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The End of the Maya Old Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

J. Leslie Mitchell
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Extract

The early nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable reversal of judgment on the American pre-Columbian cultures. Prescott's romantic histories and Lord Kingsborough's monumental Mexican Antiquities are inspirations of earlier and less sceptical eras. Such pleasing imaginings as that the Spaniards ‘overthrew in Mexico a greater civilization than their own’ received scant support from the archaeologist who had displaced the antiquary, or from the critical historian who interpreted him. Dr Robertson1 summed up the verdict of the new investigators;:—‘The inhabitants of the New World were in a state of society so extremely rude as to be unacquainted with those arts which are the first essays of human ingenuity in its advance towards improvement’. He characterized Cortes's ‘emperors’ as ‘headmen’, the gorgeous palaces of the Conquest as ‘huts or mounds of rubble’, the Aztec Empire as a ‘league of primitive tribes’. Research, both among the ruins of the Mexican Valley and in the histories of the more prosaic conquistadores, established a singular lack of anything on the pre-Columbian continents which could be described as other than a tawdry barbarism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 4 , Issue 15 , September 1930 , pp. 285 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1930

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References

1 History of America, re-issue 1820.

2 Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, 1841.

* The photographs illustrating this article have been specially selected by the author to bring out this process of growth, maturity and decline of Maya Old Empire art.—EDITOR.

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