Epilogue

Fragmented Forms in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

The history of modern engagement with the monumental stone sculptures of Piedras Negras is another essential part of their life histories. The monuments underwent physical changes that generally accompanied or resulted in radical transformations in how people perceived them. Through these transformations, the monuments became part of new geographic, social, and economic networks and institutions.

The Piedras Negras stone monuments have been the object of attention of explorers and archaeologists for over a century. Yet, starting in the middle of the twentieth century, they also became the target of looters and art dealers. Many monuments were moved, cut in fragments, consolidated, and recarved, and many fragments were abandoned at the site as detritus. These actions physically changed the monuments and fundamentally altered their identity, transforming them from religious entities, sacred relics, or archaeological artifacts into commodities and artworks or into discarded waste. Fragmenting often was deemed necessary to transform them into commodities, although reconstruction and recarving were often required for their conversion into artworks and museum pieces. But these conversions were not the end of the story, and this chapter also explores the contestation of ownership of selected monuments by various international parties who claimed them as property or as historical and artistic heritage.

After Piedras Negras was abandoned in the ninth or tenth century ce, the monuments remained veiled by jungle growth for nearly a millennium. As early as the nineteenth century, the Lacandon Maya made pilgrimages to the ruins and left incense burners in ruined buildings (Houston et al. 2001:84-85; Satterthwaite 1946:18). In the nineteenth century, woodcutters and chicleros also passed through the ruins to search for and extract lumber and chicle, and Europeans and North Americans began to visit Piedras Negras as well. This was the beginning of the site’s transformation into a locus not only for exploration and research but also for extraction of cultural resources, including its sculptures. Within seven decades, the site would be nearly denuded of its stone monuments.

The first monuments left the site in the late nineteenth century. Austrian explorer Teobert Maler (1901) visited Piedras Negras between 1895 and 1899 and discovered numerous sculptures. He brought two of them—Piedras Negras Panels 1 and 2—to the United States for Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Mayer 1980:9; Morley 1937-38, 3:16, 93). These remain in the museum’s collection, and Panel 2 has been exhibited in multiple museum exhibitions across the United States (e. g., Cahill 1933, plate 45; Finamore and Houston 2010:110-11).1

The archaeological project of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (now called the Penn Museum) discovered several sculptures at Piedras Negras during excavations in the 1930s. They also moved monuments from the site to display in Guatemalan and American museums. Using the skills, infrastructure, and techniques of the woodcutting and chicle industries, they moved stelae, panels, and altars out of the Peten jungle and to Guatemala City and Philadelphia. Piedras Negras Panel 4; Stelae 6, 15, 33, and 36; and three of the four supports of Altar 4 were transported to Guatemala City circa 1933 for display in the Sala Arqueologica of the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnologia (MUNAE). Other monuments, including Panels 3 and 12, Stelae 12 and 14, and Throne 1, were transported to the Penn Museum under a ten-year loan, with Guatemala retaining title to the sculptures (Mason 1934:2; 1935:545, 552, 568; Villacorta 1933:10-18). The Penn Museum mainly took broken sculptures (Mason 1935:552). They consolidated and returned most of them to Guatemala in 1947, although they did not return Stela 14, which remains in the Museum today.2

Movement ofthe massive sculptures was a complicated procedure. Mason (1935:545) described their transport by land and water with romanticized flair in a 1935 National

Figure E.1. Oxen hauling a monument out of Piedras Negras, ca. 1931. Courtesy of the Penn Museum, Image #15690.

Geographic Magazine article; photographs in the article and the Penn Museum’s archives document the laborious efforts (fig. E.1). They used the strength of men, machines, and oxen and went to great lengths to transfer the sculptures without fragmenting them further. Mason (1935:563, 568-70) wrote that it took one week to get the four parts of Stela 12 down the road (about thirty miles) to a navigable part of the Usumacinta River (see also Danien 2001:41). The monuments then traveled by river to the Alvaro Obregon seaport, though this was only the beginning of the journey. From there, the monuments destined for Guatemala City traveled north by ship to New Orleans and then south to Puerto Barrios on Guatemala’s Caribbean coast. After this, they traveled by train to Guatemala City. Mason (1935:570) remarked that this journey covered about 2,300 miles, although the distance between Piedras Negras and Guatemala City is only 180 miles as the crow flies.

The sculptures that went to Philadelphia were installed in the Penn Museum’s Maya Hall, which opened on 12 December 1933 (Mason 1934:1). Photographs in the museum’s archives show the elaborate support, pulley, and ladder system that they used to raise the sculptures and move them through a window into the gallery.3 Despite efforts to keep the monuments intact, twenty-six inches from the base of Stela 40 had to be sawn off so that it could be erected in the Maya Hall. Nevertheless, Mason (1934:13; 1935:561) stressed that the pieces could be reunited at any time.

Regarding the sculptures’ display in Philadelphia, Mason (1934:1-2) wrote that “artists and archeologists were enabled for the first time to see original examples of massive Maya monuments without the expense and trouble of a long and arduous journey into the forests of Guatemala, Honduras, and Southern Mexico.” He also explained that the removal of sculptures should not be considered “vandalism” but a “rescue. . . from certain ultimate destruction in the deep jungles” caused by elements such as environmental destruction, erosion, and vandalism by chicle gatherers and lumbermen. His emphasis here suggests that there may have been some criticism of the museum taking these monuments, although I have not found evidence for this.