Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  There is no way to gauge the full psychological toll the fire had on both men, but it must have been profound. The rotunda in ruins, their shared vision of a museum vaporized, they could only hurl themselves into work on the book, and at a frenzied pace that might help blunt the loss. As devastated as Catherwood was financially and no doubt emotionally, a pall descended over the ever-resilient Stephens that was to linger and become more evident as time went on. With the dream of his museum gone, some of the curiosity, restlessness, and ambition that had driven him over the last decade began to leave him as well.

  In late August he took a break from the book and traveled to Massachusetts to consult with William Prescott, who was just finishing the monumental work for which he would become famous: The History of the Conquest of Mexico. Prescott at the time was staying at his summer home on the Nahant peninsula north of Boston and was eager to hear firsthand about Stephens’s discoveries in the Yucatán.5 Both men were intensely interested in the origins of the pre-Conquest civilizations in Mexico and Central America. They approached the subject from different perspectives but found common ground. Fieldwork was Stephens’s specialty, while Prescott was a scholar who pored over Spanish chronicles, unpublished documents, letters, and manuscripts, many of which were being extracted for the first time from the archives in Spain. He rarely traveled beyond the Boston area and had never visited Mexico. Nearly blind, he depended instead on archival researchers and individuals like Stephens and other correspondents to serve as his eyes and ears. Stephens, meanwhile, relied heavily on Prescott for background information before and after his journeys, often borrowing Spanish histories and chronicles from him.6 They had much to discuss. From all the disparate evidence the two men had gathered, they had come to the same conclusion, the one that flatly contradicted the prevailing theories of the time: the old ruined cities were not the work of people from outside America, from the Old World or Asia, but were wholly indigenous in their origin. Stephens’s latest finding in the forests of Yucatán only confirmed it for both men.

  On his way back to New York, Stephens stopped in Boston for several days to visit with Dr. Cabot and his parents. Cabot’s mother later wrote to her younger son that Stephens was quite anxious to get back to New York to work on his book, but it had been “delayed by fevers.” Suffered by whom—could Catherwood have had another recurrence on top of everything else?—she did not say.7

  Despite the shock of the fire and a possible return of fevers, Stephens and Catherwood worked diligently through the fall and winter, and by the end of February 1843, only eight months after their return, the two-volume work—Incidents of Travel in Yucatán—was ready for the printers.8 At 937 pages, it was slightly longer than their first Central America book and it included a greater number of engravings, 120 in all. The increase was due in part to the addition of the daguerreotypes but also to the greater number of ruined sites—an extraordinary forty-four—that they had explored. And unlike the first book, Catherwood added extra landscapes and scenes unrelated to the ruins, including his dramatic image of the ladder descending into Bolonchen cave.9

  The book also differed from the first in the amount of material Stephens added as appendices—forty-seven pages of fine print—some of which would contribute significantly to future Maya scholarship.10 They include statistics on the Yucatán, a short architectural treatise by Catherwood, and an ornithological memorandum by Cabot.11 But the most important addition came from Pío Pérez, the only Yucatecan Stephens met who had made a scholarly study of the Maya. This material included the first manuscript ever published that attempted to outline the historical epochs on the peninsula stretching from A.D. 144 to the Spanish Conquest, and an essay by Pérez describing Maya terminology, their numbering system, and the complicated cycles of their calendars.12 These additions indicate the seriousness with which Stephens sought to address the subject of Maya history.

  Yet Stephens had been clear from the beginning that he was not interested in writing a lengthy, scholarly tract on the origins and culture of the Maya. He could never be confined that long to his desk. As his biographer Victor von Hagen observed: “He was no dry-as-dust scholar.”13 He was by nature a storyteller and what he craved was material—“incidents,” action, evidence, fieldwork—surmounting all obstacles, relaying what he found and drawing the most concise and careful conclusions he could from those discoveries. And what he found in Yucatán surprised him: a vast range of ruins scattered across the peninsula, in great variety but also with an underlying unity in art, writing, and architecture—and the abject state of the contemporary Yucatec Indians. The evidence was now overwhelming, he wrote, and it reinforced what he had only guessed at in his first book: that a highly evolved indigenous civilization had existed across Central America and the Yucatán, well before the arrival of the Spanish. And based on the physical evidence, particularly at Uxmal and Tuloom, along with his reading of Spanish chronicles, those societies appear to have existed right up to the period of the conquest.

  Then he posed the question: why conclude such a civilization had been created by the ancestors of the current Indians and not by some race now gone or by colonists from the Old World? He repeated the observations made in his first book that there was nothing about these ruins that resembled those of the Old World. Then, ever the lawyer, he took on the persistent counterargument, which he summarized as follows: “A people possessing the power, art, and skill to erect such cities, never could have fallen so low as the miserable Indians who now linger about their ruins.” Stephens pointed out, however, that it was entirely possible given the brutality and ruthlessness of the Spaniards in their subjugation of the Indians after the conquest. And with an ingenious twist, he noted that the dramatic transformation of the Indians was no less visible in their Spanish conquerors:

  The Indians who inhabit that country now are not more changed than their Spanish masters. We know that at the time of the conquest they were at least proud, fierce, and warlike, and poured out their blood like water to save their inheritance from the grasp of strangers. Crushed, humbled, and bowed down as they are now by generations of bitter servitude, even yet they are not more changed than the descendants of those terrible Spaniards who invaded and conquered their country. In both, all traces of the daring and warlike character of their ancestors are entirely gone. The change is radical . . . and in contemplating this change in the Indian, the loss of mere mechanical skill and art seems comparatively nothing; in fact, these perish of themselves, when, as in the case of the Indians, the school for their exercise is entirely broken up.

  As for how long the stone cities existed and from whence their builders and occupants had come, Stephens was much more circumspect. It was possible the structures and monuments had been built long before the conquistadors arrived, he wrote, but he seriously doubted that the period amounted to the several thousand years posited by Waldeck, who based his estimate at least partially on the number of concentric rings in trees he found growing on the ruins. Even Stephens’s earlier explorations of Copán and Palenque, with their seemingly greater antiquity, never led him to suspect they had been abandoned many centuries before the Spanish arrived. The better-preserved condition of Uxmal, Tuloom, and the other Yucatec ruins, as well as the Spanish chroniclers’ descriptions of teeming populations and towering temples, combined to convince him the civilization was more recent.

  But if Stephens would turn out to be wrong with his more modern dating of the Maya ruins, it was because he was unable to grasp that the cities he (and the Spanish) found in Yucatán were the last vestiges of that civilization. Modern archaeologists would eventually place the best preserved of the Yucatec ruins in what they call the Terminal and Post-Classic periods, a time long after Classic-period cities like Copán, Palenque, and other southern lowlands sites had collapsed and were abandoned. Stephens, for all his observant wanderings among the ruins, had barely cracked the mystery of the Maya.

  Other historical evidence added to the confusion. There were
sophisticated Indians in Mexico, called the Toltecs, who lived hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spaniards, Prescott told Stephens. He explained that they built the city of Tula near present-day Mexico City sometime around the end of the eighth century. Picking up Prescott’s thread, Stephens wrote that when their empire dissolved in the tenth or eleventh century, the Toltecs may have dispersed to the south and become the “originators of that peculiar style of architecture found in Guatemala and Yucatán.”14 But this meant the Maya cities and monuments would have been no more than four to five hundred years old when the Spanish arrived. Stephens had his doubts:

  It gives them much less antiquity than that claimed by the Maya manuscript [from Pío Pérez], and, in fact much less than I should ascribe to them myself. In identifying them as the works of the ancestors of the present Indians, the cloud which hung over their origin is not removed; the time when and the circumstances under which they were built, the rise, progress, and full development of the power, art, and skill required for their construction, are all mysteries which will not easily be unraveled. They rise like skeletons from the grave, wrapped in their burial shrouds; claiming no affinity with the works of any known people, but a distinct, independent, and separate existence.

  Based on the evidence he had found, Stephens sensed but still could not scientifically grasp the separate, full-fledged Maya civilization that future archaeologists would eventually flesh out in great detail. He understood he had uncovered a “lost” civilization, but he did not have the archaeological methodology (including meticulous excavation) to determine its long history or distinguish it from the later Indian societies to the north in Mexico. Listening to Pío Pérez, he felt he had stumbled onto something unique, a civilization older and more sophisticated, separate and distinct. Time would prove him right. Yet even if he was limited in his dating and full comprehension of the ruined cities he explored, his discovery of them and his carefully reasoned conclusion that they were indigenous in origin would mark him as the acknowledged progenitor of American archaeology.

  The Maya

  Copán, the first ruins explored by Stephens and Catherwood, lay at the edge of the Maya civilization.1 To its east and south lived simple hunter-farmers, some in scattered tribal settlements of which little is now known. To its northwest, however, teemed dozens of Maya cities in the tropical lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula. Though it was in effect the Maya’s far eastern outpost, Copán had nothing of a frontier town about it. By the early eighth century A.D., it was a glorious exemplar of the Maya civilization. It had magnificent stelae, pyramids, temples and palaces, exquisite art and hieroglyphics. Occupying a fertile valley in a temperate zone, Copán had flourished through three hundred years of dynastic rule under a dozen god-kings. It was stunningly beautiful—and powerful.

  On December 29, 724, one of its greatest kings, known as 18 Rabbit, installed a young lord named Cauac Sky as king of a port city twenty-five miles north on the Motagua River. Though small, the city of Quiriguá was, because of its location, vital to Copán’s trade not only because of the lucrative jade route along the river down to the Gulf of Honduras but also as a link with the city-states in the Maya heartland. For many decades Quiriguá had been under Copán’s control as a client state. Then, less than fourteen years after his investiture, on April 23, 738, Cauac Sky captured 18 Rabbit in a battle. Six days later the great king of Copán was beheaded by his former vassal.

  The defeat was staggering. As the thirteenth ruler of Copán’s long dynasty, 18 Rabbit (known also as Waxaklajuun Ub’aah K’awill) is credited by Mayanist scholars with taking his city to its greatest heights. During his forty-three-year reign he added more to Copán’s art and architecture than any previous king. He built a temple called Esmeralda, which covered the tomb of his immediate predecessor, and another that rose like a mythic mountain out of the city’s east court. He directed the reconstruction of one of the Copán’s largest pyramids and created the original version of the city’s now-famous hieroglyphic staircase. And after remodeling Copán’s ritual ball court several times, he ordered up an entirely new one, flanked by buildings covered with multicolored sculptures of the great macaw bird deity.

  His greatest achievement, however, was a program of sculptural art unmatched in Maya history. During his reign, he ordered seven monumental stelae erected in the city’s Great Plaza, each sculpted by Maya artists at the zenith of their imaginative genius. All of the towering stone portraits—the same monuments that had baffled Catherwood when he first tried get them down on paper—represent 18 Rabbit in different divine manifestations, covered in mythic and cosmic symbolism. The hieroglyphs carved into each contain dynastic history and dedication dates timed to celestial events and important calendar cycles. The imagery evokes patron gods, bloodletting rituals, and the Maya creation story of rebirth from the otherworld. The works are masterpieces of three-dimensional realization, deeply carved with flowers, flint blades of war, ears of corn, double-headed serpents, seashells, crocodiles, macaws, cosmic turtles, the Jaguar God, fish monsters, and other supernatural symbols. On each, 18 Rabbit holds the royal scepter of divine power and wears a headdress so extravagant and towering it takes up nearly the top third of some of the massive blocks of stone.2

  The great king’s capture and beheading was deeply demoralizing for the city of Copán. Over the next seventeen years, not another monument was erected or construction project completed. And while 18 Rabbit was later followed by four more Copán kings and a short period of revitalization, a partially completed royal sculpture dated 822 marked Copán’s end. “For a city with such a passion for sculpture,” observed scholars Martin Simon and Nikolai Grube, “it is poignant and fitting that this very moment of termination should be captured in stone. The valley had seen the last of its kings.”3

  Stela representing the king 18 Rabbit at Copán. (Catherwood)

  Long before its final king, however, and even by the time of 18 Rabbit’s inglorious end, Copán had already started its decline. At its peak, the city and surrounding valley maintained a population of nearly twenty thousand—its city center was the most densely populated of all Maya kingdoms—and it was far exceeding the area’s agricultural carrying capacity. So much deforestation had occurred that even the valley’s upper slopes had been cleared of trees and the resulting erosion was seriously damaging its remaining growing fields. By the middle of the eighth century, malnutrition and disease had become more and more common. With the end of the royal dynasty in 822, the city was a shell, empty of all but a fraction of its former population. Yet Copán was not unique. Its demise was emblematic of what was occurring across the Maya heartland. Incessant wars, ecological damage, overpopulation, and finally drought were strangling the classic Maya civilization to death.

  For all of Stephens’s eloquently argued conclusions about the builders of the ruined cities that he and Catherwood had found, it was Catherwood who provided the most penetrating insight into the ancient civilization that had created them. Writing in a large folio of illustrations he published after their Yucatán book, he reiterated the belief, which he shared with Stephens and Prescott, that the builders of the lost cities were the ancestors of contemporary Indians. But he went further, decoding the ruins through the eyes of an architect and engineer:

  It is obvious that in the construction of these stupendous works, at a period when the mechanical resources of facilitating labour were imperfectly known, immense numbers of artisans must have been employed . . . that there must have been a supreme, and probably despotic power, with authority sufficient to wield and direct the exertions of a subordinate population to purposes subservient to the display of civil or religious pomp and splendour,—that, for the sustenance of the masses of people thus brought into contact, a certain progress must have been attained in the agricultural and economic sciences,—that many experiments must have failed, and many attempts made, before the degree of proficiency in building, sculpture, and painting, which we now see, was reached,—a
nd that, in a country where only the rudest means of transmitting knowledge from one generation to another was employed, it is probable the traditionary facts acquired by experience would be preserved by a sacred caste or tribe of priests, by whom, and for whose use, many of the buildings were undoubtedly erected.

  The next 170 years of discovery, excavation, and research would prove each of Catherwood’s observations prophetically on point. The prerequisites he outlined were known about ancient Old World civilizations, most notably Egypt’s, which he and Stephens had studied firsthand in the rich agricultural lands bordering the Nile. What would turn out most striking, however, about the civilization created by the Maya was how improbable it was that it had emerged at all—rising on thin topsoils in dimly lit rain forests—and that it had reached the heights of refinement that it did.

  For example, as early civilizations go, the Maya had few of the material and technological advantages found in Old World civilizations. First, unlike those societies, the Maya had no large domesticated animals and thus lacked not only the dietary protein they provided but the muscle power they brought to plowing, grinding, and transport. Second, archaeologists have found no evidence the Maya ever developed and used one of the most basic forms of technology: the wheel. Though they understood the concept (remains of wheeled toys have been found), they never employed pulleys or potter’s wheels, carts and wagons, even though they built long, flat causeways on which they could easily have rolled. And finally, the Maya never developed the use of metal except in rare instances for personal ornamentation. Their tools (and weapons) were limited to bone, wood, sharp volcanic glass like obsidian, and hard rock like chert and flint.4Nonetheless, the Maya created a civilization of material and cultural sophistication at least the equal of those found in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and early Greece. How did they do it? How, asked scholars and archaeologists, could they have raised great city-states in the midst of the jungle and filled them with grand monumental architecture and art without the basic tools available to ancient Old World cultures?