Page:Native Religions of Mexico and Peru.djvu/41

24 myself be inclined to ascribe to a population, which either consisted of bands of emigrant Mayas or was affected by this Nahua movement, those "Mounds" which still throw their galling defiance at the modern methods of research, powerless to explain their origin in regions which have since been under the reign of the most absolute savagery.

However this may be, the movement by which in a remote antiquity the peoples of Central America ascended towards the North, carrying with them their relative civilization to Mexico and even beyond, was reversed at the epoch of our Middle Ages by a migration in the opposite direction. In this case it was the peoples of the northern regions that tended to beat back upon the South. They invaded, conquered and brought into subjection the peoples who had established themselves along the path followed by the previous migrations; and it is probably to invasions of this description that we must ascribe the fall of the ancient Maya society of the isthmic region. But the civilization of which it had sown the germs was not dead. Nay, the peoples who descended upon the South had in great measure