Page:Nicaraguan Antiquities (1886).djvu/17

 Talmac, San Juan del Sur in the department of Rivas, and some localities in Nicoya, in the republic of Costa Rica. From a linguistic point of wiew Dr has given very valuable contributions to our knowledge of the ancient civilisation of Nicaragua by his sharp-sighted and successful investigations into the Indian idioms of that country and into those of Mexico and of the northern parts of Central America.

In the night of the New-Years-eve 1882—1883 I arrived at Ometepec from Granada, and took up my head-quarters at the little borough of Muyogalpa, in the north-west corner of the island. From this point excursions were made in different directions, and, although my time was pretty severely taxed by zoological researches, I found however some opportunities of undertaking archæological diggings.

Hardly one kilometer to the west of the burying-place examined by Dr, a symmetrical mound, rising one meter and a half above the ground, was dug through (Station 1). It contained a little bowl, pieces of a larger urn of an unusual thickness, feet and fragments of a tripod vase, and a little bronze figure of a saint, the last one evidently a foreign guest among the other objects. At Los Angeles (Stat. 2) two statues, both very badly frayed, were measured and sketched; some insignificant fragments of pottery were digged out. At a bay (Stat. 3) on the north side, between Muyogalpa and Alta Gracia, in a place said by the Indians to have formerly been a town, fragments of divers small pottery, two stone chisels, one «molidor», and perforated and polished shells of a species of Oliva and a species of Voluta, from the neighboring coast of the