Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/350

 support of such an assumption. It is quite probable that small numbers belonging 1o every pueblo lived a portion of the year in the forests in temporary habitations, engaged in cultivation, or in hunting and fishing; but enough is known from the brief accounts of the early explorers to show us that the body of the inhabitants of Yucatan and Central America were gathered in pueblos or villages. Moreover, they were animated by the same spirit as the Cibolans in what related to personal independence. Rather than live in subjection to Spanish taskmasters, the very Indians who erected these houses with so much labor, as Coronado states of the Cibolans, "Set in order all their goods and substance, their women and children, and fled to the hills, leaving their towns, as it were, abandoned," preferring a return to a lower stage of barbarism rather than a loss of personal freedom. In 1524 Cortez sent an officer 'Ho reduce the people of Chiapas, who had revolted, which that commander effectually performed, for, when they could resist no longer, these desperate wretches cast themselves with their wives and children headlong from precipices, so that not above two thousand of them remained, whose offspring inhabit that province at this time." The inhabitants of Palenque may have been included in this description.

The profiles of the Palenque Indians, copied by Stephens from representations in plaster in different parts of the several structures, show that they were fiat-heads, like the Chinook Indians of the Columbia River; their foreheads having been flattened by artificial compression. Herrera, speaking generally of the inhabitants of Yucatan, remarks, "that they flattened their heads and foreheads. ." Whether it was a general practice does not appear, aside from the Palenque monuments, and the off-hand statement of Herrera.

Another important question still remains, namely, whether or not the Indians of Yucatan and Central America had reached the first stage of scientific architecture, the use of the post and lintel of stone as a principle of construction in stone masonry. The Egyptians used the post and lintel, whence their architecture has been characterized as the horizontal. The Greeks did not get beyond this, although they brought in the three orders of architecture. The round and the pointed arch, used as principles of construction, with all they gave to architecture, were beyond even the