|
|
|
|
•
continued from page two
Unearthing Mayan Secrets
BY Eric Larson |
 |
| Facing history:an
on-site reproduction of a Copan artifact that's now being conserved
in a Copan museum |
| photo:Aby Algueseva |
 opan,
Honduras, is a Mayan city with an Aztec name, but the contradictions
don’t end there. If not for the 150,000 foreign tourists who
visit each year, the site would be considered a rural backwater. Only
20,000 people live in Copan proper, a number unchanged for 1,200 years.
The genes of the area’s earliest inhabitants are noticeable in
the faces and customs of today’s citizens. However, the ancient
Maya have for centuries been regarded as magical beings to be revered,
not blood relations from whom to draw strength.
Half the size of Manhattan,
Copan was once the epicenter of the Maya Nation, which originated
in Central America in 200 C.E. and thrived for seven centuries. This
era of artistic, scientific, and cultural achievement is known as
the Classic period, and during this time, a complex Mayan society
flourished. Governments were centralized, and the people were divided
into classes and professions. Copan was just one of several major
Mayan cities of the period, along with Tikal in Guatemala, Palenque
in Mexico, and Quirigua, also in Honduras.
Between 900 and 1500 A.D., following territorial wars
and, some researchers believe, overuse of environmental resources,
Mayan society began to fall into decline. The major cities became
centered in the Yucatan, and the weakened civilization eventually
fell prey to the conquistadors. After the Spanish conquered the Maya
in the sixteenth century, indigenous pride was devalued and the civilization
all but disappeared.
Today, Mayan awareness is being
re-ignited by discoveries at Copan, discoveries giving flesh to their
ancestors and showing the Maya as successful in a way few civilizations
have been, before or since. More than 1,500 years later, Copan is
the jewel of Mayan archaeology, in no small part because of archaeologist
Ricardo Agurcia ’74.
“Copan is one of the classic Mayan
sites,” says Agurcia, who has spent twenty-three years as a liaison
between the lost Maya and the modern world, working with other scientists
to uncover and preserve the Mayans’ lost history. The son and
great-grandson of ambassadors—his great-grandfather was the U.S.
ambassador to Honduras early in the twentieth century, and his father
was the Honduran ambassador to the United States in the 1980s—he
has worked as a research associate of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology
and History. Now he is the executive director of the nonprofit Copan
Association, which works to preserve and research the site. A recently
televised NOVA documentary on PBS, “The Lost King of the Maya,”
featured Agurcia and the secrets he is helping to uncover.
If you’ve ever visited Honduras, you’ve probably
been to Copan. No less than 86 percent of all tourists to Honduras
visit what the locals consider as Disneyland and the Grand Canyon
rolled into one.
The first gringo visitors to Copan arrived in 1839, nearly
400 years after the scattering of Copan’s Mayan populace. Modern
scholars attribute the demise of the Maya to poor management of natural
resources exacerbated by drought or other natural disasters. Today
it is an archaeological cornucopia, and scholars from around the world
have come to this “Athens of the West” to reconstruct its
history.
Much more would be known about the Maya if the sixteenth-century
Spanish bishop Diego de Landa hadn’t burned most of the culture’s
codices in a devil-purging exercise. (The clergyman’s boasts
about the act survive in his writings.) Only four texts out of hundreds
survived, helping researchers to make huge strides in the decoding
of the sophisticated Mayan language and system of celestial calendrics.
For instance, we know that Mayan buildings were constructed in alignment
with the sun and the planet Venus; even the scheduling of human sacrifice
was timed according to celestial events. Meanwhile, mathematicians
still credit the Maya with originating the concept of zero.
 |
| Table tour:
Agurcia uses his "treasure" to teach |
| photo:John Willard |
One surviving text is the longest pre-Columbian
text of all, a mountain of glyphs written on the 2,200 blocks of stairs
leading up Copan’s acropolis. Essentially a series of temples
stacked by Copan’s kings, the acropolis is thirty meters high
and a full half-mile square. Excavation of this layered cake has been
both aided and confounded by the Copan River, which flowed through
the acropolis until Harvard and Carnegie Institute researchers diverted
it in the 1930s. The river destroyed a portion of the ruins, but also
helped to reveal what is inside.
The Maya seemed to do little that wasn’t well thought-out,
and the acropolis was no exception. Recorded on a stone altar near
the acropolis are important clues that have helped Agurcia and other
scholars construct Copan’s earliest history. Altar Q, as the
stone altar is called, depicts sixteen of Copan’s kings. The
altar is most silent of all on the first leader, giving just the date
426 as his arrival date from western lands. Scholars constructed
a name from the headdress of the figure, calling him Yax Kuk Mo, whose
right arm sports a warrior’s shield. Was Yax Kuk Mo a paternal
figure of history like George Washington, or was he more akin to Romulus
and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome?
As it turned out, details of the myth were confirmed when
a male skeleton of a man in his fifties was discovered entombed in
one of the acropolis’ earliest temples called Yenal. Burial in
the temple alone pointed to royalty. Furthermore, the skeleton’s
teeth were studded with jade, and the minerals embedded there were
found only north of Copan in modern-day Mexico. Most uncanny of all
was a fracture found on the specimen’s right forearm, the shield
arm that a left-hander would have used to take the brunt of a blow
during battle. In effect, all signs pointed to Copan’s first
king as a real person, and his people as geniuses in memorial-making.
|
| “I
kept pinching myself, because every other building I’d
found was trashed. I kept wondering when I was going to find
the cut,” says Agurcia of discovering the perfectly preserved
Mayan temple Rosalila.” |
|
Momentous as the skeleton’s discovery
in 1996 became, it did not overshadow Agurcia’s own treasure-find.
In 1989, he was helping to unearth an area at the heart of the acropolis
known as Structure 16. Digging slowly, Agurcia came to something solid.
He began looking for an edge to dig it out. “I kept pinching
myself,” he says, “because every other building I’d
found was trashed. I kept wondering when I was going to find the cut.”
He named his find Rosalila, the best-preserved temple
in all of Mayan archaeology. Rosalila was “perfectly embalmed,”
the delightful consequence of early Mayans filling in the temple with
dirt to keep it from crumbling, also serving to protect hundreds of
statues, pottery, and eccentric flints cached there. Rosalila proved
all the more amazing by surviving two calamitous natural disasters,
the earthquake of 1934 and Hurricane Mitch in October 1998.
According to a hieroglyph on its front stairway, Rosalila
was built in 571 by the tenth ruler of Copan, Moon-Jaguar. Artwork
on its exterior identified Rosalila as a “house of smoke,”
a place where kings would reconnect with ancestors of the underworld.
In addition to scepters and other artifacts, scattered in the temple’s
four rooms were spines of stingrays that the worshiper would use to
bleed himself, soaking a cloth that he would then allow to smolder.
The smoke supplied the vision. “If you want to see the temple
of Rosalila in action, go to the Church of Santo Tomas in Chichicastenango,
Guatamala, where they still cover the floor with flowers and pine
needles,” Agurcia attests.
 |
| Mayan legacy:
Copan sites draw 150,000 visitors each year |
| photo:Aby Algueseva |
A goodly portion of Copan’s artistic
wealth is scattered in museums around the world. Since 1940, Honduran
officials have worked diligently to stem the flow of artifacts out
of the country, an effort bolstered when Agurcia helped to write important
protective legislation in 1982—legislation now held up as a model
for patrimony law in other developing countries. Locals who might
have been tempted to loot are now seeing how hands-off pays off through
millions of dollars a year in tourism revenue. Today, visitors to
Copan can journey into the acropolis to view the original Rosalila
behind Plexiglass. An amazing full-scale replica with the original
coloration has been included as part of the Museo de Escultura Maya
de Copan, found within the national park that borders the site.
The legacy that Agurcia has helped to preserve has much
to do with his own background. Born and raised in Honduras, then educated
in the United States, Agurcia majored in anthropology and psychology
at Duke. He traveled to Tulane for a master’s in anthropology,
studying the settlement patterns of early American societies. Then
in 1978, he found a job working with researchers in Copan, “and
I got sucked in.” Four years later he was director of the institute—the
youngest ever.
When Agurcia started work at the ancient site in 1978,
debate was still raging as to whether Copan was a city or merely a
burial place. Over the next few years, researchers helped prove Copan’s
significance as a vibrant urban center. Agurcia, meanwhile, worked
to have the site named a national monument and a United Nations World
Heritage site, allowing for more extensive research into how Maya
culture might have evolved.
“Now you can go to Copan and not just see what the
kings did, but how the ordinary people lived as well,” he says.
Genetic studies, meanwhile, are attempting to trace the origins and
movements of the Copan Maya, who are closely related culturally to
the Maya in the Yucatan Peninsula, hundreds of miles away.
Others have joined Agurcia in treasuring Copan. Enhancing
the Copan experience for visitors while protecting landscape and artifact
is the purpose behind the Copan Maya Foundation, a nonprofit enterprise
started in 1999 by Catherine Docter ’92. Docter’s parents
were Mayan history buffs who reared their daughter to appreciate antiquity;
she majored in art history with a concentration in Mayan art.
|
“If
you’ve ever visited Honduras, you’ve probably been
to Copan. No less than 86 percent of all tourists to Honduras
visit what the locals consider as Disneyland and the Grand Canyon
rolled into one.”
john willard
|
|
Docter was with her family in Copan
for the March 21 equinox in 1998 when her father, Stephen Docter,
recognized Agurcia from the photograph on Agurcia’s book, Copan
and Tikal. As they talked, Catherine realized she’d heard Agurcia
speak at Duke in 1991. “Then he proceeds to pull out his key
chain and says, ‘I didn’t just visit there to lecture—I
went to Duke, too. I am a Blue Devil!’” she recalls. “We
hit it off right away. My father got a promise out of Ricardo that
if we came back he would take us into the tunnels. Ricardo said he
would—never suspecting, I think, that we would take him up on
it.”
Out of the chance meeting grew the idea of the U.S.-based
foundation “to see what we can do as visitors and armchair scholars
to help the Copan community,” Docter says. The foundation (www.copanmayafoundation.
org) has its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California, where Docter
runs an art and design consulting company. Though they have raised
and given away just a few thousand dollars in the foundation’s
short history, Docter and other foundation board members have already
helped facilitate one children’s museum, Casa K’inich, funded
by the World Bank, that teaches Honduran children about Copan. The
foundation’s boards of directors and advisers include Ricardo
Gutierrez Mouat ’74, Wood Turner ’92, and Dorie Reents-Budet,
a former
 |
| photo:John Willard |
Duke art museum curator, and the group took part
in an international symposium at Copan in mid-July.
“CMF will not just be fund raising, but people-raising,”
Docter says. “We want to help Copan get the best international
people for whatever project is needed.” Next on the foundation’s
docket: an educational nature trail and onsite learning resource center.
Copan’s initial glory died with its seventeenth king,
U Cit Tok. Agurcia is working to reconstruct statues and architecture
that have broken or deteriorated over the years, a jigsaw puzzle of
immense proportions that might well consume the careers of future
archaeologists as well. “We’re not talking about a dead
culture,” Agurcia says. “The work we do has a lot to do
with the people of today. I’d like to see another generation
of Central Americans having a sense of the Maya as their ancestors.”
Larson ’93, a frequent contributor to the
magazine, lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. |
|
