After a photograph in Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, p. 67. See on another page, cut of the court-yard of the Museum, where this stone is preserved. Cf. Humboldt, pl. xxi.; Bandelier in Amer. Antiq., 1878; Bancroft, iv. 509; Stevens’s Flint Chips, 311. There is a discussion of the stone in Orozco y Berra’s El Cuauhxicalli de Tizoc, in the Anales del Museo Nacional, i. no. 1; ii. no. 1. On the sacrificial stone of San Juan Teotihuacan, see paper by Amos W. Butler in the Amer. Antiq., vii. 148. A cut in Clavigero (ii.) shows how the stone was used in sacrifices; the engraving has been often copied. In Mrs. Nuttall’s view this stone simply records the periodical tribute days (Am. Ass. Adv. Sci. Proc., Aug. 1886).
There is no part of Spanish America richer in architectural remains than the northern section of Yucatan, and Bancroft (iv. ch. 5) has occasion to enumerate and to describe with more or less fullness between fifty and sixty independent groups of ruins.[1033] Stephens explored forty-four of these abandoned towns, and such was the native ignorance that of only a few of them could anything be learned in Merida. And yet that this country was the land of a peculiar architecture was known to the earliest explorers. Francisco Hernandez de Cordova in 1517, Juan de Grijalva in 1518, Cortés himself in 1519, and Francisco de Montejo in 1527 observed the ruins in Cozumel, an island off the northwest coast of the peninsula, and at other points of the shore.[1034] It is only, however, within the present century that we have had any critical notices. Rio heard reports of them merely. Lorenzo de Zavala saw only Uxmal, as his account given in Dupaix shows. The earliest detailed descriptions were those of Waldeck in his Voyage pittoresque et achéologique dans la province d’Yucatan (Paris, 1838, folio, with steel plates and lithographs), but he also saw little more than the ruins of Uxmal, in the expedition in which he had received pecuniary support from Lord Kingsborough.[1035] It is to John L. Stephens and his accompanying draughtsman, Frederic Catherwood, that we owe by far the most essential part of our knowledge of the Yucatan remains. He had begun a survey of Uxmal in 1840, but had made little progress when the illness of his artist broke up his plans. Accordingly he gave the world but partial results in his Incidents of Travel in Central America. Not satisfied with his imperfect examination, he returned to Yucatan in 1841, and in 1843 published at New York the book which has become the main source of information for all compilers ever since, his Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (N. Y., 1842; London, 1843; again, N. Y., 1856, 1858). It was in the early days of the Daguerrean process, and Catherwood took with him a camera, from which his excellent drawings derive some of their fidelity. They appeared in his own Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America (N. Y., 1844), on a larger scale than in Stephens’s smaller pages.
WALDECK.
After an etching published in the Annuaire de la Soc. Amer. de France. Cf. Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., October, 1875.
Stephens’s earlier book had had an almost immediate success. The reviewers were unanimous in commendation, as they might well be.[1036] It has been asserted that it was in order to avail of this new interest that a resident of New Orleans, Mr. B. M. Norman, hastened to Yucatan, while Stephens was there a second time, and during the winter of 1841-42 made the trip among the ruins, which is recorded in his Rambles in Yucatan, or Notes of Travel through the peninsula, including a Visit to the Remarkable Ruins of Chi-chen, Kabah Zayi, and Uxmal (New York, 1843).[1037]
The Daguerrean camera was also used by the Baron von Friederichsthal in his studies at Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, and his exploration seems to have taken place between the two visits of Stephens, as Bancroft determines from a letter (April 21, 1841) written after the baron had started on his return voyage to Europe.[1038] In Paris, in October, 1841, under the introduction of Humboldt, Friederichsthal addressed the Academy, and his paper was printed in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (xcii. 297) as “Les Monuments de l’Yucatan.”[1039] The camera was not, however, brought to the aid of the student with the most satisfactory results till Charnay, in 1858, visited Izamal, Chichen-Itza, and Uxmal. He gave a foretaste of his results in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog. (1861, vol. ii. 364), and in 1863 gave not very extended descriptions, relying mostly on his Atlas of photographs in his Cités et Ruines Américaines, a part of which volume consists of the architectural speculations of Viollet le Duc. Beside the farther studies of Charnay in his Anciens Villes du Nouveau Monde (Paris, 1885), there have been recent explorations in Yucatan by Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife, mainly at Chichen-Itza, in which for a while he had the aid and countenance of Mr. Stephen Salisbury, Jr.,[1040] of Worcester, Mass. Le Plongeon’s results are decidedly novel and helpful, but they were expressed with more license of explication than satisfied the committee of that society, when his papers were referred to them for publication, and than has proved acceptable to other examiners.[1041] Nearly all other descriptions of the Yucatan ruins have been derived substantially from these chief authorities.[1042]
DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY.
Reproduced from an engraving in the London edition, 1887, of the English translation of his Ancient Cities of the New World.