A Geographic Reconnaissance in Northern Mayaland

Abstract

IT is the purpose of this paper to summarize a few of the results of an expedition made early in 1938, under the auspices of the Syracuse Univer? sity Museum of Natural Science, to some of the old Mayan city sites of northern and eastern Yucatan, particularly to that of Coba. The expedition proposed to study the environment of the ancient sites, the ruined causeways connecting them, the possible routes south to the earlier Mayan centres in the Guatemala region, and to search for any accessible quarries, cenotes, and other landscape features that might throw some light upon the Indian cultures from a geographic viewpoint. In addition it was hoped that collections might be made of the local flora and that fossils might be found that would be of value, inasmuch as this latter field especially has scarcely been touched in Yucatan. The Yucatan peninsula is a great block of limestone: soft, white, and porous. Its horizontal strata, largely marine in origin, were lifted vertically out of the ocean in Pliocene and Pleistocene time. With the exception of an east-west anticlinal ridge, south of Uxmal, the surface of the northern half of the peninsula is an unbroken stretch of perfectly level plain, nowhere more than a few score feet above sea-level. The western or Gulf shore is extremely shelving, while the eastern or Caribbean side rises in abrupt bluffs from the water's edge. In all the land there are no known deposits of any of the useful metals, and such gold and copper as was found in Mayan possession at the Conquest must have come from Mexico proper or from some of the Central American sources.