Word: mayan
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Temple Paradise. In Guatemala last week, an expedition financed by the United Fruit Co. was restoring the Mayan city of Zaculeu, near Huehuetenango. Zaculeu's spectacular pyramid temple is surrounded by a diggers' paradise of lesser temples and altars. (Near by is a court for the breakneck religious ball game which Central Americans believe to be the ancestor of basket ball.) Guatemala is dotted with dead stone cities, and United Fruit has promised a five-year program to put them back in shape...
...Idea Was Fun: Visitors to the gallery found themselves in a world as whimsically engaging as first-rate Disney. The pre-Columbian art of the Indians of Western Mexico had a freshness of its own; none of the stern beauty of Aztec forms or the glum formality of Mayan relics. When the Indians were not laughing at themselves, they were good-naturedly caricaturing someone else. The dominant note was exaggeration: humpbacks had overpowering humps; in erotic figures phallus outweighed...
...rida maintains that many of the wiggly goblins and squat blobs which appear in paintings like Time Has Stratified Eternity are derived from ancient Mayan and Tarascan art forms. To 20th-Century eyes they look more like something seen through a microscope. Though they seem easy, Mérida gets his striking half-old, half-new effects after painstaking study; the raw, vivid colors are invariably surprising, and the figures, however grotesque, seem very much alive. Some of the paintings were the result of a visit to Texas. "The land there is as flat as a sea," says...
What the archeologists don't know about pre-Spanish America dims about 20 centuries of history. Much of what they do know has been dug up with scraps of Mayan, Toltec and Aztec sculpture. Last week a few of the existing clues to the Western Hemisphere's rich, mysterious cultural past were on display in Mexico City...
...Peaceful People. In the 17th Century, Spanish friars and soldiers failed to convert the Lacandones, who still worship Mayan gods. Unlike some of their fierce, Christianized Indian neighbors, the Lacandones seldom fight, almost never commit murder. They moan and chant, burn incense of copal and rubber at the altars of jungle-grown Mayan cities 1,500 years old. In a cave near a blue, sacred lake lives an evil minor god. Two Lacandones, sick with fright, guided Miss Duby there. In the cave was an ancient stone idol; on the entrance were carved hieroglyphics. The last of the Mayans begged...