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286 At the end of the year, the couple, their relations and friends, paint themselves and assume their best ornaments; the bride presents her husband with a stool and five cacao grains, and receives from him a skirt and five cacao grains. Their hands are then joined by the cacique, and a feast follows. The Lacandons are monogamous, and divorce, probably owing to the system of trial-marriage, is rare.

Among the Quiché also marriage was by purchase, but the bride-price was a serious matter, and apparently often amounted to a considerable sum. We are told that the princes grew rich on the gifts which they received in return for their daughters, but the system brought abuses with it, and quarrels arose which became so frequent and serious that the tribe split up into nine "families" and twenty-four "great houses." The tendency to matriarchy seen among the Maya is even more evident among the Kakchiquel, since if the couple belonged to different clans (chinamitl), the man regarded all the male members of his wife's clan as either brothers-or sons-in-law, according to age. This would seem to imply that the man passed into his wife's clan rather than she into his.

Commerce flourished among the later Maya, and there was a good deal of travelling to and fro in the country. The pilgrimages to celebrated shrines along recognized routes have already been mentioned, and also the fact that there was a particular god of travel, Ekchuah. The Yucatec traded salt, textiles and slaves to Uloa and Tabasco, in exchange for cacao and stone money; red shells were imported, and also copper from New Spain. Diaz mentions that the Spaniards found, in a village in Chiapas, a number of prisoners secured by wooden collars who had been captured on the road, and he states that some of these were travellers from Tehuantepec and Soconusco. On the border of Yucatan and in the hilly region of Alta Vera Paz there were