A Glimpse at Guatemala/Chapter 12
A TEMPLE NEAR RABINAL.
CHAPTER XII.
RUINS AT RABINAL. (BY A. P. M.)
We had already changed our plans once, when the failure to find a road from Belchú to Rabinal diverted our steps to the Alta Vera Paz and Coban, and now news reached us that, through some blunder, the cases of instruments and boxes of provisions which were to have been forwarded to Salamá for our use at Rabinal had never left Guatemala, so that again we had to alter our plans, and all thoughts of exploring the ruins near Rabinal had finally to be abandoned. I regretted this the more as I had already caught a glimpse of these ruins when on a journey from Santa Cruz Quiché to Coban in 1887, and was much impressed with what I then saw; but as I was then only able to spend five hours examining one of the sites, my notes taken on that occasion are very scanty: however, I will give them here in the hope of attracting the attention of some other traveller, whom I have no doubt will be amply repaid for the trouble of examining the ruins more thoroughly.
The two towns of Cubulco and Rabinal are situated about twelve miles apart at either end of a plain surrounded by high ranges of hills. Lower hills run out into the plain from north and south, and almost divide it in two near the middle, and spurs of the high range and partly detached hills jut out into the plain from all sides. Many of these lower hill-tops are the sites of ancient Indian buildings, and on one of them, to the north of the town of Rabinal, the ruins are visible from the town itself; but as the foundations of the buildings of this group are said to be much destroyed, I chose as the object of my excursion another site further to the west and almost equidistant from Rabinal and Cubulco.
A spur of the bare rocky foothills, rising to over one thousand feet in height, here juts out into the plain from the main northern range, and for about three quarters of a mile along its top ridge stands the ruins of an Indian town. At the narrow neck where the spur leaves the main range there are the remains of two curved walls about fifty yards apart, which were no doubt used for defensive purposes. Outside these walls towards the main range there is one group of buildings. On leaving this group and crossing the walls to follow the ridge towards the south, the top and slopes of the hill, for about one hundred feet down on either side, are seen to be covered with the small terraced foundations which may have supported very small houses built of some perishable material, or may possibly be the sites of burial-places. These terraces are sometimes oblong, measuring 20-30 feet in length by 6-7 feet in width; but more often they are of this shape:—
and they stand out from the hill thus:—
Along the ridge of the hill there are seven separate groups of what must have been public buildings, each group arranged on nearly the same plan so as to enclose a level plaza. It seems to me most probable that here we have an example of the villages "of not more than six houses, standing a gunshot apart," mentioned by Las Casas, and that it was the inhabitants of the houses on these hill-tops whom he had so much difficulty in persuading to leave their homes and form the settlement at Rabinal. The relative position of the seven groups of buildings is shown on the sketch plan.
The general arrangement of the buildings in each group is as follows:— One large house extends right across the hill-top bounding the northern side of the Plaza: this house faces the south, and as there are no openings in the back wall, the access to the Plaza from the north must have A to G about 3/4 of a Mile
| A. 1. Large House | B C D 1. Large House | E 1. Large House. |
| 2. Smaller House„ | 3. Smaller | 2. Small |
| 1. Temple House„ | 1. Temple | 2. Temples |
| 1. Altar House„ | 1. Altar | 2. Altars |
ROUGH SKETCH SHOWING APPROXIMATE POSITION OF GROUPS OF BUILDINGS.
PLAN ELEVATION AND SECTION OF LONG HOUSE (N°1) FROM THE GROUP OF BUILDINGS MARKED E.
RUINS NEAR RABINAL.
PLAN OF GROUP OF BUILDINGS MARKED E IN THE SKETCH.
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PLAN AND ELEVATION OF TEMPLE (N°1) FROM GROUP OF BUILDINGS MARKED E.
RUINS NEAR RABINAL.
I took some measurements of the buildings in the Plaza on the top of the western spur. The arrangement differed somewhat from that of the other groups, the Plaza being, so to speak, double and having no houses along the sides, or it may be that the houses were small and had left no trace of their previous existence. The house No. 1 (see plan, Group E) was by far the largest, measuring 156 feet 7 inches in length and 21 feet 6 inches in breadth. It was approached by a flight of steps divided into six divisions by projecting buttresses. Eight masonry piers supported the roof in front, the wall being continuous at the sides and back of the house. The wall is still standing in some parts to the height of 6 feet. A raised bench 6 feet 6 inches in width runs along the back and sides of the house. Such a building must necessarily have been roofed with wood; and I may add that nowhere did I find any traces of stones which could have been used for purposes of roofing.
A ground-plan and elevation of the building, which I take to be a temple, is also given in the Plate. Two stairways with very narrow steps rise between buttresses on both north and south sides of the building and a single stairway on the east and west; but the approach is from the north side only, and the platform round the temple on the other three sides is little more than a foot wide. The height of this platform from the ground is 10 feet 10 inches. The temple has three doorways on the north side, and the walls are still standing to the height of 5 feet. The temple marked No. 2 in Group E faced towards the south. All the other temples are built on the same plan, but differ in size, some being considerably larger than that shown in the plan.
The altars were apparently miniature copies of the foundations of the temples, with steps only 3 or 4 inches in height and width; but no trace of a miniature house could be seen on the top of them. The masonry is all of the same description: irregular flat stones 2 to 5 inches thick and straight at one edge, placed over one another and faced with plaster. The stones may have been found already apart from one another, or may have been flaked off from the rock with little trouble, and have needed little dressing. The thick plaster coating is in some places still perfectly preserved.
From the position chosen, and from the fact that the buildings face inwards, it seems probable that each group may have formed a sort of fortress.
In one of the plazas I found the remains of a building, of which a rough ground-plan is here given:—
It is an oblong enclosure with walls 10 feet thick, with recesses at the four corners. The walls are in some parts perfect to the height of 7 feet. I could not find that there had been originally any doorway to this enclosure, but two entrances have been forced in where the walls are narrowest. It agrees in plan and dimensions with the building figured in Bancroft's 'Native Races of the Pacific States,' as a type of the Tlachtli courts of Mexico, where a game (which is described by Herrera and others) was played with an indiarubber ball.
There were numbers of Chaya (obsidian) flakes lying about on the surface of the ground, and I found one chipped arrow-head, one stone axe, and several pieces of stone axes and of mealing-stones.
Nothing beyond these few dry statements can be squeezed out of my note-book, and what little else is known can be gathered from the photographs and plans. An examination of the ruins on the neighbouring hill-tops would doubtless add much to our knowledge, and there still remains as a field for enquiry the whole of the forest-covered range of the Sierra de las Minas, which has not as yet been touched by the archæologist, and must almost certainly contain interesting ruins. The assertion is not mere guesswork, but is based on the fact that similar ruins are known to exist on the hills above San Gerónimo, and that I believe I gained touch of the same style of building at the ruins of Chacujal on the south side of the valley of the Polochic, which was a flourishing town when Cortéz visited it in the year 1526; it is not probable that the country between these sites was left uninhabited.