MAYA SCHOLARS RACE AGAINST THIEVES TO THWART THE LOOTING OF A LOST CIVILIZATION

Xpujil Pyramid Site on Pu'uc Route (Yucatan Magazine)

PART ONE

"Tombs are robbed, temples are looted, and the past is destroyed, all to feed the international market for antiquities." Donna Yates, Archeologist and Lecturer in Antiquities Theft and Art Crime, Associate Professor at Maastricht University, Netherlands

In 1997 we drove across Mexico in our Ford Focus wagon, loaded to the nines with our belongings and our cat, heading towards a new life on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Our hearts quickened after passing through Escarcega. At the end of that lonely 170-mile stretch of road, we'd cross from the state of Campeche into Quintana Roo. Then we'd certainly be homeward bound. 

The road narrowed as Escarcega was left behind in our rearview mirror. I settled in for the long drive ahead. We decided when we got to a stretch of little known pyramids at the half-way point we'd take a break, make a sandwich, and let Max, then just a kitten, walk around. I'd recently read about this quartet of pyramids in NatGeo—Kohunlich, Becan, Chicanna, and Xpujil—near the great ceremonial center Calakmul. Though these sites didn't have the star power of Chichen Itza or Tulum, Kohunlich, known for its Temple of the Masks, gained fame in 1971 when looters tried to sell one of its huge eight foot stucco masks to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

We made good time, virtually seeing no other cars on the road. Around 4 p.m. we passed Chicanna. Soon after, I spotted the towers of Xpujil from the road. "Can we stop?" I asked Paul. 

He nodded and we pulled down a sascab lane a good ways past an open wire gate into a rough parking area. I extricated myself from the car while Paul saw to Max. I stretched, then went to the back end of the car to find the cooler. I'd brought bread, mayonnaise and a couple cans of tuna. A quick sandwich would be welcome as we'd had only fruit and juice for a late breakfast around 11, not wanting to take time to stop. I pulled out a plastic container for mixing, located the can opener, mayo and bread, and began assembling a rather unglamorous tuna sandwich. As I finished up spreading the lumpy fish onto Bimbo wheat bread, I called to Paul. 

He'd put Max back inside the car. We leaned against the door, ready for our afternoon snack. After the sandwich I told him I wanted to have a quick look around the site. Just as I bit into the tuna fish, a white, older model International with a large tarp-covered trailer pulled into the parking area, leaving dust in its wake. Two men sat inside; an older man was driving. The vehicle was about 100 feet away when the guy riding shotgun jumped out. He was young and lanky, nineteen or so, and moved fast across the parking lot. The truck had Canadian plates and the driver kept the engine idling. 

"Weird," I said to Paul. "I wonder what they're up to. Why'd just one guy get out and why isn't the driver turning off the engine?"

"It is weird." 

We both watched the young man dart through the fence and run along the path leading to the pyramid site. 

With the truck still idling, we viewed the scene warily. "I don't feel good about this."

"Me neither. What are they doing?" Paul began to push things into the way-back. I followed his lead and closed the cooler, holding my sandwich in one hand. I tossed the can opener and bag of bread into the wayback.

"Let's get out of here. Something isn't right. Maybe they're scouting the ruins for artifacts. What's the trailer for?" I asked.

"Not good," Paul agreed. "And what's with the tarp? The cat's inside? Then let's go."

The truck had parked at just the right angle so we couldn't see the driver, as if it was planned that way. If these guys were grave looters, we didn't want to be around when INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History) discovered them, or worse, the federales. 

Paul started the car and headed towards the long driveway that led out to the highway. The white International was still idling when I turned around and gave it one last look.

"Grave robbers? Were they grave robbers? Or looters?"

"We don't want to know," Paul said as we eased onto the uneven asphalt, amped up the gas, and headed towards Chetumal.

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NOT JUST WHITE COLLAR CRIME

Antiquity looters come in many guises as the above tale tells—unassuming tourist types, locals, businessmen looking to make a buck, collectors.

And as the international appetite for Maya culture continues to grow, so does the hunger for illegal artifacts. Researchers say it's a race against time and increasingly tenacious looters.

One of the Remaining Masks at Kohunlich

Art theft is big business. Ask any dealer of antiquities. It's a 'trade' worth billions, and it's not going away any time soon. As long as there's poverty in undeveloped countries where ancient civilizations once stood, you can bank on it. Some art dealers call it the world's second oldest profession. Any country in civil war or conflict is ripe for antiquities looting, says Tess Davis, archeologist from Boston University and legal expert. When conflict erupts in an archeological rich country, the world-wide art market is suddenly flooded with antiquities from that ravaged country. Artifact looting becomes a means of subsistence when homelands are war-torn and ravished, and it's practiced in a variety of environments, from Peru and the Andes Mountains to the Peten jungle and the Central Mexican highlands, for starters.

THE RISE OF NARCOTICS TRAFFICKING

"The public should be aware this is not just a white collar crime. Insurgents, terrorists are using the antiquities trade to fund their efforts. Unless we get it together soon, I fear there is going to be nothing left," Davis said in a lecture titled "Tomb Raiders and Terrorist Financing," for Boston University alumnae.

Of the organized trafficking groups involved in a diversified portfolio of illicit activities, most are dealing drugs as well as other commodities. The market prices antiquities can draw are too high for organizations dealing in contra-band to ignore. 

THE LOOTING OF THE PETEN

Palace of Palenque by Frederick Catherwood

Compared with well known ancient civilizations in Europe and Western Asia, archeological interest in the Maya culture came relatively late, partially because of the forbidding nature of the deep-jungle sites. The outside world was first exposed to Maya ruins through the writings and drawings of explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. Their early adventuring shone a light on the Maya. After their travel memoirs about the Maya and the Yucatan were published in 1843, many adventurers trekked on through, conducting rudimentary recordings of archeological sites with limited removal of Maya artifacts. The first actual excavations were not conducted until the 20th century.

THE BEGINNINGS

Art and antiquity, according to Archeologist Donna Yates in her thesis, "Displacement, Deforestation and Drugs: Antiquities Trafficking and Narcotics Economies of Guatemala," underwent a huge upheaval in the first half of the 20th century. Aesthetic tastes in contemporary art shifted to modern looks and forms and an interest was taken in tribal art. Defined against a classic Western model, these disparate cultural traditions included ancient and modern cultural objects originating from Africa, parts of Asia, and the Americas. The appeal, her thesis stated, was that they didn't conform to familiar Greek and Roman styles. And demand grew as connections from these objects were drawn publicly between them and famous artists of the day such as Picasso, Kahlo, Giacometti, and Rivera. Soon, powerful collectors began to source them from their countries of origin for private collections.

The Maya on Display at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

At the same time, 1957, Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Primitive Art in New York. This was a watershed for the collection of Maya and other "primitive" cultural properties. The Maya were on the market.

MAYA DEBUT

Yates' thesis explained that endemic looting of nearly every known Maya site began around 1960. Collectors and museums, inspired by Rockefeller's acquisitions, were looking to fill the Maya gap in their collections and demanded the very best the Maya had to offer. This meant that even the large carved stone stelas that depicted the events of Maya lords and their recorded histories along with large architectural treasures from Maya temples were looted, trafficked, and sold. Size was not an issue.

Clemency Coggins is a professor of both Archeology and Art History at Boston University, and also holds a degree from Harvard University in Fine Arts. Decades ago she wrote,"In the last ten years there has been an incalculable increase in the number of monuments systematically stolen, mutilated, and illicitly exported from Guatemala and Mexico in order to feed the inter-national art market. Not since the 16th century has Latin American been so ruthlessly plundered."

RANSACKING RUINS

Guatemala Soldier Scouts Site of Xultun for Looters

Unfortunately this plundering tore the stelas, large concrete-like slabs that stood in front of pyramids to honor Maya kings and their empires' procla-mations, births, deaths and marriages, and they were ripped from where they stood. In order to understand any individual site, it's imperative for archeologists to know the provenance of stelas or pieces that have been looted. Without dates and locations it's impossible to place the art, the site, the structure, even the times and historical issues taking place when it was created. The Maya's very history was being torn apart, a story with no context, as various works of art floated throughout the world, moving to private collectors and museums across the globe. 

But looters cared not for the history of the ancient Maya. Their only concern was how to remove stela that could be 15 or 20 feet high, weighing several tons. Removal was their one and only mission and taking a power saw to the stela and cutting it vertically removed the face of it. This was then usually cut into quarters to make it easier to ship and the pieces could be sold off to separate investors. Sometimes the inscriptions along the sides were damaged by their mutilation.

This plundering set the archeology world back several decades in trying to break the Maya hieroglyphic code.

BANDS OF LOOTERS

Map of Yucatan and Guatemala (By NatGeo)

A landmark paper by Clemency Coggins that is often credited with exposing the gravity of the looting situation characterizes the 1960s as a time when bands of looters moved freely through the Maya region, particularly in the sparsely populated and heavily jungled regions of Guatemala's Peten, emphasizing the mutilation of large stone monuments with power tools. Countless Maya sites (Ixtonton and La Corona) were looted before they were even located by archeologists. "It was a terrible time," she wrote.

THE WHY BEHIND THE CRIME

She explained that the 1960s looting of the Peten is tied to two jungle economies: the trade in rare hardwoods and tapping gum trees for chicle. In both instances, she wrote, men (usually) at the bottom of the supply chain moved through vast tracts of wilderness searching for different tree types. In doing so, they encountered recorded but poorly protected remote sites as well as Maya cities yet unknown to archeologists.

THE CHICLEROS

Early on in the 20th century, archeologists worked closely with these men, paying them for info about new sites and monuments. Chicleros, as chicle hunters are known, are credited with locating many important sites in the Peten—Uaxactun, Xultun and even Calakmul, the famous Heritage Site. But when chicle prices bottomed out in the 1970s, financial gains for looting and trafficking in antiquities grew. Chicleros could expect higher rewards by reporting an unknown site to a trafficker rather than to an archeologist. And they could even be employed in the demolition, for added revenue.

Said one archeologist as he peered at the looting damage of a Xultun temple literally cut through the middle, "The humans are more poisonous than the snakes."

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Part Two will delve into a number of pyramid sites plundered, the lack of security at even famous sites, and what can be done to address the trafficking of antiquities. Stay tuned.

If you enjoyed this post, check out  Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.