6.See http://pages.ucsd.edu/~gbraswel/docs/Braswell%20CV_Peer%20Reviewed%20Chapters%20&%20Articles/Braswell%202003f.pdf.
7.The ten Lost Tribes of Israel were originally located in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and were exiled during the Assyrians’ invasion of the Kingdom in 722 B.C. Their disappearance ever since has prompted centuries of speculation concerning where they went.
8.M. M. Noah, Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel: Delivered before the Mercantile Library Association, Clinton Hall (New York: J. Van Norden, 1837)0, pp. 21–29. Noah wrote: “Mexico and Central America abound in curiosities, exemplifying the fact of the Asiatic origin of the inhabitants, and it is not many years ago, that the ruins of a whole city, with a wall nearly seven miles in circumference, with castles, palaces, and temples, evidently of Hebrew or Phoenician architecture, was found on the river Palenque. The ruins of this city near Guatemala, in Central America, are described by Del Río in 1782, [and] when taken in conjunction with the extraordinary, I may say, wonderful antiquities spread over the entire surface of that country, awaken recollections in the specimens of architecture, which carry us back to early pages of history, and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt we who imagined ourselves to be the natives of a new world, but recently discovered, inhabit a continent which rivaled the splendor of Egypt and Syria, and was peopled by a powerful and highly cultivated nation from the old world.”
9.E. K. Kingsborough, A. Aglio, et al., Antiquities of Mexico: Comprising fac-similes of ancient Mexican paintings and hieroglyphics, preserved in the royal libraries of Paris, Berlin and Dresden, in the Imperial library of Vienna, in the Vatican library, in the Borgian museum at Rome, in the library of the Institute at Bologna, and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, together with the monuments of New Spain by M. Dupaix, with their respective scales of measurement and accompanying descriptions (London, 1831). Kingsborough included in his volumes several essays by scholars who speculated on the origins of New World natives, their cities, and ancient civilization. They included: “Comparison of the Ancient Monuments of Mexico with Those of Egypt, India, and the Rest of the Ancient World,” by Alexandre Lenoir, and “Discourse on Two Questions Submitted to the Historical Congress of Europe, the Value of Documents Relating to the History of America, and to Decide Whether There Is Any Link Between the Languages of the Various American Tribes and those of Africa and India,” by Charles Farcy.
10.W. Robertson, The History of America (London, 1803). Most of Robertson’s discussion on the state of Native American Indians can be found in vol. 2, Book IV, pp. 13–32.
11.W. G. Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500–1821 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), pp. 61–64. Bancroft, History of Central America, also has a vivid account of Gonzalo de Alvarado’s campaign against the Mam Indians (pp. 695–704).
12.In fact, wrote Stephens, three Belgians, who reportedly were sent not long before by their government on a scientific expedition to Palenque, had applied for permission to visit the ruins and were turned down.
13.Kingsborough, Aglio, et al., Antiquities of Mexico. See Dupaix’s report.
14.S. Martin and N. Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 177–89.
15.Ibid.
16.Here Stephens quotes Dupaix in translation in Incidents of Travel in Central America, pp. 262–63.
CHAPTER 13: PALENQUE
1.The ruins had been known to the local natives for decades, maybe centuries, simply as “las casas de piedra,” the houses of stone, without any history attached to them. The earliest discovery of Palenque by Europeans is still a mystery. Writing in his history of Guatemala, published in two volumes, 1808–18, Domingo Juarros described Palenque: “This metropolis . . . remained unknown until the middle of the eighteenth century, when some Spaniards having penetrated the dreary solitude, found themselves, to their great astonishment within sight of the remains of what once had been a superb city, of six leagues in circumference; the solidity of its edifices, the stateliness of its palaces, and the magnificence of its public works, were not surpassed in importance by its vast extent; temples, altars, deities, sculptures and monumental stones, bear testimony to its great antiquity.” See D. Juarros and J. Bailey, A Statistical and Commercial History of the Kingdom of Guatemala, in Spanish America containing important particulars relative to its productions, manufactures, customs, &c. &c. &c. (London: J. Hearne, 1823), pp. 18–19. Juarros does not name the Spaniards but there were oral reports that a parish priest named Antonio de Solis, from nearby Tumbala and Santa Domingo del Palenque, had visited the ruins of Palenque as early as 1746. One of his relatives, Ramon de Ordonez y Aguiar, heard a family account of the visit and became the prime instigator of future government surveys of the site. Although Ordonez y Aguiar, a priest living in Ciudad Real (present-day San Cristobal de las Casas), apparently never visited the site himself, he succeeded in prompting two local officials from Ciudad Real, Fernando Gomez de Andrade and Esteban Gutierrez, to visit the ruins in 1773. Ordonez y Aguiar drafted a “memoria” on what was found and alerted the authorities in Guatemala City about the discovery. But it took another eleven years before José Estacheria, the president of the Audiencia of Guatemala, ordered José Antonio Calderón, the mayor of Santo Domingo, the hamlet closest to the site, to investigate in 1784. A full discussion of the involvement and actions of Ramon Ordonez y Aguiar and José Estacheria, as well as the reaction of the royal courts in Guatemala and Spain to the discovery is outlined in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s excellent How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 321–46.
2.P. Cabello Carro, Política investigadora de la época de Carlos III en el área Maya: descubrimiento de Palenque y primeras excavaciones de carácter científico: según documentación de Calderón, Bernasconi, Del Río y otros (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1992). This work provides copies of the correspondence and other documents concerning Palenque, including the reports of Bernasconi and Calderón that passed between Guatemala and the Royal Court in Spain.
3.There appears to be no direct orders from King Carlos. There are, however, documents located in Spain and the British Museum indicating that the royal historiographer of Spanish America, Juan Bautista Muñoz, corresponded from Spain with the president of the Royal Audiencia in Guatemala, José Estacheria, about the several expeditions to Palenque. See Cabello Carro, Política investigadora de la época de Carlos III en el área Maya. In dispatching the expeditions the two men drafted a list of questions that they wanted answered, such as the scope of the ruins, their age, who were the founders, and the reason for its abandonment.
4.E. C. Danien, R. J. Sharer, et al., New Theories on the Ancient Maya (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1992). Ignacio Almendáriz has also been identified by the name of Ricardo Almendáriz (p. 5).
5.There is some speculation that Del Río, like the original conquistadors, was looking for gold and other treasures.
6.R. Almendáriz, A. d. Río, et al., Coleccion de estampas copiadas de las figuras originales, que de medio y baxo relieve, se manifiestan, en estucos y piedras, en varios edificios de la poblacion antigua nuevamente descubierta en las immediaciones del pueblo del Palenque en la Provincia de Ciudad Real de Chiapa, una de las del Reyno de Guatemala en la American Septentrional (1787).
7.A. d. Río and P. F. Cabrera, Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City: Discovered Near Palenque, in the Kingdom of Guatemala or, A critical investigation and research into the history of the Americans (London, 1822), p. 19.
8.Evans, Romancing the Maya, pp. 23–32.
9.Domingo Juarros published a history of the Kingdom of Guatemala in 1808 in which he briefly described Palenque: “The hieroglyphics, symbols, and emblems, which have been discovered in the temples
, bear so strong a resemblance to those of the Egyptian as to encourage the supposition that a colony of that nation may have founded the city of Palenque, or Culhuacan. The same opinion may be formed respecting that of Tulhá, the ruins of which are still to be seen near the village of Ocosingo in the same district [where Toniná is located].” Juarros appears to have seen a copy or summary of Dupaix’s report, and possibly Del Río’s as well. His account of Palenque takes up less that a page of his 520-page book, which was originally published in Spanish in 1808. The Palenque reference drew little to no attention. An English translation was published in 1823 in London. Juarros and Bailey, A Statistical and Commercial History of the Kingdom of Guatemala, pp. 18–19. Several years after Dupaix’s expedition, while his report still lay in a drawer in Mexico City, Alexander von Humboldt began publication in Paris of his monumental thirty-volume work covering his scientific journey through Spanish America. While in Mexico, Humboldt heard of the ruins at Palenque but never traveled to site. On his return to Europe in 1804 he learned from a German antiquary of the so-called Dresden Codex, one of four surviving bark-paper “books” filled with vividly painted Mayan hieroglyphs that had not been destroyed by the Spanish during the Conquest. In 1810, he published View of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous People of America, and reproduced five pages of hieroglyphs from the codex, as well as an image of one of the stucco figures from Palenque, apparently a copy of one of Almendáriz’s 1787 drawings. It was the world’s first look at Mayan hieroglyphs and a figure from Palenque. However, Humboldt did not grasp what it was that he was publishing. He mistakenly identified the bas-relief image as coming from the Mexican state of Oaxaca. And he gave no source for the hieroglyphs, although they were later mistakenly assumed to be Aztec, from the central Mexican empire that existed centuries after the collapse of the classic Maya. Humboldt partly corrects the location of the bas-relief in a note at the end of the text and places its location not at Oaxaca but near Guatemala, “according to the accounts received from Mexico” (p. 254). A. v. Humbold and H. M. Williams, Researches, concerning the institutions & monuments of the ancient inhabitants of America: With descriptions & views of some of the most striking scenes in the Cordilleras! (London, 1814), pp.126–34, 144–47. Actually, the first publication of a Mayan hieroglyph came in a 1796 publication showing several glyphs employed as decorative elements in a model Mexican room created for a treatise on interior decoration by Joseph Friedrich, Baron von Racknitz. Danien, Sharer, et al., New Theories on the Ancient Maya, p. 3.
10.The publication drew little serious notice in England but greatly intrigued the French, who had become fascinated with antiquities ever since Bonaparte invaded Egypt at the turn of the century. Del Río’s account created a sensation among the French savants and in 1825 the prestigious Société de Géographie offered a gold medal worth 2,400 francs for the best eyewitness description of Palenque in particular and ancient ruins in Central America in general. The competition was on. In rapid succession, several interested parties showed up at Santo Domingo de Palenque and traveled out to the ruins. Among the most important was Lieutenant Colonel Juan Galindo. When he arrived in April 1831, he was military governor of nearby Petén and was still three years away from exploring Copán. He sent off reports on Palenque to the Société and to the Literary Gazette, a periodical of wide circulation in London. Because so little was known about Palenque in the general public, despite publication of Del Río’s account several years earlier, many assumed after reading Galindo’s report in the Gazette that he was the discoverer of the ruins. Galindo made no such claim. He did contend in a later article in the Gazette, however, that he had no knowledge of Del Río’s and Dupaix’s investigations at the time he arrived at Palenque. And though he never explained what had prompted him to visit the ruins, he clearly was aware of the Paris prize and clearly coveted it based on reports to the society of his later explorations, including Copán.
11.Kingsborough, Aglio, et al., Antiquities of Mexico.
12.P. N. Edison, “Colonial Prospecting in Independent Mexico: Abbé Baradère’s Antiquités Mexicaines,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 32 (2004): 195–215. Baradère, a French priest, discovered in Mexico City Dupaix’s accounts of his expeditions, along with Castañeda’s illustrations, and brought them back to Paris, where they became the centerpiece of a two-volume set of folios called Antiquités Mexicaines, which Baradère published in 1834–36.
13.Kingsborough, either as a student or later, had gained access to Mexican codices housed in Oxford’s famous Bodleian Library. These were Indian “picture books,” which like the Dresden Codex had survived the conquest. The manuscripts, which were created largely by the Aztecs, were illustrated not by hieroglyphs but pictographs—colorful symbols and figures sometimes described as narrative cartoons—painted on pounded bark paper, some more than twenty feet long and folded accordion-like to make them compact and portable. Despite Spanish destruction of large numbers of these manuscripts, some were carried back to Spain and had found their way to Oxford. Kingsborough’s encounter with these codices at Oxford changed his life and sent him on a quest to find and publish every document relating to pre-Columbian America that he could put his hands on. He hired an Italian artist, Augustino A. Aglio, to scour the libraries, private collections, and archives of Europe and carefully copy whatever materials relating to American antiquities he could find, including the hieroglyphic-rich Mayan codices. The result was a disorganized, richly illustrated, nine-volume set of oversize books—each volume weighing twenty to forty pounds—some with its illustrations hand colored and printed on vellum. Kingsborough initially planned for seven volumes but two additional volumes were added after his death, and a tenth was composed but never published. S. D. Whitmore, S. D. (2009). “Lord Kingsborough and his Contribution to Ancient Mesoamerican Scholarship: The Antiquities of Mexico,” PARI Journal 9, no. 4 (2009): 8–16. The price of these so-called elephant folios was prohibitively expensive and the print runs were small. Stephens later quoted the work at four hundred dollars per copy, an enormous sum at the time, and noted that he knew of only one set in the United States. It was this fantastic sum restricting the folios to a select few that motivated Stephens to insist his books be reasonably priced to ensure their widest possible distribution. The magnificent Antiquities of Mexico would eventually prove to be an invaluable resource for future scholars—a massive folio collection faithfully reproducing the few surviving manuscripts of pre-Columbian America, all drawn together in one place. More than a century would pass, however, before anyone would be able to unscramble their disordered sequences and begin to make any real sense of them. The first seven volumes of Antiquities of Mexico were published in 1830 and 1831 and the last two in 1848. Kingsborough did not live to see the final two volumes in print. He was thrown into debtor’s prison after he failed to pay the manufacturer of the high-quality, handmade paper on which Kingsborough insisted his books be printed. His father, the Earl of Kingston, died not long after his son, and if Kingsborough had lived he would have inherited his father’s title and estate and been able to pay off his debts.
14.W. E. Burton, The Gentleman’s Magazine (Philadelphia, 1837), pp. 537–38. This obituary states that Kingsborough was imprisoned because of a debt owed by his father and not due to any “extravagance” by Kingsborough himself.
15.I. Podgorny, “‘Silent and Alone’: How the Ruins of Palenque Were Taught to Speak the Language of Archeology,” Comparative Archaeologies, Part 2 (2011): 527–553. Podgorny offers an interesting discussion of this issue.
16.H. Baradère, G. Dupaix, et al., Antiquités mexicaines. Relation des trois expéditions du capitaine Dupaix, ordonnées en 1805, 1806, et 1807, pour la recherche des antiquités du pays, notamment celles de Mitla et de Palenque (Paris, 1834). Baradère had hoped with his two volumes to win the gold medal offered by the Société de Géographie but he failed for a lack of comprehensive on-site exploration. Baradère then left France in 1835 for Me
xico with ambitious plans to explore Palenque and other sites. He was last seen in Mexico in 1839, then disappeared. The speculations about the origins of this mysterious new civilization were not limited to classical and Middle Eastern cultures but included Asia as well—Japan, China, and India.
17.Not all commentators had succumbed to the speculation that Native American civilizations must have descended from those of the Old World. Even as early as 1823 there were voices who found such speculations presumptuous. In a 1823 review in the European Magazine of Del Río’s published account of Palenque the anonymous reviewer wrote: “Writers on such subjects have the absurd habit of selecting two distant nations, and tracing some resemblance in their ancient customs, manners, religions, and civil architecture, they draw the inference that one must have been descended from the other, forgetting that such resemblances merely prove the general analogy of our animal nature; and that man, under similar stages in the scale of civilization, will have analogous institutions, and analogous objects both of ornament and of convenience, although these may be all modified differently by various contingent circumstances.” How prophetic the writer turned out to be. European Magazine, and London Review 83 (May 1823): 454–56.
18.M. D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992), p. 80.
19.According to Waldeck’s account of his life, he was already off on an expedition to South Africa at the age of fourteen. When he returned, he took up the study of art in France with the influential neoclassic painter Jacques-Louis David. He said he joined Napoleon’s army as a soldier during the siege of Toulon and the Italian campaign, later following Bonaparte to Egypt. After the French defeat there, he crossed the desert deep into Africa. When he emerged, he claimed to be the only survivor of the five men who had started on the journey. Next came an expedition with pirates on the Indian Ocean. The following fifteen years of his life remain somewhat of a mystery, a period even he did not account for. He surfaced again in 1819, this time in South America, where, by his account, he joined in Lord Cochrane’s naval exploits on behalf of Chile’s struggle for independence from Spain. H. F. Cline, “The Apocryphal Early Career of J. F. Waldeck, Pioneer Americanist,” Acta Americana 5 (1947): 278–300.
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