184 MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA 
show a great and sudden influx of new ideas that are 
characteristic of the Valley of Mexico. No other city 
of this region has so many of these intrusive features. 
An instance is the Great Ball Court with its connected 
temples. The ball court is found in many Mexican 
cities where it had a strong religious significance but it 
is absent from any of the great Mayan cities with the 
exception of Chichen Itza and Uxmal. Sculptures and 
hieroglyphs in the style of the Mexican highlands also 
occur in quantity at Chichen Itza. No one can state 
definitely the length of this Toltecan supremacy on 
Mayan soil, but it probably was not for long and pos- 
sibly came to an end before the middle of the fourteenth 
century. The cities in the Valley of Mexico to which 
this intrusive culture is to be ascribed are those of the 
Toltecan period, such as Tula, Teotihuacan, and 
Cholula. 
MopeERN PERIOD 
1442 to the present day 
After the fall of Mayapan, the Mayas seem to have 
been divided into many warring factions. All the great 
cities were abandoned although the temples were still 
regarded as sacred. Of course, stone construction was 
still prevalent as we know from some of the Spanish 
descriptions of towns on the coast. Learning was still 
maintained by the nobles and the priests. But there 
was not the centralized authority necessary for the 
keeping of such luxurious capitals as existed in the old 
days. The Itzas, in part at least, returned to one of 
their ancient seats in the south, founding the island 
town of Tayasal in Lake Peten. Here Mayan culture 
was preserved until 1696. At the present time certain 
ancient ideas still persist as has already been stated in 
connection with the ethnology of the Lacandone Indi- 
