GEORGE KUBLER THE SHAPE OF TIME WAS FINISHED IN 1961, which makes this year, in Maya terms, its Katun anniversary of twenty years. During these twenty years, the occasion has never arisen for me to speak in public about the book. Being. a man not prone to autobiography, and who will go out of his way to avoid looking in a mirror, I have paid little attention to the reception of the book. Here, however, on this anniversary, I hope to look back over the reviews, to note the changes in the book's public and its author. I was surprised, while I was preparing this lecture, to notice how, among my friends who had read the book, a division into two groups appeared. Both groups are equally discerning and educated and, as far as I can tell, equal in numbers. One group is eager to say that they don't understand a word of it, and there are artists and historians among them. Those of the other group declare that they understand it all on first reading, without difficulty. Of course I believe them both, without knowing the combination that separates them so sharply. Perhaps distinctive and contrasting features in their comprehension of works of art are responsible. What I say speaks to some, but not to others. Some are ready and others are not. But when both someday find that they agree in understanding it, that day may be its last as a book alive in the dissension over its intelligibility. In what follows, it seems best to limit my remarks to printed reviews and essays that are more in disagreement than in accord with the book. In this way the more searching objections to my argument are chosen. The most exact and critical review that has appeared in this country is by Priscilla Colt, then at the Dayton Art Museum.' She notes five principal positions of the book which are at variance with entrenched practice in art history. These are:

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The Peruvian records indicate that the guano islands (Fig. 14) yielded, between 1826 and 1875, several thousand artifacts of pre-Conquest origin. These are probably only a fraction of the archaeological material actually discovered during the commercial destruction of guano caps. Most of it has been lost; several hundred specimens in the museums of Europe and America still retain some record of their origin; and a small group of pieces, with which this paper is principally concerned, are known to have been discovered under stratified and depth-recorded conditions.

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