Word: maya
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Honduras last spring was done on a white road, the rapids of the Plantain river," stated Mr. H. J. Spindler '06, Curator of the Peabody Museum, in an interview yesterday. Mr. Spinden, an expert on the archaeology of Central America, is one of the leading investigators of the ancient Maya civilization, and has been on a number of expeditions to Yucatan and Honduras as a representative of the Peabody Museum. He is scheduled to speak at the Harvard Union. November 10, and will illustrate has talk with movies of the Honduras trip...
...Columbian times, the Payas are boat-men of great daring and endurance, who drive forward in the face of the most tumultuous streams. I was alone with these natives during the course of my trip and found them a very interesting people, more humanly attractive than the comparatively civilized Maya Indians of Yucatan...
There is reason to believe that some of the impressions of this sign were put in Maya buildings after the conquest: in short that here is a tangible piece of the old ritual remembered by degenerate descendants of great ancestors. On Cozumel Island our expedition found examples of the red hand so conventionalized by the artist that the five fingers looked like five petals of a flower or the five flames of a lamp...
Jaguars were favorite subjects of Maya artists, and the Rain Gods of the Four Quarters were given the forms of jaguars. The gods of the Mayas were many and included planets and forces of nature, as well as animals endowed with human or superhuman intelligence. In addition there seems to have been a belief in a formless Supreme Being...
...does have a bird's foot with distended claws at the extremity of a sort of dragon's leg attached to his body. This foot is held angrily below his open jaws. These would not be recognizable as a snake's jaws by a person unfamiliar with Maya art, which advanced over a course of conventionalization that took it to the pole opposite that of such realistic portrayal as is now all the rage in the literature of the United States...