ART and

ARCHAEOLOGY

The Arts Throughout the Ages

Volume XXXI JUNE, 1931 Number 6 THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROBLEM

OF THE MAYA

By A. V. Kidder
Chairman, Division of Historical Research, Carnegie Institution of Washington
This month the Carnegie Institution of Washington publishes Earl Morris’s monumental work describing The Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza and his successful excavation and restoration of it. By special arrangement ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY is able to present in the following pages a resume not only of the
contents of that volume, but a general survey of the whole Maya problem, both as a complete subject and in several of its phases. The compilation and editing of the five articles which follow are the work of Dr. Frank F. Bunker, editor of publications for the Carnegie Institution, who has carefully extracted from the reports of the different authorities abstracts which, taken as they are here presented, give a more comprehensive View than has hitherto appeared in any one publication. Readers of ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY desiring to refer to previously published partial descriptions of this work are referred to Vols. XXIII, No. I, Pp. 3 and II {January, 1927); XXVII, No. 3, P. 99 {March, 1929); XXX, No. 6, P. 229 {December, 1930). The articles referred to are by Dr. Bunker himself, by Edith Bayles Ricketson, and by Mrs. Zelia Nuttall. Copies may be purchased by addressing the Circulation Department.

THE Maya were the most brilliant people of the aboriginal New World. Their civilization had its roots in the primitive farming culture,

which originated well before the birth of Christ, somewhere in the Middle American highlands or in the Andean region, and which through ramification and diffusion ultimately gave birth to all the higher pre-Columbian develop

ments in the Western Hemisphere. The Maya, whose earliest known remains

lie in the forested plains at the base of the Yucatan peninsula, took over or brought with them from the highlands the elements of this primitive culture: corn-growing, pottery-making and pre

sumably also the rudiments of their later artistic, religious and social systems. In the low country they flourished like a tropical flower.

Their glyph-recorded history begins at about the time of Christ (according to Dr. Morley’s correlation of Maya