Maya Murals, Mercury, and Risk

It seems like Maya tomb news is coming hot and heavy these past few weeks. I waxed sentimental about recent finds at El Peru-Wak'a recently as you all know. Last week (and into this week) the internets were abuzz with news that the 'oldest Maya tomb' (sorry, eye-roll) was uncovered at Tak'alik Ab'aj ¹.  Today I read that archaeologists with the INAH have entered a tomb at the site of Palenque to perform stabilization work, giving me a view of amazing red murals to go with my Tuesday morning coffee. I'm a sucker for a Maya mural. Today is a good day.

Two things mentioned in that article got me thinking. First, this tomb is being conserved in a very interesting way. Archaeologists have known about it for a while, have poked at it a few times, are monitoring the situation, but they aren't necessarily in any rush to excavate it fully. The idea of this sort of preservation is that the tomb is good as it is, we only need rock the boat and dig it out if it either becomes unstable or we have nothing else to do with ourselves archaeologically. For every year that one 'waits' on a site/tomb/whatever, we have a whole host of new scientific tools to apply to the excavation. Waiting on this tomb at Palenque is possible because it has not been looted (naturally) and because the archaeologists involved believe that it wont be looted in the future.

I admit that I am not 100% confident about that. I can't really picture a situation where Temple XX at Palenque, which the tomb is within, is looted. If you look on the map, Temple XX is kind of right there, in the middle of the popular tourist party that those crazy archaeologists call the Cross Group.² But the region can be unstable³; and even the most stable places get robbed. To quote the Past Horizon's article: "already visible are eleven vessels and about a hundred smaller artefacts such as beads, mostly green stone". From what I am looking at, they don't look quite worth busting all up into a World Heritage Site at night, but who knows?

What really caught my attention was the statement that even though folks are going into the tomb to stabilize the murals, they will not be removing anything from the tomb. Why you ask? Well: "early studies show a high concentration of mercuric sulfide or cinnabar". The artefacts are toxic!  In pre-Conquest Peru, "the toxic properties of mercury were well known. It was dangerous to those who mined and processed cinnabar, it caused shaking, loss of sense, and death...data suggest that mercury was retorted from cinnabar and the workers were exposed to the toxic mercury fumes."⁴ So yes, ideas of preservation in situ are there, but really the tomb is covered in death powder.

Cinnabar-covered body from Copan, Honduras

Why I am bringing this up is that we sometimes talk about the danger involved in antiquities smuggling.  We talk about being arrested, we talk about being shot, heck we even talk about being smushed (at least I do...). We never really talk about potential toxic exposure. I literally have nightmares about catching some sort of horrible deadly fungus from a mummy.⁵ I will now have cinnabar nightmares. I wear a face mask when I clean ancient glass (I know the lil' bits that come off are just dying to fly down into my lungs). And so on and so on. How is some dude, looting a tomb back-a-bush somewhere supposed to evaluate this kind of risk. Paredes Maurey reported that chicleros and other folks regularly use unsellable ancient Maya pottery for cooking in and eating off of. It could be covered in cinnabar! That is horrible!

Sure sure, that is an outside risk, but when we think about anti-looting community education, beyond emphasis of illegality and half-baked promises of tourism revenue, it might be worth telling folks that mercury poisoning is a risk associated with Mesoamerican looting. A slight risk, but a risk none the less. Plus, you know, I am going to say it. At various points we need to make certain folks realize that this isn't just an academic squabble between financial and educational elites. Sometimes you have to go for the gut and say "yeah, well, some tombs are covered in mercury and we are supposed to be fine with a bunch of poor folks unknowingly being exposed to that so that rich people can have pretty things".

Tak'alkik Ab'aj Monment 23: Tis a head!

I think I need some more coffee.

As a complete and total aside, because I mentioned Tak'alik Ab'aj, lemmie tell y'all about Monument 23 from the site. I kid you not, it is an Olmec-ish figural sculpture of a seated person emerging from a cave, holding an infant (think Las Limas Monument 1 which was, of course, stolen from the Xalapa museum in 1970 and recovered in a hotel room in San Antonio, TX)...THAT WAS CARVED OUT OF A PRE-EXISTING OLMEC MONUMENTAL HEAD! Well, most likely it was. How sweet is that?

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1. The state of my Maya knowledge is such that I truly thought the site was called Abaj Takalik...which it was, just not anymore. I am mentally in the Maya world of 1975 or so. Wikipedia says the site was named by Suzanna Miles in 1965 but doesn't say why the words were inverted. I'm guessing it is meant to mean something in a modern Maya dialect and she got the words backwards? Apparently back in the back it was maybe called something like 'Kooja'. 

2.  Here is a short but worthwhile piece on the challenge of presenting what is going on at Temple XX to the public by C. Rudy Larios Villalta: http://www.mesoweb.com/palenque/features/larios/TXX.html

3. Somehow when Subcommandante Marcos had a to-do there in 2006, no one took some hot shots of him against the backdrop of the ruins so you all don't get to see that. Nor do you get to see the Zapatista doll I bought at Palenque in 2003 because it is in Boston and I am in Scotland.

4. Petersen, G. (2010). Mining and Metallurgy in Ancient Perú. The Geological Society of America.

5. This really is a fear of mine. It led to a silly incident in a hospital in La Paz where I was sitting there, delirious with a fever  telling everyone that I had been touching dead bodies, that they had to know I had been touching dead bodies, that I might have a lung fungus from the dead bodies... I'm sure it isn't the weirdest thing they had heard.

Images of historic looting

There is no getting around it, this topic is emotional and I have just put up some very emotional images on the project website.

http://traffickingculture.org/data/placeres/

This is the looting of a large Maya stucco facade from the site of Placeres. It is a well known piece: not only is is now in the national museum in Mexico City, it is the standard image that you see on any wikipedia entry concerning the Maya (at least at the time I am writing this). And now, there it is, being sawed off a temple.

Now the emotions. I was very excited to have access to these photos. A guilty sort of excited. Maybe a sober excited? This is your standard 'understand the past to understand where we are now'. A history (or an archaeology) of the looting of cultural objects as seen through the remains.

In this limited case, I was able to look into an idea presented in an article in Mexicon. The author speculates that two stucco masks in private collections may have come from the same source as this facade. The looting photos show that, at the very least, they didn't com from this EXACT facade. Same site, perhaps, but not this facade. There are missing masks on the edges in the looting photos, but not the same ones. Nothing much, but interesting enough.

In the broader sense, we have emotions again. Publication of these images makes what happened in the Peten real. As somehow who has spent some time in looters trenches in that part of the world, seeing 'action shots' is somehow more...just more.

Sorry to end on such a fluffy note. I think they are only the tip of the ice burg. I think there are many collections like this out there and I think that they should see the light of day. I sincerely hope to we can gather more of this. If you have anything for us, let me know.

A new/old colleague: Trafficking Culture gets Cambodia'd

In case you folks didn't hear, the Trafficking Culture project have hired Tess Davis to rock the Southeast Asian section of our research starting in January. Clearly ladies from Georgia who graduated from Boston University's Archaeology undergraduate program in 2004 are wonderful, amazing, and employable. Can't have too many of those on a project, am I right?

Her work is really at quite a mature stage (need I hide my envy as I slowly try to find people in Bolivian law enforcement who are willing to chat with me?) and I think her results will be quite exciting.

Now all we need are a pile of Masters and PhD students to kick this all into super high gear.

Replica Monuments and Warrior Queens in Guatemala

I was delighted to hear that David Friedel, Juan Carlos Pérez, and their team have discovered a tomb at El Perú-Waka' that they can convincingly argue is that of Kaloomte’ K’abel, one of the Maya ladies of the Péten's past that really seems to have had some power. I kind of cringed at how the media focused on the "Maya Warrior Queen" idea: it makes her sounds like some sort of Greek-style Amazon in the jungle rather than the leader of a city-state. However, she bore a (probably symbolic) title that indicated warrior status and the reporters have to give the public what they want, right?

Anyhow, the far far far more exciting thing is that she is a known, named Maya individual who can be linked to a specific burial and this is remarkably rare in the Maya world. Sure you would think that the elite Maya, who wrote their names on EVERYTHING, would write their names all over tombs but somehow it didn't play out like that. Including this tomb there are only five Classic Maya tombs which can be associated with a named individual according to David Freidel. There are a lot of factors at play here but, because this is an illicit antiquities blog, I'm going to go right out and say that we only have five identified individuals in Maya tombs because every archaeological site in the region was horribly looted to feed the international illicit market for Maya antiquities.

'Lady Kabel' is second to bottom
and 'Lady of Calakmul' is the bottom one

If the K'abel tomb can be used as an example of how personal names appear on Maya grave goods we should be looking to writing on portable antiquities found within the tomb. To summarize the contents of this very helpful interim report on the K'abel tomb:

1. "Kaloomte’ K’abel is well known in Maya archaeology because a beautiful portrait of her, El Peru Stela 34, was looted from El Perú-Waka’ in the sixties and is in the Cleveland Art Museum"
2. Her name on that stela¹ is constructed out of a waterlily pad and a hand
3. A weird little jar was found in this tomb at El Perú-Waka' over the summer with an inscription and a portrait on it
4. The jar's inscription mentions a lady whose name is constructed out of a waterlily and a hand and calls that lady a lady of Calakmul (which is how K'abel is styled, politics!)

Sure it isn't the tomb of Pakal, identification-wise, but it is a lot more than usual.

So El Perú-Waka, as you gathered from that mention of the Cleveland Art Museum, was looted like mad. Speculating from information presented in the report, there are reasons why this tomb may have been missed by the looters but there is no need to go into that here. Had K'abel's tomb been looted, that jar would just be another jar out on the art market with no information. Her tomb would be an empty hole, and we would have no exciting headlines about Maya Warrior Queens to dream about over our Saturday morning coffee.²

Lady K'abel on Stela 34. Hey peeps at the
Cleveland Museum, love the electric saw lines.

But you all know that. I'm preaching to the choir here.

That was really just a long intro to what I really wanted to mention: the idea of museums paying for replicas of the looted monuments in their possession to be placed at the original archaeological sites. In the report, the researchers mention that "K’inich Bahlam II [K'abel's hubby] on El Peru Stela 33 is in the Kimbell Art Museum and a replica of this monument will be installed at Waka’." In a 2007 interview conducted by NPR, David Freidel mentions that the Kimbell has promised the replica.³ The fine folks at NPR rung the Cleveland Art Museum who informed them that they had no plans to provide a replica of K'abel's Stela 34.⁴ Salvador Lopez Aguilar is quoted as saying:

This is the irony: That in place of them keeping the replica and us getting the original, now they are giving a replica to the poor Guatemalans, when it shouldn't be that way

I'm not really sure why the whole idea of museums with large looted objects offering copies for on-site display surprised me so much. Indeed, it is actually quite normal to see replica stelae at Maya sites. The reality of the situation is that many stela that were never looted are now in site, regional, or national museums in their countries of origin and not propped up where the Classic Maya put them. This is not only because they might get nicked, but because of the damaging effects of the jungle environment. They get rained on.

My, Stela 33, you are looking 'trim'. Saw
lines are sad! In the Kimbell Art Museum.

So in a perfect world in which the beautiful depiction of Lady K'abel was left standing where she wanted it placed (and not hacked to bits with a saw, trafficked into the United States, and bought by unscrupulous sorts at the Cleveland Art Museum), I, as the typical El Perú-Waka' visitor,⁵ would likely see a replica of the stela at the site. That is provided that the money was found to transport the stela to a Guatemalan museum and to make a replica of course. I wouldn't be seeing the real thing. Is the Kimbell's theoretical replica any different?

I think so. The obvious: it doesn't right a historic wrong, it doesn't make the removal of the stela any less illegal under Guatemala law,⁶ and there isn't a one-to-one correlation between 'stela at site' and 'stela at museum that the people of Guatemala could conceivably go see'. It certainly doesn't address the larger questions, like why on earth any self respecting museum or art collector would be party to the buying and selling of beautiful monuments that had been literally sawed into pieces specifically for transport onto the market. That isn't loving art. Anyhow, I think the really interesting difference is the shift in who pays and what that means. If this replica ever happens, that would be the Kimbell actually spending money to try to make a bad situation (a site without stelae, a stela without context) marginally better. By doing so, they are sort of admitting that they are culpable for whatever harm their acquisition of the stela caused. Admitting fault is step one, no? Better than nothing.

Y'all know me, I think that the Kimbell should probably give back the whole stela, pay for a replica, and, I don't know, apologize directly? But that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

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1. her name can't quite be said yet, K'ab___el has an untranslatable bit in the middle
2. accurate depiction of most of my Saturday mornings
3. four years on, Kimbell...where is the replica?!
4. big surprise! See But wait everyone, there are other antiquities on the Cleveland Museum website!
5. oh man I want to visit El Perú like you wouldn't believe
6. I know...edgy but I'm not going to get bogged down by that mire right now. Lets just say it was

Professional social media: an attempt

An experiment in professional twittering, you can find me at @DrDonnaYates

Guatemala: Masks, Church Stuff, and a False Divide

Guatemala has been the site of many of my most vivid dreams and imaginings. When I was 19 years old, I spent a summer living in a run down building in Roxbury, working part time, and spending the rest of my days sneaking into Harvard's Tozzer Library and reading archaeological accounts of Guatemala from the first half of the 20th century. I remember feeling that it was imperative that I know the information in those texts: I had decided that I was going to focus my degree on Maya archaeology. The semester before I had taken a course called Maya Cities taught by Norman Hammond and was scheduled to take another course on Central and South American art history taught by Clemency Coggins the next term. There was word that I would be working on projects in Belize then Guatemala. I remember feeling this sense of urgency, that I was behind, that I had to suck up the textual artefacts of a century of Maya archaeology. That I couldn't conduct Maya archaeology unless I did. At Harvard I read what I couldn't access anywhere else. It was all incredibly nerdy.

Masked drama in the Bonampak murals (modern copy)

That experience has left me with an odd amount of difficult-to-apply knowledge of earlier Maya archaeology (which, at the present, has an outlet in the Trafficking Culture Website, as well as a chapter that I wrote for an upcoming British Academy monograph entitled Publication as Preservation at a Remote Maya Site in the Early Twentieth Century). Clearly I have mostly migrated south, but in the back of my mind I still play with the idea of getting involved in Guatemala again in some way. Ideas? Whatever else, I follow Guatemala closely.

I'm happy to say that the US/Guatemala Cultural Property MOU has been extended for another five years as of Friday. As Rick St. Hilaire pointed out in a recent post, the import ban now includes "certain ecclesiastical ethnological materials dating to the Conquest and Colonial Periods of Guatemala". FINALLY! While these two new categories might contain a number of things, what we are clearly talking about are church loot and masks. These things are hot right now, but I wonder if they are hot in slightly different circles than, say, your Maya pot. They are collected for sure but they seem to enter into the décor market. That is not to say that antiquities are not used to decorate, but to me a Guatemalan conquest-era mask reaches a market that is more like that of decapitated Buddha heads. The ecclesiastical art certainly is purchased by someone else. Auction catalogues and dealers classify them separately. I wonder if we cultural property research folks do as well to the point of sort of ignoring them?

The Guatemala MOU is not the only one that covers, well, church stuff and masks. "Ecclesiastical Ethnological Materials" are barred from import from Colombia as are "Colonial Ethnological Objects" (which mostly means Church stuff) from Peru. "Colonial and Republican" objects are restricted under the Bolivia MOU too, a category that includes church stuff, masks and costumes, and, of course, your post-Conquest textiles.

Guatemala seems an obvious candidate for the protection of Conquest-era objects. The stuff is beautiful, the 'sites' are remote, and the property is in demand. Heck we know so little about Conquest and post-Conquest culture that this may represent another point where the market beats archaeologists to the punch. Everything is a surprise when it comes to the Conquest and immediate post-Conquest. Take, for example, the murals recently found in the kitchen of a house in the village of Chajul:

The paintings depict figures in procession, wearing a mix of traditional Maya and Spanish garb. Some may be holding human hearts.

Or those may be masks in their hands. They also have costumes on...and Chajul is mentioned in the Rabinal Achí, perhaps the only bit of pre-Conquest Maya drama to survive which is now part of our certified World Intangible Heritage. You best believe I read some shoddy translations of the Rabinal Achi while sitting in the Tozzer Library years ago. I drooled on my desk when I heard about these. We don't know what is going on there! Golly I'm glad that they didn't get torn down and trafficked. Something like 80% of the people of Chajul live below the poverty line and the civil war hit that area super hard. Buy their cooperatively grown coffee.

Those murals represent exactly the sort of amazing Conquest-era material heritage that is just starting to come to light in Guatemala. The masks, the ecclesiastical pieces that combine the Indigenous with the foreign and so on are so strongly tied not just to ancient but to very modern Guatemalan identity that it baffles me that we illicit antiquities folks rarely talk about them.

As the Ramirez family of Chajul found out, if your home is
over 300 years old, you find strange stuff in the walls.

It may just be the archaeological nature of a lot of this kind of work: historical archaeology occupies an odd place in our discipline, which is unfair. Historical archaeology in Latin America barely exists. I will say that what little historical archaeology that IS being done in Central and South America is about the coolest stuff that I get to read.

So three cheers for Guatemala's masks and church stuff! I'll be writing a bit more about church looting in Bolivia quite soon, no doubt, so stay tuned!