Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  While he waited, Thompson pondered the cenote’s other legends. The water of the Sacred Well was usually turbid, ranging from jade green to rusty brown. But Thompson also saw the water turn blood red, just as the ancient sources had claimed. The green, he determined, was due to algae, the brown, to decaying leaves. And the sanguinary tint was caused by red flowers and seeds that tumbled into the water during certain seasons, lending the surface the color of dried blood.

  One day, Thompson was sitting in the cenote in his scow, writing notes while a repair was made on the dredge. The boat was moored directly beneath the derrick, and when he happened to glance over the gunwale, Thompson had a revelation: Reflected in the water he could see the “many deeps and hollows” reported by the maidens who had survived their plunge into the well. Rather than the contours of a supernatural landscape, the images were simply the reflections of the cavities and striations in the cliff wall. As for the “many people of their nation” that the women had reported seeing, Thompson also glimpsed figures in the water—the reflected forms of his workmen on the bank above. And like the maidens, he heard voices—the murmurs of the laborers drifting down to him. It was, Thompson recalled, “the weirdest part of the weird undertaking. The whole episode gave me an explanation of the old tradition that developed as clearly as the details of a photographic negative.”

  But when no other artifacts were found, Thompson began to regret exposing his patrons in Massachusetts to such expense and himself to so much ridicule. By day, he became increasingly nervous, by night, sleepless.

  One morning, he arose from yet another bout of insomnia. The day was as dark as his thoughts, and tracing the path from his house, past the great pyramid and down the processional causeway leading to the cenote, he plodded toward the staccato clicks of the dredge’s brake. Taking his position under the palm-leaf lean-to, he watched the men working the winches. Slowly, the bucket emerged from the water and pivoted over the platform, as it had hundreds of times before. But as he glanced listlessly into the metal jaws, Thompson spied two yellowish, globular masses nestled in the chocolate muck.

  Reaching into the bucket, he hefted the objects and saw that they seemed to be made of resin, which he confirmed by pinching off a bit and tasting it. There were some lighted embers nearby, and when he tossed a piece into them, it released a wonderful aroma; he realized he was holding globes of copal incense that had been hurled into the cenote hundreds of years before, during the rituals reported in the legends. It was just as one of the local wise men had said: “In ancient times our fathers burned the sacred resin—pom—and by the fragrant smoke their prayers were wafted to their god whose home was in the sun. That night for the first time in weeks, Thompson wrote, he slept “soundly and long.”

  He decided he would make Chichen Itza his crowning accomplishment. First, he took leave from the consulate (where his duties, as chronicled in the New York Times, included bailing out of prison some American fishermen accused of poaching and reporting on the exorbitant price of chicle, the raw material in chewing gum). Later, he retired from government service to devote all his time to the ruins. There was hardly a day when something astonishing didn’t appear in the bucket of his dredge. Then, after five years, when the machine began raising just mud and sticks and slivers of rock, he started to dive. The cenote was so cold that he could work only two hours a day underwater; surfacing with his lips blue and his body prickled with gooseflesh, he’d gulp hot coffee to revive himself. Meanwhile, ensconced in Mérida, Henrietta didn’t learn of her husband’s submarine adventure until it was over, some two years later.

  In the end, Thompson recovered nearly thirty thousand artifacts from the cenote, a fantastic haul that has been called the single most important archaeological treasure ever recovered in the Americas. There were arrowheads, flint axes, spear throwers, and a spectacular sacrificial knife with a stone blade and a wooden handle carved with entwined serpents. There were terra cotta vessels of every form and size, and earthenware figures of animals and human beings. More pieces of copal, some still mounded in their ceremonial bowls, others sculpted into fantastical creatures, including a snake grasping a man’s head in its jaws. And there were incense burners, including one made from the skull of an adolescent boy. Of copper, there were chisels, bowls, and bells, pendants shaped like playful monkeys, and more skulls. Of gold, rings; bowls; cups; and basins, including one twelve inches in diameter; hammered disks, some incised with scenes of battle; realistic masks; a headband of entwined serpents; a round helmet stunning in its simplicity; ornaments in the form of human heads, deer, parrots, monkeys, frogs, turtles, crabs; and a finely wrought necklace of alternating beads and links. Dozens of skeletons of both sexes and all ages were also found, bearing out the legends of human sacrifice.

  Then there were the jades. From the green waters of the cenote, Thompson raised plaques intricately worked with images of gods and kings; figurines of men and women, jaguars, and other animals; knives for extracting the living hearts of sacrificial victims; pendants of human heads, some with delicate, lifelike features, others nearly abstract; and ornaments ranging from austere rings to elaborate flower-shaped earplugs, nose rings, and necklaces, as well as hundreds of beads carved in a bewildering variety of shapes—round, flat, tubular, square, swirled. Many of the jades were of a luminous, highly prized color that has become known as Chichen green.

  Numbering more than five thousand, they are still the greatest assemblage of carved jades ever recovered. Before being cast into the water, most had been broken to liberate the spirit residing within. But at the Peabody, where Thompson shipped his finds, curators were able to reconstruct many of the pieces, and from stylistic clues it was determined that most were Late Classic works from the Maya’s southern range, showing that the cenote was a major destination for pilgrims from about A.D. 800 to 1534. One striking jade head was carved in A.D. 688 and portrayed Yo’nal Ahk II, king of the Maya city-state known as Piedras Negras, some three hundred miles from Chichen Itza. Other pieces were older still, apparently heirlooms that had been cherished for centuries before being offered to the Sacred Well. No other collection of jades represents such a wide time period or range of styles.

  Thompson must have succeeded at Chichen Itza more spectacularly than he’d ever hoped. Perhaps anticipating trouble from the Mexican authorities, he and his benefactors kept his find secret for a decade. When the hoard from the Sacred Cenote was finally publicized in the New York Times, on March 2, 1923, J. C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution, and Marshall H. Saville, head of the Museum of the American Indian, pronounced it “the most important source of information in unraveling the story of the Mayas now available to science.” But the ensuing years weren’t easy for Thompson. He’d done permanent damage to his hearing during one of his dives, when he’d become absorbed in his work, forgotten to open the valve on his helmet, and surfaced too quickly. He fell behind in his taxes, which the Carnegie Institution stepped in to pay. In 1921, during the lingering violence after the Mexican Revolution, Hacienda Chichén was looted again and burned.

  Even the cenote seemed to exact its revenge. Among the artifacts lifted from the well was a four-hundred-pound statue, half jaguar, half human, which Thompson had placed in his house despite the warning of one of his workers, who had told him, “Don Eduardo had better take care. He is taking away one of the servants of the rain god.” For years, the figure sat uneventfully, but when the hacienda was burned, the piece was damaged by the heat. As workers picked it up, the stone split, and the heavy base landed painfully on Thompson’s toes.

  “Now you see,” the worker chided, “the serpent god was angry and he took this means of avenging himself on Don Eduardo.”

  “Bey Ani,” Thompson answered in Mayan. “It may be so.”

  In 1926, the Mexican government also vented its displeasure, seizing the hacienda and charging Thompson with the unauthorized exporting of archaeological artif
acts. It would be eighteen years before the country’s Supreme Court finally ruled that he had broken no laws. But Thompson had long since left Mexico, and in May 1935 had died at the home of his son Edward in Plainfield, New Jersey. Henrietta also didn’t live to see her husband’s vindication, having survived him by only a year. Thompson’s heirs sold the hacienda, which today operates as an eco-spa hotel. In 2010, the Yucatan government bought 205 acres around the archaeological site for 17.8 million American dollars. And today, Mexico has much stricter laws regulating the collection and exportation of cultural artifacts. The Peabody began repatriating some pieces from the cenote in the 1960s, in what the museum’s director called “a gesture to promote international understanding.” But many works from the Sacred Well remain with the museum.

  So on a warm July morning, I journey to Cambridge and stroll to the venerable brick building on Divinity Avenue. A few pieces, including the wonderfully expressive head from Piedras Negras, are displayed on the building’s third level, arranged in old-fashioned cases on the creaky wooden floor, but the lion’s share are not on public view.

  I have an appointment to meet curator Susan Haskell and archaeologist Clemency Coggins, one of the principal cataloguers of Thompson’s discoveries. After surrendering my backpack and signing a promise not to publish any photographs, I trail my hosts through corridors bristling with racks of indigenous spears, bows, and arrows. Haskell enters a code on a keypad, and we pass through a heavy metal door. Inside the vault, secreted as surely as in a royal tomb, lie some of the most thrilling treasures of Maya civilization. The smaller works recline in foam-filled boxes, while the larger ones rest incongruously on gray metal shelves. There are huge, masterfully carved, brilliant-green jade plaques; gleaming golden bells and figurines; and, on a low shelf, one of the Peabody’s most famous accessions—the great, foot-long sacrificial knife, larger than I expected from its photograph and even more sinister, its dark wooden handle carved with entwined serpents and its chert blade glistening in the fluorescent light.

  I’ve read a news story that the Peabody was negotiating with the Mexican government to return even more of the collection, but when I ask about it, Susan Haskell explains that the report was in error. Still, a century after the fact, Thompson’s work at Chichen Itza remains controversial. A complex figure, he’s on the one hand admired for his pioneering discoveries, his modesty, fearlessness, and sincere affection for the Maya and their culture. On the other, he’s reviled, along with the institutional patrons who abetted him, for his indiscriminate methods, especially the dredging of the Sacred Cenote, which damaged some artifacts and stripped them of their archaeological context. And by packing his finds off to his patrician sponsors, he represents for some the worst of an acquisitive, imperialistic period in archaeology. Mexican historian and journalist Luís Ramírez Aznar has judged Thompson “an ambitious, clever, intelligent investigator” who “offered his virtues in service of a brutal, unbridled sacking in order to deliver into foreign hands invaluable relics that formed part of the history of the creators of the Maya-Yucatec culture.”

  Others are more inclined to overlook Thompson’s excesses in the framework of his time and training. “He wasn’t a scholar,” Clemency Coggins reminds me as we stand in the vault admiring the artifacts Thompson raised. “He saw the dredging as an engineering problem.” And prominent Maya and Olmec scholar Michael D. Coe, of Yale, takes an even more lenient point of view. “There are lots of villains in archaeology,” he tells me, “but Thompson isn’t one of them.” Besides, what archaeological context was there to preserve, he asks, when the items were all just thrown into the well? “At least Thompson wrote up his findings,” Coe adds. “The real sin is not writing them up.”

  For his part, Thompson went to his rest with his conscience unencumbered. “I should have been false to my duty as an archaeologist,” he wrote, “had I, believing that the scientific treasures were at the bottom of the Sacred Well, failed to improve the opportunity and attempt to bring them to light, thus making them available for scientific study instead of remaining in the mud and useless to the world.”

  Of the tens of thousands of relics lifted from the Sacred Well—the gold, the copper, the human remains—Thompson was particularly fascinated by the jade, which he found “the most romantic of all gems.” He wasn’t alone in that assessment. For millennia in Mesoamerica, jade had been esteemed the most precious substance on earth.

  To be sure, jade was rare. And fifteen hundred years ago, carving the stone was not a casual activity. Owing to its extreme hardness and the primitive tools available (only other stones, wood, and string), its working required great skill, as well as the luxury of time—months to fashion even a small item. Doubtless, both these considerations added to jade’s value.

  And jade was beautiful, imbued with rich colors, subtle patterns, and a substantial, sensual feel in the hand. Along with other commodities such as cacao beans, obsidian, and sea salt, jade beads were accepted to settle debts, reward retainers, and pay tribute to royal lords. Jade has been called “the green gold of the Maya,” but its value exceeded any aesthetic or commercial estimation. Not making our distinction between the living and nonliving worlds, Mesoamerican peoples believed that every object and every natural phenomenon—trees, animals, mountains, thunder, rain—was inhabited by an animating spirit with the power to intervene in human affairs. And jade’s unique properties suggested that its spirit was particularly potent.

  Jade was robust and immutable, impervious to fire, resistant to hammering, seemingly eternal. As Edward Thompson mused, “The years have gone, the centuries and then the cycles. . . . Even the massive pyramids have lost their outlines, but these bits of carved and polished jade are exactly as they were when fashioned. Their lines are as clear and their brightness as undimmed as when, unknown centuries ago, they left the hands of the prehistoric artists to grace the neck of a maiden or gem the regalia of a king.”

  Jade’s green hue only added to its mystique, since green was the color of water (like the pool in the Sacred Cenote), fertility, the sacred corn plant, of life itself. In the Maya cosmos, east was symbolized by red, west by black, north by white, and south by yellow; green was reserved for the very center. It wasn’t a coincidence that green was also the color of the highly prized feathers of the quetzal. With half a dozen names for various colors of jade, the Aztecs reserved quetzalitzi for the stone’s most brilliant, luminous hue.

  To the Maya, jade was also associated with wind, which brought the life-giving rains, and with breath. The stone did appear to breathe, as when water poured over sun-warmed jade rose up as vapor. And it could collect human breath, as when exhalation condensed on cold jade. No wonder lustrous, green, seemingly living jade was thought to cure all manner of physical ailments, from pain and fever to gout and head fractures, even to revive the dying. In the lovely phrase of Mayanist J. Eric Thompson (no relation to Edward Thompson), jade was “the precious stone of grace, the first infinite grace.”

  Arriving in the Valley of Mexico sometime between A.D. 1150 and 1300, the late-coming Aztecs generally didn’t work their own jade but obtained carved pieces as tribute. That meant they didn’t get the finest specimens, but it didn’t diminish their lust for the stone. When the Spanish landed in Veracruz in 1519, Montezuma dispatched his ambassador Pitalpitoque to greet Hernán Cortés with an offering of jade beads. “These rich stones of chalchihuite [in Nahuatl, “herb-colored jewel”] should be sent to your Emperor,” he told the Spaniard, “as they are of the greatest value, each one being esteemed more highly than a great load of gold.”

  After Cortés brushed the gift aside, Montezuma is said to have expressed relief that the benighted white men were interested only in the yellow metal that the Aztecs knew as “the excrement of the sun.” Reducing jade’s power to the level of parody, Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes reported in 1569 that the Aztecs used it to cure illnesses of the kidneys. Thus it was known
in Spanish as piedra de los riñones (“stone of the kidneys”) or piedra de la ijada (“stone of the loin”), which became ejade in French and jade in English and Spanish (where the pronunciation is HAH-day).

  As Edward Thompson realized, jade had a great deal to confide about the cultures that revered it. Any ancient American city that carved jade must have had a specialized labor force, including trained artisans. It must also have had an evolved political structure, including a royal class with the authority to wear the stone of kings, as well as the need to display their rank to lesser citizens. Of course, what monarchs directed to be carved on their jades—mostly portraits of deities and their own forebears—revealed much about their history and beliefs. And the uses to which the ancient priests put their jades were crucial in understanding their rituals. Any city where jades were discovered was likely to have been part of an extensive trading network, since the stone wasn’t generally found close at hand. These trade routes would have served not only as conduits for other goods but also for ideas and culture, for writing, art, and religion—for civilization.

  However, for centuries no one knew where New World jade had come from, because in their mania for gold and silver, the Spanish had accomplished the unthinkable—they had made jade superfluous. Within fifty years of the Conquest, jade sources that had been worked for three millennia were abandoned and in time forgotten. American jade was “the most mysterious stone of the world,” Thompson wrote, because “no modern man has yet been able to discover the deposits whence ancient man obtained it for his needs and purposes . . . no man has ever recorded the finding of American jade, except as worked pieces, amulets, votive objects, and ornaments.”