THE FALL OF THE OLD EMPIRE. 445 
architecture of the conquered cities; but such is not the case. On the con- 
trary, if war were the cause of the extinction of the Old Empire civilization, 
it would appear more likely to have been civil war, possibly the north against 
the south. Indeed, the possibility of internecine strife as one of the causes 
which may have contributed to the fall of the southern Maya cities can not 
be entirely overlooked. Eight centuries later, at the close of the New Empire, 
after the termination of the disastrous civil war which devastated the whole 
northern part of the Peninsula of Yucatan, all the Maya cities, those of the 
victors as well as of the vanquished, were abandoned outright, and new ones 
were founded. Thus the Tutul Xiu moved some 30 kilometers east of their 
old capital, Uxmal, and founded a new one at Mani; the Cocom, the losers 
in the struggle, were permitted to reestablish themselves at Sotuta, 60 kilo- 
meters southeast of Mayapan; and the Itza, not satisfied with the idea of 
founding a capital near their former homes, left the peninsula altogether and 
migrated southward into Peten, the region from which they had originally 
come, and reestablished themselves around Lake Peten Itza, as already 
noted. 
In the case of the Itza we may possibly have a parallel indicating what 
may have happened at the close of the Old Empire, and, as mentioned above, 
the factor of civil war probably can not be entirely overlooked as one of the 
contributory causes of the phenomenon we are seeking to explain; but so far 
as conquest by a foreign people is concerned, the weight of all the archeologi- 
cal evidence summarized below practically eliminates this hypothesis from 
the field of possibility: 
1. The long period, more than a century, judging by the closing dates on the 
monuments, during which the Old Empire cities were being abandoned. 
2. The complete absence of archzological remains other than those of the Maya 
in the region in question. 
3. The meager representation of war-like subjects on the monuments of the 
Old Empire. 
4. The fact that the lines of migration followed by the Nahua tribes south 
through Central America were exclusively on the Pacific Coast-plain, 7. ¢., south 
of the Continental Divide, and that except possibly at Copan on the southern 
frontier and along the western frontier in Chiapas and Tabasco the two races 
never seem to have come into contact during the Old Empire, at least a contact 
sufficiently violent to have expelled the Maya from their homes. 
The hypothesis of a disease, of a general pestilence, which practically 
depopulated the country, causing the survivors not only to abandon their 
plague-stricken cities but also to seek new homes in other lands, is so con- 
trary to historical precedent under similar conditions elsewhere among man- 
kind that it may probably be dismissed from consideration even as a remote 
possibility. Moreover, such a hypothesis, while fitting the fact of sudden 
extinction in the individual cities, can hardly be made to explain the 
gradual extinction over the area as a whole. To explain this latter fact 
by the disease hypothesis it is necessary to postulate either a long series 
