by Craig Childs
I walked in an evening rain back to my rented room just off campus, where I shook off my raincoat and lay down on the stiff single bed, hands behind my head. I had spent two days sorting through the Peabody. Seeing those murals, pots, and archived photos of men digging trenches in the 1930s—men who have all probably died by now—made the rain sound different, as if it were prying apart the stone tiles on the roof. I was keenly aware of water-fat ivy creeping up the walls of this two-story brownstone, big, green hands pressing against my window as if waiting to get in. I let the house fall apart in my imagination, followed dutifully by the city around it and the rest of the East Coast, leaving only overgrown hills of ruins, streetlamps slumped over like bones, as gone as Awat’ovi. Would there be anyone to excavate our fallen civilization after that, and what would they do with us? Would they snatch at relics and argue? Would they find the astonishing remains of the Peabody and its artifacts from around the world and think it a place of ancestor worship? Would they be wrong?
I once asked Anibal Rodriguez, a charismatic curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, what would become of his museum in a thousand years. Standing in the silent corridors of the Southwest Collection, where he had been working for more than forty years, Rodriguez considered the question and wondered whether there would still be museums.
“Maybe the remains and collections of you and me,” he postulated. “By then, the collections you and I are now looking at will have gone home.” Gone home. It was a curious notion, as if there were places artifacts would return to, each one having an invisible X to which it belonged, a door it would someday knock on, announcing, I’m back.
Listening to the rain in Cambridge, I imagined artifacts picked up one by one and taken to the home Rodriguez spoke of, perhaps even dug out of the rubble of some future Peabody, murals returning to their naked kivas as a gold jar moves into the wild barrancas of the Sierra Madre. A gray jar goes onto the floor of a buried room where it once was romanced by a tree root. The Euphronios ambles to the countryside near San Antonio di Cerveteri. A handful of tiny white beads scatter across the floor of a rock shelter in the desert, as thousands of manuscripts go back to their cave at the edge of the Taklamakan. A story fits back together, one we have guarded and fought over for centuries, one we have torn to pieces in our enthusiasm and sense of entitlement.
There is a rule we are taught from an early age: put things back when you are done. There is no need for us to rush to do this. We have nothing but time.
PART FOUR
IN SITU
CHAPTER 13
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
It matters where things are; stories are told differently as they get shuffled from one place to another. A statue in a museum guarded by a motion detector is not that same statue in a shrine with its feet being kissed off. Moving it under a roof may give us a new past to revel in, but at least consider the equal and opposite reaction: what has happened to the thing that has been lost?
Cornelius Holtorf, a controversial archaeologist at the University of Lund, in Sweden, rattled the scientific community in 2007 by proposing that the past is actually a renewable resource, and we are not being robbed of it. Holtorf, who believes we are not losing sites but actually gaining them, writes, “It has become cliché to lament the loss of ancient sites and objects in the modern Western world in much the same way as we do the continuous reduction of the tropical rainforests and the gradual decline of remaining oil reserves.” He says that remnants of the past are not depleted in the same way as environmental resources because we are actually creating more of them: “No other societies have surrounded themselves with as many archaeological sites and objects that can be experienced in the landscape or as part of collections as our modern Western societies.” We establish museums and parks dedicated to archaeology, all the while honing tools to look at the past with an ever-sharper eye, finding even more layers to peel back. While I agree with Holtorf’s assessment, there is more to the story. We may be making more archaeology all the time, but once the original context is lost, that story is over.
When China last invaded Tibet in the mid-twentieth century, it went to great pains to erase people’s physical connection to the past by removing and often destroying their artifacts. So many statues and pieces of religious regalia were hauled out by caravans of transport trucks and melted down that one foundry in Beijing produced six hundred tons of gold bullion of Tibetan ancestry. The People’s Liberation Army reduced an original presence of more than six thousand monasteries to thirteen. Ancient libraries of religion, medicine, history, and philosophy were shelled, burned, and rolled over by tanks. Reliquaries of artifacts dating back centuries if not thousands of years were destroyed.
When the political climate began changing in the mid-1980s and surviving cultural objects were made available, delegates sent to China found warehouses and halls filled nearly to their ceilings. In one visit alone they packed up more than thirteen thousand mangled, hammer-beaten statues that they returned to Tibet to let the past back in.
One statue received different treatment, however. It was the Jowo Shakymuni, the most revered object in all Tibet. When the Chinese invaded, this item was on the short list of things that must be left undamaged. Positioned in the center of Lhasa, it is considered the geographic bull’s-eye of Tibetan Buddhism, the very axis on which the universe is said to turn. When it arrived in Lhasa in the seventh century as a gift from China, the statue ushered Buddhism into the country. It was the dowry of a Chinese princess steeped in Buddhism who married a powerful Tibetan king, a political and religious alliance that united the two countries. In this most recent invasion, the statue remained unharmed because even after nine hundred years it is still a claim China has put on Tibet, a justification that says, We brought you Buddhism, now pay up.
Ancient objects have this kind of power. Leaving them in place is more than just a political gesture. They represent a continuum of active history that affects everyday lives. To this day pilgrims travel hundreds of miles, kissing the ground at every step, to greet the Jowo Shakymuni, and when they arrive in Lhasa they join a procession walking a wide, clockwise circle around the temple that houses it. The circle spirals inward, crimson robes bustling together into a darkened hall where the Jowo glows with a smooth-skinned alloy of gold and silver, the jewels of its robe brilliant in the smoky light.
Had the statue been taken, a substitute probably would have been installed so that the circle would keep turning. This has happened before. There is little chance that today’s version is the original Jowo Shakymuni made in India around 560 BC and blessed by the Buddha himself, then later exported to China and finally to Tibet. Lhasa has been sacked many times since the statue first arrived, and though it was probably hidden a few times, somewhere along the line it was likely lost to war or to unscrupulous or forgetful hands, whereupon a new Jowo took its place. What matters most is that there is not a blank spot at the center of this universe. A direct line to the past is still there, embodied by something physical. Placement matters.
I think back to the man who built a replica of a prehistoric loom and put it in the cave in Utah where the original had been. It was strangely haunting for him to know something important was gone, a vacancy that had to be filled.
In Scotland there is a revered seven-ton rock called the Cadboll Stone, artfully inscribed head to toe, from the ninth century. When the British Museum took it in 1921, locals were in an uproar. They demanded that it be returned, contending that it was part of who they were, and they at least succeeded in getting it moved closer to home, where it can now be seen at the Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh. A handmade replica has been placed on its original site so there is not a glaring vacuum, but locals are still fighting for the real thing, arguing that the stone was “born” there and “grew” there, and that is where it “should” be. They speak of it as a living thing. Siân Jones, head of archaeology at the University of Manchester, has written extensively on the perplexi
ties and challenges surrounding the Cadboll Stone, compiling a series of interviews with locals. One woman said to Jones, “I do feel it’s wanting to go back. We’ve taken it out, disturbed it, we’ve looked at it…. I mean I know it has to have lots of things done to it to preserve it… but I think once it goes back I feel it’ll shine on its own.”
For some it is a matter of heart. Heart becomes culture. Places become sacred.
While exploring an archaeological site in the highland interior of Guatemala, I once emerged from the forest onto an ancient plaza. It was a late Mayan city, ruins thick with trees, the plaza made into a clearing. At the far end were the tumbled remains of a temple, and I noticed a wisp of smoke turning among its stones. Curious, I started toward the smoke, head cocked like a dog hearing a whistle. Someone had built a small fire and then smothered it. When I got there I crouched and waved my hand over the scorched circle. It had been snuffed out minutes before my arrival. Around it were arrayed ropes of melted wax, candles of many colors, and tiny stubs of paper matches that had been burned down to keep the candles lit. Between the temple’s crooked building blocks were greasy Catholic votive candles and one freshly severed head of a rooster. The ruffle around the rooster’s throat was matted and wet with blood, its gray eyelids closed as if sleeping, eyeballs not yet sunken.
These were the remains of a mourning ceremony in which Mayans mix Catholicism with an ancient and much more local religion. Worshippers had brought flowers, just as the Mayans had brought them a thousand years earlier. There were dead flowers, too, and candles, years of them by the looks of it. Whatever this temple was, people knew it by name and perhaps remembered which god or goddess had once been worshipped in this very place. Maybe they had been coming for centuries. The heat of this doused fire helped me realize that this was not merely an archaeological site, not in the scientific sense. It was a place people came to remember. It mattered that it was still here.
In 2001, William Saturno went to Guatemala under the auspices of the Peabody Museum and discovered what is now being called the Mayan Sistine Chapel. He found it by accident. His guides were lost in the Petén, unable to get him where he wanted to go, and after a few days by Land Cruiser and eight hours by foot they got him to a ruined city that had already been discovered and thoroughly looted. The site looked like a war zone, with trenches burrowed this way and that into jungle-covered temples. Many of the digs were fresh, bright spoil piles of plaster dumped across the ground.
Frustrated, exhausted, and out of drinking water, Saturno entered a looter’s trench looking for shade. The trench led to the base of a temple, where it disappeared into darkness. Saturno pulled his flashlight and was stunned to see a portion of a subterranean mural accidentally exposed by tomb raiders. Not only did the mural appear to be intact, but its style looked very old; in fact, it would turn out to be the oldest Mayan mural ever discovered. Saturno later said, “In Western terms, it’s like knowing only modern art and then stumbling on a Michelangelo or a Leonardo.”
He immediately hired guards to protect the site. The looter’s tunnel had undercut the mural’s foundation and left a painted wall suspended in midair, so he moved in sand bags and polyester mesh, and installed vertical supports.
Closer examination showed that there were probably a number of large and intact mural panels buried in dirt. Immediately there were cries to excavate, but Saturno held off. A less farsighted archaeologist might have gone straight for the heart and begun ticking away with a trowel on the spot. Instead, Saturno took two years to organize a project, securing grants and specialists. He went so far as to take out personal loans to cover costs. Although curiosity was killing him and many others, he moved not even a fingernail of rock out of the way. Even more than he ached for the dazzle of immediate discovery, he wanted the place preserved for full understanding.
Once he announced that he was going to start excavation, the money came through. Saturno called these the “gravy days.” Detail crews rebordered fragile mural edges with lime plaster to prevent further decay. Fallen fragments were reattached, while the remains of destroyed murals—tens of thousands of pieces broken by Mayans themselves in ancient construction episodes—were carried outside and temporarily glued back together in a lab.
What the team unearthed was astonishing: an elegant and beautifully stylized depiction of a creation ceremony from around 200 BC. Starting on the west wall, four deities stand in fabulous headdresses, each god shown bleeding profusely from his own sacrificial wounds as he makes offerings to the cardinal directions: first a dead fish on a burning pyre, then a deer cut open and bleeding from the mouth, followed by a turkey in a similar state of butchery, and finally a sacrifice of fragrant blossoms set ablaze. Continuing down the panel, one sees a corn god establishing the center of the universe upon which all circumstance must turn, and the last scene, a Mayan king ascending to godhood with name, title, and exact date written clearly in glyphs as if stamped with a block. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. It was a glimpse into the birth of Mayan cosmology.
Saturno decided that the murals needed to be left in place, a markedly different approach from that taken at Awat’ovi sixty-five years earlier, when murals were stripped from Arizona using burlap and resin. He told me, “Not only was it serendipitous the way I found them, but it was serendipitous they were found by me.”
Indeed, Saturno did everything he could to secure the murals, and after that, he did nothing. He had been schooled in the careful ethics of Barbara and William Fash, who worked the Mayan site of Copán in Honduras, where any major artifacts or pieces of architecture pulled out were replaced by molded replicas so there would at least be no blank spots. Conservation, restoration, and reconstruction by archaeologists has become much more commonplace in Central America. It’s as if they’re responding to the mass destruction that has happened there, either at the hands of looters or earlier archaeologists, or by the jungle. Scientists are beginning to talk about “a holistic approach.”
Saturno scoffed at the notion of moving the murals to a secure location elsewhere, as has been done in the past. “If you can find me a better spot,” he said, “fine, but there isn’t a better spot, a place climate-controlled with an eternal power source not affected by earthquakes. The oldest building in the United States that is still standing is about three hundred fifty years old, and I’m not sold on that kind of longevity. This temple has been here for two thousand years. Beat that.”
“What happens to it next?” I asked.
“Hopefully nothing happens next,” he said. “Ideally the murals would stay where they are and as they are. But actually achieving nothing means a lot of work, surprising amounts of work.”
Keeping something where it is is a much more active process than simply taking. Guards have to be posted on-site and environmental fluctuations monitored. New support walls must be built, which Saturno plans to do by quarrying limestone from where the Mayans themselves quarried it, using only local lime plaster so that no foreign materials are introduced. His approach involves connectivity rather than removal and isolation. What Saturno has accomplished is a delicate feat, scientific inquiry balanced on the value of a thing in its place.
The jungle devours ruins. You can walk through a fallen city with hundred-foot temples without ever knowing. Everything here crawls. The canopy buzzes, hums, and drips. Plants attack each other; parasites and chemical invaders suck nitrogen from each other’s roots and trunks. Bromeliads hang like sea creatures. This is no museum, no collector’s living room. It is the very place where archaeology happened, Mayan civilization at its height.
I stumbled through the root-bridled entropy of the Petén a mere hour from the nearest dirt road, my boots snared in fallen vines, a satchel over my shoulder with a bit of lunch and water. It seemed as if I’d fallen into an abyss. I was traveling through a lowland bajo in the eastern part of the country, looking for the remains of an unexcavated Mayan settlement. I was not trying for anything near Saturno’s find; I
just wanted to see something of the old Maya still in place. If there was any sort of trail, I was unaware of it. A machete would have been handy—though cumbersome and tiring to swing—for cutting the sloppy shape of my desire through plants. Likely I’d just have hurt myself.
I had been visiting excavated sites in the area, bright limestone temples and pyramids shaved like poodles of their vegetation, but I wanted to know what they looked like in their natural state of decay. There were outlying compounds of structures around here, but I could not find a damn thing but vines and strangled trunks, no horizon to be seen. Sunlight penetrated in slivers.
Lurching this way and that, my limbs snarled, I looked up and suddenly there it was: a shaggy temple place before me, topping out just beneath the canopy, trees grown from its head like a crown. I had to peer at it for a moment to make sure it really was what I thought. This was not a soaring pyramid like those you might see at the nearby Mayan city of Tikál, nor was it miraculously exposed. It was a steep, lonely protuberance blanketed in jungle.
When I drew closer I saw faint pits, shallow holes put down by looters decades ago. The perimeter of this place was watched over by armed guards. No major looting has hit the immediate area in a while. In the rest of the Petén, however, tomb raiders have excavated tunnels into every temple. Grotesque mouths belch spoil piles bright white from lime plaster dug out of building interiors. One archaeologist working in the area told me that pretty much everything in the Petén has been looted.
Looking at the relatively minimal damage to the temple before me, I realized it was possible that there was still an intact tomb inside.
There are two very different ways of seeing what is buried inside a temple. One involves recording the bounce-back rate of subatomic particles, which can make an increasingly detailed internal map (the technique has been employed to study the interior of a pre-Aztec pyramid in the Valley of Mexico without disturbing the site). The other is the old-fashioned way: digging your way in, swinging metal tools over your shoulder.