_Monumental._ When we turn to the monumental data, to the architecture and structural relics of the ancient Americans, we naturally think first of the imposing stone-built fortresses of Peru, the massive pyramids and temples of Yucatan and Mexico, and the vast brick-piles of the Pueblo Indians. It is doubtful if any of these notable monuments supply pre-historic dates of excessive antiquity. The pueblos, both those now occupied and the vastly greater number whose ruins lie scattered over the valleys and mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, were constructed by the ancestors of the tribes who still inhabit that region, and this at no distant day. Though we cannot assign exact dates to the development of this peculiar civilization, there are abundant reasons, drawn from language, physical geography and the character of the architecture, to include all these structures within the period since the commencement of our era.[9] There is every reason to suppose that the same is true of all the stone and brick edifices of Mexico and Central America. The majority of them were occupied at the period of the Conquest; others were in process of building; and of others the record of the date of their construction was clearly in memory and was not distant. Thus, the famous temple of Huitzilopochtli at Tenochtitlan, and the spacious palace—or, if you prefer the word, “communal house”—of the ruler of Tezcuco, had been completed within the lifetime of many who met the Spaniards. To be sure, even then there were once famous cities fallen to ruin and sunk to oblivion in the tropical forests. Such was Palenque, which could not have failed to attract the attention of Cortes had it been inhabited. Such also was T’Ho, on the site of the present city of Mérida, Yucatan, where the earliest explorers found lofty stone mounds and temples covered with a forest as heavy as the primitive growth around it.[10] But tradition and the present condition of such of these old cities as have been examined, unite in the probability that they do not antedate the Conquest more than a few centuries. In the opinion of some observers, the enigmatical ruins on the plain of Tiahuanaco, a few leagues from the shore of Lake Titicaca, in Peru, carry us far, very far, beyond any such modern date. “Even the memory of their builders,” says one of the more recent visitors to these marvellous relics, General Bartolomé Mitre, “even their memory was lost thousands of years before the discovery of America.”[11]