Word: yucatan
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Reports from the Mason-Spinden expedition in the Yucatan have recently been received at the Peabody Museum which tell in some detail of the territory which the expedition has covered so far and of the discoveries it has made. Dr. Herbert J. Spinden '06, Curator of the Peabody Museum left Cambridge in January with Mr. Gregory Mason to continue the explorations which archaeologists have begun in the jungles of Central America. Splendid stone cities, great temples, and imposing statues have been gradually revealed during the last half century. But as yet the language, customs, and origin of the people...
...party embarked at New Orleans and arrived at Belize in British Honduras as the point of departure for their trip into the Yucatan. From Belize they took a smaller ship northward along the coast of the Yucatan peninsula, making excursions into the inland by means of the large rivers which flow out to the sea all along that coast. On one of these side trips Mr. Mason and another member of the party came down with malaria and were forced to return to Belize. The rest of the party went on without them and made a number of valuable discoveries...
...them until recently had figures set on the altars. One of these is still in place but the hand is gone and the other has been taken away entirely. We found this evidence that the figures of terra cotta and stuco of the styule found in Talusco and also Yucatan were set up on table altars and in niches over the doors of shrines...
...first real awakening of outside in Yucatan and Guatemala came with the reports from the American explorer, John L. Stephens, and his companion, the English artist, Francis Catherwood. Between 1839 and 1842 these two men visited and, with admirable exactitude, described "forty-four ruined cities or places in which remains or vestiges of ancient populations were found...
...this is published Dr. Spinden, the other members of our party and myself are travelling northward along the eastern coast of Yucatan, retracing in a schooner with powerful gasoline engines the track of the clumsy high-pooped vessels of the first Spanish discoverers. Although most of Mexico has greatly progressed, this region of the earliest American civilization is far from well known. For example, few naturalists have been here, and one of our number, Ludlow Griscom, Assistant Curator of Birds at the American Museum of Natural History, expects to get important new data on the ornithology of these parts...