Notes on a Curious People: The Maya and Their Doings

This is a greatly updated version of a column of some years back on an unusual and intriguing people.  Maya civilization was not 1850 Vienna, but neither was it the primitive horror lovingly imagined by the ill-mannered and barely informed of the web.

Inasmuch America has a large population of Latin Americans, it seems to me that people, or some people, might want to know about them, and what they are, and where they came from. Most Latinos of the south are either a mixture of Spanish and Indian, or sometimes pure Indian. We have some idea of the Spaniards. They were European. But what were the Indians? What is their contribution to the great numbers of–whether you like it or not–new Americans? In particular, what are their blood lines? Are they, as insisted by web louts hostile to Mexicans, of very low IQ–83–and has their Asian blond enstupidated the Spanish? Were they horrendously primitive?