Books: Pre-Columbian Culture

THE CONQUEST OF THE MAYA—J. Leslie Mitchell—Dutton ($3.75).

The Conquest of the Maya is written by an archeologist who is also a novelist, hence an enemy of dry-as-dust procedure. Mr. Mitchell insists, too categorically for such cautious Americanists as Philip Means (Ancient Civilization of the Andes'), that wandering Polynesians or Chinese, in search of "life-givers" such as gold, landed somewhere along the coasts of South or Central America to bring culture to the Aztec, Inca and Maya Indians of the New World. He seeks to clinch his point by comparing Mayan architecture and sculpture with the buildings and statues of Egypt, Babylonia, India and Angkor-Vat in French Indo-China. The Mayas of what are now Guatemala, British Honduras and Yucatan, he says, could never have evolved the controversial earth-monster of Quirigua from native American animals; therefore this monster must be the makara, a legendary beast, part crocodile, part elephant, evolved by sculptors in Asiatic India.

Mr. Mitchell lays about him with such infectious vigor that one almost forgets that other archeologists who are interested in the cultures of pre-Columbian America are still agnostic about the origins of the Inca, Aztec and Maya Indian civilizations. And if one looks at a map of the world, one is struck by the vast distances between outposts of Polynesia and America, between Easter Island and Chile, between the Hawaiian Islands and Mexico. Could Polynesians or Chinese, in their small boats or canoes, have traversed such forbidding stretches of water to bring a god of Egyptian origin to Yucatan and Mexico?

The Author is a Jack of all professions —aviator, novelist, archeologist, biographer. His novels, written under the pseudonym of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, are in Scots dialect. His Earth Conquerors, a series of short biographies of famed explorers, was published by Simon & Schuster last autumn. The Conquest of the Maya has the official praise of Fellow of the Royal Society G. Elliot Smith, champion of the theory that all human culture was diffused from a common point in the Nile Valley.