treasures, who foolishly turned the whole 

 plateau upside down. 



It might, to be sure, be assumed that the table-land of Utatlan con- 

 tained only the palace of the ruler with the accessory buildings and the 

 temples, while the rest of the city might have covered the surrounding 

 plain. In fact, there are at some distance from Utatlan a few tumuli 

 rising in the plain which might be considered detached forts, built to 

 protect the parts of the town in which the poorer people lived. But the 

 Spanish writers say nothing of such an outer town, and the surface of 

 Utatlan is no smaller than that of many other Indian fortified places 

 like Saculeu, Comitancillo, Iximche, and others. 



The nature of old Indian centers of population differed, of course, 

 according as the settlement was made principally for defense or for the 

 performance of religious worship, or merely for the maintenance of a 

 king or a prince. In the table-lauds of Guatemala- and Chiapas, where 

 a number of warlike peoples and independent hostile tribes of one and 

 the same nation dwelt in close proximity to each other, the fortified 

 character of their buildings naturally prevails, and they usually con- 

 tained also the palaces of their rulers, and the temples of the deities. 1 

 Nature here offered in abrupt eminences, which were entirely or par- 

 tially severed from the adjoining table-land by deep ravines, or on 

 mountains with a level plain on their summit, places that could easily 

 be defended and were really used for that purpose by the Indians. In 

 building towns here, where nature had limited the space, the builders 



'At times the princes also lived in open towus which they ahandoned at the out- 

 break of war, withdrawing into near fortified places, as in the year 1525 Caibil- 

 Balam, King of the Mames, retired at the approach of the Spaniards under Gonzalo 

 de Alvarado from his capital, Chmabhul (Huehuetenango), to the fortress Saculeu. 



