Word: mayan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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History. In Christ's time, Mayan Indians, history's most brilliant aborigines, created in Guatemala a culture that included sculpture, arithmetic, writing and trade (in textiles and featherwork) over a net of fine roads-though they had neither domestic animals nor the wheel. But earthquakes, plagues and tribal wars so weakened them that in 1523-26 Spanish Captain Pedro de Alvarado's 120 horsemen and 500 foot soldiers were able to subjugate 2,000,000 Indians. Spain made Guatemala the viceregal capital of Central America, and enslaved the Indians as plantation labor; an Indian caught riding...
Before Pizarro, the Andes have no recorded history. One tribe, the Mochicas, may have developed a system of hieroglyphics similar to the Mayan, but like the Mayan it has never been deciphered. Having no records to go by, archeologists are necessarily vague in categorizing Andean art, but laymen may find a certain poetic fascination in the mere names of the main civilizations: Chavin, Cupisnique, Salinar, Cavernas, Quimbaya, Chanapata, Chiripa, Mochica, Tiahuanaco, Chimu, Chibcha, Inca...
...layman in the field, many of the Museum's exhibits verge upon the spectacular. Twenty-five foot totem poles dwarf the onlooker in the hall of Indian ethnology; in the Bowditch Hall of Middle American culture, huge casts of Mayan, statuary tower two floors in height. On Peabody's top floor, the skull of Mt. Carmel Man, the only Paleolithic man on exhibit in the United States, sits staring moodily at his bones in case across the hall. Not far away stands the Museum's ample collection of shrunken and mummified human beads, calculated to surprise even the most hardened...
...faithful looked with pride at the massive Mayan-style building, covered with cast panels of cement and Wasatch crushed rock, which overlooks the Pacific on the west and downtown Los Angeles on the east. When the temple is finished in the fall of 1955, the City of the Angels will have a new guardian-the Mormon's own Angel Moroni, in aluminum and gold leaf, sounding his trumpet from the templetop, 262 feet above the ground...
...spectators can watch the university's football team from reasonably near the 50-yd. line. On the stadium's sloping outside walls, Diego Rivera is now executing a three-dimensional frieze of acid-painted stones. This "sculpture painting" depicts the history of Mexican sport from Mayan handball to gringo baseball...