March 19, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Stone tablet sliver at UMaine may unravel Mayan mystery

ORONO – A sliver cut from a 1,000-year-old, hieroglyphic-covered tablet at the University of Maine’s Hudson Museum could be the key to solving one of the great mysteries of Mayan archaeology.

The limestone tablet is part of a series of once-connected panels scattered among museums and private collections around the world that are some of the finest examples of Mayan hieroglyphics known. What is not known is where the panels came from.

A sliver from the single panel in the renowned Palmer Collection of pre-Conquest Mexican and Central American art will be analyzed microscopically and chemically to see whether it matches the limestone in Mayan ruins discovered in 1997 at La Corona, Guatemala.

The panel at UM is “very special,” according to David Stuart of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, a lead researcher on the project. It is “one of the most beautiful examples of Mayan calligraphic art … Mayans were so visual they combined art and writing in a way almost no other civilization did.”

The tablet is one of a set of 20 known panels that apparently adorned the side of a stairway used in ceremonies and rituals. The only others in the set that are on public display are two at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Two things make the taking of the piece from the UM tablet unusual. One is that the driving force in trying to figure out where the panels came from is a British television program. The second is that the Hudson Museum allowed one of its artifacts to be nicked.

Chris Ledger of “To the Ends of the Earth,” a show on Britain’s Channel 4, and a crew were at the Hudson Museum on Friday to film the cutting, as well as to interview Stuart, an expert on Mayan hieroglyphics.

During the summer, Ledger and his crew trekked into La Corona to film the site and to get a limestone sample from a building that could be the original location of the Palmer panel.

“Most museums wouldn’t cooperate in the way the Hudson has,” Ledger said. “There is a 99.9 percent chance that this piece was looted. You can see saw marks on the back. Most museums wouldn’t want their pieces to be identified as looted.”

He praised museum director Stephen Whittington, himself an expert in Mayan archaeology, for allowing the testing.

“We’re a museum of anthropology,” Whittington explained. “Our goal is to learn as much as possible about what we have here to understand other cultures.

“When we put this together it will help with reconstructing the overall history of the Mayan realm and culture,” he added. “In Mayan archaeology, everything you can identify and locate really helps to put together the whole puzzle of their culture.”

Taking a sample from stone artwork has been done with Greek monuments in Europe, but never before with Mayan artifacts, he said.

On Friday, Ronald Harvey of Tuckerbrook Conservation in Lincolnville cut the tablet, which measures about 18 inches tall by 12 inches wide and 2 inches deep.

A consulting conservator for the Hudson Museum, Harvey explained before the operation that he planned to slice a three-quarter-inch-long, three-quarter-inch-wide, eighth-inch-thick square from the rough-hewn back of the tablet.

The piece will be taken to England where it will be compared to the sample taken from La Corona, a site rediscovered in early 1997 by locals who gather chicle in the jungle for making chewing gum.

Stuart visited La Corona in April 1997 and was ecstatic to discover on a monument the name of a person whose name also appears on the stairway panels.

“The looted pieces name a figure, Red Turkey, who we could not associate with a place,” Stuart said. “Completely unexpectedly a block on the ground [at La Corona] had Red Turkey’s name on it.”

The city is deep in the jungle and heavily overgrown. But there was evidence that saws, the kind used in logging, had been used to cut apart monuments, he said.

Looting is often the work of Guatemalan loggers looking to earn some extra money, he said. The site is in a heavily logged corner of Guatemala near the Mexican border.

La Corona is “as remote as you can get,” Ledger said. It takes eight hours of travel in four-wheel-drive vehicles to reach the village closest to the ruins. From there it takes four hours of walking with gear borne by mules.

The place was like “a sauna with mosquitoes,” said Neil Brodie, coordinator of the Illicit Antiquities Research Center at Cambridge University in England, a member of the project. “We’re looking at the international trade in archaeological material that was looted.”

Stuart pointed out that the tablets in the stairway sequence are small enough to fit in a suitcase. Most likely, they were spirited out of Central America to Paris, Mexico City or New York City, where dealers and collectors bought them.

The museum has hard evidence that the tablet was bought by William Palmer III in 1968 from a dealer in New York City, Whittington said.

In 1982, the tablet was part of the bequest to the Hudson Museum from Palmer, a UM graduate who amassed one of the finest private collections of pre-Conquest Mexican and Central American artifacts in the world.

The glyphs are arranged in an upside-down L shape, as if they were meant to run along the riser and tread of a staircase, Whittington said.

Of the 20 known panels from the stairway, 10 are covered with hieroglyphs and 10 show pictures of a Mayan ballgame. Played with a heavy solid rubber ball, the game has ritualistic and symbolic importance in Mayan culture.

Stuart suspects that the 20 known panels are less than half of the original set.

Some of the hieroglyphic panels talk about the ballgame, but others talk about history, including the births and lives of rulers.

The hieroglyphs on the Palmer panel begin in midsentence, Stuart said. The one full sentence on the panel concerns the casting of incense, an important ritual in Mayan culture.

Until the place the tablets came from is determined, Stuart told the television crew, the panels are just bits of “floating history.”

The Mayans chiseled extensive texts about themselves, said Brodie, but trying to recapture their history from these writings is like “trying to recreate 20th century history from government press releases.”

“Finding out where the panels come from on the ground gives us a better picture of what Mayan life was like,” he said.


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