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In 1822, Antonio del Rio gave a detailed description of them, illustrated with drawings by Frederick Waldeck, the future explorer of Palenque, that city of the dead.
One or two statues have been discovered, and a statuette twelve inches high is described; “it is made of baked clay, very hard, and the surface is smooth as if coated with enamel.” At Palenque are remains of a well-built aqueduct; and near the ruins, especially in Yucatan, are frequently found the remains of many finely constructed aguadas or artificial lakes.
Squier says of them: “The ruins of Copan, and the corresponding monuments which I examined in the valley of the Chamelican, are distinguished by singular and elaborately carved monoliths, which seem to have been replaced at Palenque by equally elaborate basso relievos, belonging, it would seem, to a later and more advanced period of art.”
When Grijalva, about 1517, discovered the Tabasco River, he held friendly intercourse with some of the tribes of Yucatan. When Cortes, in 1525, made his celebrated expedition to Honduras, he passed near the pueblo of Palenque and near that of Copan without being aware of either, and visited the shore of Lake Peten. They numbered one hundred and fifty Spanish horse and several hundred Aztecs.
Most of these ruins were found buried in dense forests, where, at the time of the Spanish Conquest, they had been long hidden from observation. The ruins known as Palenque, for instance, seem to have been entirely unknown to both natives and Spaniards until about the year 1750.
Off Point Palenque, too, in 1806 a British squadron under Vice-Admiral Duckworth defeated a French squadron commanded by Rear-Admiral Lessiegues, forcing two French ships-of-the-line ashore and capturing several other vessels. The ports are all shallow and unsheltered, but are occasionally visited by coasting sloops in quest of timber and other products of the country.
There is some evidence that painting was used as a means of decoration; but that which most engages attention is the artistic management of the stone-work, and, above all, the beautifully executed sculptures for ornamentation. Two other buildings at Palenque, marked by Mr.
Their houses, with those previously described, represent together an original indigenous architecture, which, with its diversities, sprang out of their necessities. Its fundamental communal type, I repeat, is found not less clearly in the houses about to be described, and in the so-called palace at Palenque, than in the long-house of the Iroquois.
When we attempt to understand the "Palace at Palenque" or the Governor's House at Uxmal, as the residences of Indian potentates, they are wholly unintelligible; but as communal joint-tenement houses, embodying the social, the defensive, and the communal principles, we can understand how they could have been created, and so elaborately and laboriously finished.
Many of the great buildings erected on such pyramidal foundations, at Palenque, Uxmal, and elsewhere in that region, have not disappeared, because they were built of hewn stone laid in mortar.
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