It is a country of volcanoes and mountains, dramatic lakes and misty vistas. It is also an ancient land once inhabited by civilizations that are the stuff of myth and legend. In the small Central America country of Guatemala, dramatic geography serves as a fitting backdrop for a remarkable and intriguing people.

Much of the ancestry of contemporary Guatemalans goes back to the ancient Mayas. The men and women of today are the descendants of a population which, a millennium and a half ago, cleared tropical jungles to erect pyramid-cities, and using crude tools achieved a sophisticated understanding of astronomy. Feared and admired by their contemporaries, the Mayas were larger than life in their own time, the subject of legends for centuries after their passing, and figures of mythical proportions today.

Today a land with ten million people, Guatemala was sparsely populated by scattered indigenous groups when explorer Pedro de Alvarado took possession of it in the name of the king of Spain in 1523. The country went on to assume an important regional position as the seat for Spain's administration of all Central America, but became an independent nation in 1821. To varying degrees, thus, Guatemalans also descend from the Iberians who colonized the New World in the name of an empire which--much as that of the Mayas even if in a very different way--reigned supreme in its own time and geographical sphere. Radically different from each other, the two races and cultures nonetheless fused together to create a new civilization.

Great variety flourishes to this day in Guatemala, and gives rise to special nomenclature. Interestingly, the terms used to distinguish human beings are essentially cultural rather than racial. The distinction made is not that of Caucasian vs. Indian. Instead, ladinos and indigenas are contrasted to each other. Ladinos are men and women, of whatever racial combination, who speak only or predominantly Spanish and follow Western ways in dress and lifestyle. The indigenas communicate most comfortably in Indian tongues and by preference adhere to Indian living patterns and dress styles.

One of the great surprises for visitors is the enormous vitality, to this day, of the indigena culture in Guatemala. Women who wear the striking clothes of their forbearers and speak languages which mystify Westerners are everywhere, including cosmopolitan Guatemala City, the largest urban nucleus in Central America. The highlands surrounding the city for hundred of miles around remain even today the principal home of the traditional indigenas. Here, in villages along mountain slopes and peaks many thousands of feet above sea level, they live a life that mirrors their ancestors' as much as the intrusion of modern life and Western culture permit.

As a practical matter, indigena village men, more in contact with the outside world than the women, have abandoned traditional clothing. Their more conservative wives and daughters, by contrast, largely preserve theirs.

Traditional female garments are strikingly distinctive and beautiful. The woman wears a top known as a huipil and a skirt called a corte, which vary in design from village to village. It is hard to make general statements about huipiles beyond observing they are sleeveless garments with openings for the head and arms. Depending on the village, they might be waist-length or reach below the hips; be made of light or heavy fabric; embellished with embroidery or not. The corte is a cloth several yards in length which the woman wraps around herself in a succession of layers until there is none left. A narrow band is similarly wound several times around the waist to secure this simple skirt in place.

In Guatemala, hand weaving, arguably the nation's proudest handicraft achievement, continues to flourish as it does in few countries. The huipiles are dramatic testimony to this. Hand woven on narrow stick looms by village women who have practiced the craft since childhood, they reflect complex color designs and texture patterns. Some take months to produce. Many of the women in the portraits wear huipiles , and a sharp eye will notice how distinct and unmistakable each design is. Amateur scholars can go even further, using the garments to identify with precision the place of origin of each indigena.

In Guatemala the poor, and particularly the rural poor, continue having large families. For that reason, it is a country where babies and children with doll-like faces and large black eyes are everywhere. As several of the portraits reflect, infants are carried everywhere by their mother or by an older sister pressed into service when no adult is available. Among indigenas, a large shawl transports the infant on the older person's back. This shawl, plus little caps and abundant sweaters, provides warmth for the infant. When sleeping, the baby is frequently carried against the mother's or sister's chest. With the shawl covering the small human form completely, the older person appears to be transporting a huge bulge that hangs from her neck.

Guatemala, surrounded by Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador, has highly varied terrain. In the mountainous central Highlands, mean elevation is several thousand feet high. Farther north, however, the land turns to vast stretches of hot savannah--a huge no-man's-land of primitive jungle, rich in natural resources, but as yet largely undeveloped and unsettled by man.

The bulk of Guatemala's population lives in the country's southern two-thirds. The highlands, discussed already, are surrounded by flat, low-elevation country that lends itself to large-scale commercial agriculture. Notwithstanding some very successful diversification in recent years, Guatemala's economy, and thus its population--and many of the subjects of these portraits, consequently--has traditionally been tied to the land's yield of large crops of coffee, sugar and cotton grown here. These are ladino lands where the outlook and lifestyle are more Western than in the predominantly indigena highlands. The temperament of the people is considered mercurial, unlike the more patient character associated with the Highlands.