Yucatan presents a rich field for antiquarian exploration, furnishing perhaps finer, and certainly more numerous, specimens of ancient aboriginal architecture, sculpture, and painting than have been discovered in any other section of America. The state is literally dotted, at least in the northern central, or best known, portions with ruined edifices and cities. I shall have occasion to mention, and describe more or less fully, in this chapter, such ruins in between fifty and sixty different localities.[V-1] While these monuments, however, are the most extensive and among the best preserved within the limits of the Pacific States, they were yet among the last to be brought to the knowledge of the modern world. In the voyages, made early in the sixteenth century, which immediately preceded the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, Córdova, Grijalva, and Cortés touched at various points along the Yucatan coast, and were amazed to find there on the borders of a new world which they had supposed to be occupied exclusively by barbarians, a civilized people who served their gods and kept their idols in lofty stone temples. But their stay was brief and they pursued their way northward, bent on the conquest of the richer realms of Montezuma. The excitement of the conquest and the new wonders beheld in Anáhuac blotted practically from the popular mind all memory of the southern tower-temples, although their discovery was recorded in the diaries of the expeditions, from which and from verbal descriptions accounts were inserted in the works of the standard historians of the Indies. Later, in the middle of the century, when the turn came for Yucatan to be overrun with soldiers, stone temples had become too familiar sights to excite much attention; yet the chroniclers of the time included in their annals some brief descriptions of the heathen temples destroyed by the Spanish invaders; and the Yucatan historians of the following century, Landa, Cogolludo, and Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, described and personally visited some of the ruins. These earlier accounts have been utilized in delineating the state of architectural art among the Mayas in a preceding volume, and they will also be used somewhat extensively as illustrative material in the following pages. Since these early times the ruins, shrouded by a dense tropical vegetation, have lain untenanted and unknown, save to the peaceful inhabitants of the northern and more thickly settled portions of the state, who have from time to time become aware of their existence accidentally while in search of water or a favorable locality for a milpa, or cornfield. Only a few of the forty-four ruined towns explored by Mr Stephens were known to exist by the people of Mérida, the state capital.