Word: mayan
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Archaeologists generally have accepted five Mexican cultures-Mayan, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, Totonac and Olmec-as being the oldest in North America, and have dated them around A.D. 300. But last week tests performed at the University...
...most exciting finds in the past two decades is the 20-in.-tall statuette of the Mayan Rain God Chaac (see color), one of two discovered by a Carnegie Institution expedition in the ruined Yucatan city of Mayapan, and now on view at Mexico City's National Museum. Probably sculpted from clay in the 14th century, the prong-nosed Chaac is seen here in full regalia, with all his accouterments worked out in the full complexity of the Mayan style...
...contrast to later-day Mayan works, writes Mexican Painter-Archaeologist Miguel Covarrubías, Mezcala objects are "highly stylized and schematic, and their coarse, vigorous character makes them readily identifiable" (see cut). Probably sculpted between 200 B.C.-800 A.D., surviving examples of Mezcala workmanship are small (many only 2-in. to 7-in. tall) and were made from the same hard stone used for chisels. But primitive as are the small masks, figures and votive animals, they pass the test of good sculpture. Even magnified in size, they keep their proportion and acquire a monumental gravity...
...young resident of Boston (top left) looks with some uneasiness at the worldly remains of a gorilla. At the left are two Peruvian mummies photographed in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Below are samples of the ruins at Copan, Honduras-probably the best known example of Mayan culture at its palmiest...
...Mayan Lower Classes. Professor (of archaeology) Gordon R. Willey of Harvard has been carefully excavating a small ancient village at Barton Ramie, Honduras, which is 15 miles from the elaborate ceremonial center of Benque Viejo. The great temples and pyramids of the Mayans are already well known, but little is known about the people who labored to build them...