TO BE IT YOU NEED TO SEE IT: WHAT IF INDIANA JONES HAD BEEN A WOMAN?

Merle Greene Robertson, Archeologist, Artist, Scholar

I've written about Maya women warriors and queens, women archeologists, anthropologists, epigraphers, authors and artists, all who've inspired the masses. After reading a Washington Post Op-Ed (A Woman to Reboot Indiana Jones? Yes, Please) by bio-archeologist Brenna Hassett about the new film starring Hollywood's favorite archeologist, she reminded us that overall, the study of archeology is dominated by men. Says Hassett, "This is what generations of girls—me included—saw when we saw archeology, and that's a problem. Because to be it, you need to see it."

So let's address women trailblazers in archeology who've carved a place for themselves and those who came after—the likes of Merle Greene Robertson and Linda Schele for starters. In her study of the Maya, Robertson lived as many adventures as the more famous Dr. Jones, traipsing through Central American jungles, crossing rivers, evading looters, working hours on end creating a multitude of life-size art rubbings in dam, cramped spaces. 

Linda Schele was a major scholar, author and trail blazer in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing and the study of ancient American civilization. Her death at age 55 in 1998 was a terrible loss to archeology and the study of the ancient Maya.

I'll begin with a previous 2022 post on Robertson, a larger than life presence in the world of Maya archeology and culture. Next will be Linda Schele and I'll then continue with women outliers in the global field of archeology and anthropology, several of whom I've already written about.

MERLE GREENE ROBERTSON

Merle Greene Robertson was an archeologist, artist, scholar and Maya explorer, but these are mere labels. Her entrance into the study, portrayal and exploration of the Maya culture was a catalyst for introducing the ancient Maya to the modern world through art, photography and exploration of numerous Maya sites. After I read Never in Fear, her autobiography, I realized she well could have been the glue that stuck it all together, the Gertrude Stein of the Maya world. Along with fellow scholars, she shaped an understanding of the ancient Maya civilization. She galvanized others, as an organizer, planner, dynamo and she knew everyone in the field from Eric S. Thompson and Alberto Ruz to Michael Coe, George Stuart and those who came after.

INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL IN YUCATÁN

Her enthusiasm and limitless energy in regard to Maya culture made her a fulcrum at the very moment the Maya re-emerged on the world stage after an unduly long absence. The first European and American explorers who stumbled onto these pyramid sites in the 1840s were floored by what they saw. A blockbuster bestseller in 1846, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, written by John Lloyd Stephens with drawings by Frederick Catherwood, ushered the reader into Maya sites at Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Copan for starters. The book literally blew the collective mind of the world. No one had a clue that intricate stepped pyramids lay hidden, covered by centuries of vines and forest, deep in Mexican and Central American jungles. The archeology world lay in the mid-east and far east. Before the release of Stephens' and Catherwood's book, the word "bestseller" had not yet been coined. 

Frederick Catherwood Maya Drawing

The world clambered for more knowledge of this mysterious civilization, hidden in southern rainforests of North America. Stephens' concise writing along with Catherwood's magnificent drawings assisted in shaping the identity of one of the world's great civilizations—the Maya. Previously unknown, the Maya had joined an iconic club alongside other great civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and China.

ROBERTSON AND HER WORK 

Robertson is nearly indefinable, so interwoven was the role she played with her Maya work over the past fifty years—from assisting in breaking the Maya hieroglyphic code, to co-founding the Palenque Roundtable talks, including trekking to and exploring scores of pyramid sites in Mexico and Central America. Not to mention the body of work she left behind after reviving an ancient archeological rubbing technique using Japanese ink on rice paper.

She created beautiful reproductions of countless stela, columns, tombs, sarcophagus lids, often produced in unfavorable circumstances after trekking through rugged terrain and dense forests crawling with snakes and buzzing with bothersome mosquitoes. Occasionally she and her crew had close calls with grave robbers. A life of leisure was never to be hers— she wouldn't have wanted it. Not unlike Frederick Catherwood's drawings, Robertson's sublime rubbings brought the Maya to the world visually.

ANCIENT TECHNIQUE

Finished Rubbing, Stela 16, Dos Pilas

Merle Greene Robertson was a legend in the world of Meso-American studies and Maya epigraphy. With over five thousand rubbings to her name, thanks to a generous heart, many landed in museums and universities throughout the world. She not only explored these faraway Maya sites but shared her knowledge with others. Often her expeditions included lucky students who accompanied her in what would no doubt become the experience of a lifetime.

NEVER IN FEAR 

With a career that spanned close to sixty years, it's impossible in a single post to condense all that Robertson accomplished. Turning page after page in her autobiography, Never in Fear, it seemed she lived her life in warp-speed.

Do we shape our lives, or are our lives shaped by our experiences and those we meet along the way? After reading Robertson's autobiography, apparently her future unfolded while growing up in the rural West where she developed an interest in Native American culture.

EARLY BEGINNINGS

Born in Montana, she lived on land flanked by the Rocky Mountains. Her interest in Native American culture was ignited when her father took her to visit Blackfoot Indian chiefs. She was also influenced by nearby Montana neighbor Charles M. Russell, one of the greatest western artists of all time, who encouraged her interest in art and drawing. Meeting Blackfoot Indians and watching Russell paint may have shaped her future at an early age. 

She attended university in California and graduated with a degree in art. Later she attended the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she studied watercolors, oils, photography, and mural painting for three summers before earning her MFA from University of Guanajuato.

Afterwards she went to Tikal, Guatemala, to work on a University of Pennsylvania project where she made architectural drawings of the Central Acropolis. This was her entry into recording monuments by means of rubbings. The technique is an ancient one, the earliest taken from Buddhist texts on wooden blocks in 8th century Japan, or from rubbings practiced in 2nd century China. Robertson brought it to an art form. Her perfection of the technique showed how rubbings could be a means of documentation of Maya relief sculpture.

SUMMER EXCURSIONS TO MAYA COUNTRY

Central Acropolis, Tikal (Afar)

Robertson's working life was as a teacher at Robert Louis Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, California, where she met her second husband, Lawrence "Bob" Robertson. In the summer of 1960 they began taking students to Guatemala and Mexico for summer vacation. The main purpose of the trips was to record in photos and rubbings the magnificent monuments on which the ancient Maya carved. Even as early as the 1960s, the looting of Maya sites was common and Robertson's desire was to record as much of the Maya civilization as possible before it was hacked to pieces or sold off to private collectors.

PALENQUE AND PAKAL'S TOMB

Though Tikal, her first jungle excursion, stole her heart, once in Mexico, Palenque replaced Tikal as her number one site. Her documentation of the site was revolutionary. She started with the Temple of the Inscriptions. In order to photograph it before beginning her rubbing, giant scaffolding was constructed for her to stand on. Nothing she did was easy. Her rubbing of Pakal's sarcophagus lid, Palenque's greatest ruler, took super-human tenacity.             

She wrote, "The first thing I started on was the sarcophagus lid, down in the crypt of the Temple of the Inscriptions. A rubbing had never been done before. I worked locked in with only a lantern to see by. It was quite a trick getting myself on top of the lid. It took seven sheets of rice paper (1 x 2 meters). Also, I had to use oil paint instead of sumi ink; there could be no way to work on so much space and keep an inked area from running into the sheet of paper next to it. After two weeks working on the sarcophagus, doing several parts of it over time, I felt that Pakal was not only my friend but a long lost relative."

After the lid, she worked on the side. "Standing in water on the floor of the tomb, trying to do the rubbings and not getting the paper wet was no small feat, especially since the space between the walls of the crypt and the sarcophagus was barely wide enough for me to stand. All of the rubbing equipment had to be kept on top of the sarcophagus, making it difficult to reach when standing on the floor.

"Inch by inch, as different features of the ancestors of Pakal emerged, it was as though I was speaking with these dead kings—I now knew them. Being alone in the tomb was like being in their world long ago."

THE SCULPTURE OF PALENQUE

The results of her Palenque work was documented in a series titled The Sculpture of Palenque. She searched out pigment sources in that region to duplicate the colors used by Palenque artists centuries ago. Her impressive collection of rubbings represents a major archive of Maya monuments throughout the Maya world and has been a major resource for scholars studying the culture. 

Temple of the Sun Reconstruction Painting

At Palenque, she met Moises Morales, head guide and major domo of the site. Her friendship with Moises and his family would be a staple in her and Bob's lives for decades. At first he rented them a room and in the 70s built a house next to his in the La Cañada compound.

Merle and Bob worked together on the Maya projects—she as artist and he as jack of all trades, performing behind the scene duties that greased the wheels. Their presence in Palenque became an interest to traveling scholars and and their house, Na Chan-Bahlum, became a meeting place for every archeologist working in Chiapas, the Yucatán Peninsula, and Belize—their door was always open. Palenque is where Linda Schele and Merle met and became fast friends.

MAYA ROUNDTABLE IN PALENQUE

 In 1973, things were beginning to gel in the Maya world. Through conversations initially with Linda Schele and other Mayanists, an idea emerged— why not have a gathering of like minds? They put together a list and sent out feelers for a get-together. Soon afterwards, Merle heard from famed archeologist Michael Coe. He suggested December would be a good time. The idea ignited and the first Maya conference took place in 1973. Through discussions, lectures, late nights and visits to the pyramid structures footsteps away, the group was at the beginnings of breaking the Maya hieroglyphic code and figuring out who the ancient Maya were. The conference became known as Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque.

Topic talks ranged from art, history, chronology, iconography, early explorers, inscriptions, sacrifice, trade and the surrounding area. Word got out and everyone came: guides, archeologists, scholars, artists, students. Fourteen universities from the US, Mexico, and Canada came and everyone was asked to have a paper ready to give as a lecture on the art, architecture, or iconography of Palenque. The second year, 1974, the governor of Chiapas opened the ceremonies in Palenque's Municipal Auditorium, it had grown that much. The first had convened in Merle and Bob's house in Palenque.

BREAKTHROUGH AT FIRST CONFERENCE

That first year's highlight was the discovery of the names of Palenque's rulers by Floyd Lounsbury, Linda Schele and Peter Mathews. The second year's highlight along with the governor presiding was the attendance of archeologist Dr. Alberto Lhuillier Ruz, famous for his discovery of the Tomb of the Temple of the Inscriptions where Pakal's sarcophagus was buried. Eventually, through the melding of minds, the Maya hieroglyphic code was broken, the turning point being that first Roundtable in 1973. 

Bob and Merle lived in Palenque and helped host Mesas Redondas until Bob's death in May, 1981. Merle went on to do many more Maya rubbings in the Yucatán, specifically at Chichen Itza, where at Hacienda Chichen, Robertson was given her own suite which became headquarters for her crew. After the Chichen Itza project, Merle traveled the world, visiting other archeologists, artists, and friends while painting and walking ancient ruins everywhere on the planet. 

Stela 1, Ixkun, the Peten, Guatemala

MAYA SITES VISITED

During her time studying and recording the Maya, Robertson visited and worked at Tikal, Sayaxche, Dos Pilas, Aguateca, Itsimte, Naranjo, Tamarindito, Ixkun, Ixtutz, El Peten, Seibal, Yaxchilan, Lubaantun, El Baul, Bilboa, Jimbal, Uaxactun, Lamanai, Caracol, El Palmar, Calakmul, Copan, Palenque, and Chichen Itza. She could definitely compete with Dr. Jones. And to my women readers, I'd say she'd come out on top.

Merle Greene Robertson died at her home in San Francisco in 2011. She was 97 years old.

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.

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.

THE THREE SISTERS, THE MILPA GROWING SYSTEM AND THE GENIUS OF INDIGENOUS AGRICULTURE

The Three Sisters (By National Agriculture Archive)

THE THREE SISTERS—CORN, BEANS, SQUASH

Native peoples speak of this type of agriculture—corn, beans and squash— as the three sisters. In Robin Wall Kimmerer's popular classic, Braiding Sweetgrass, the author explains how these three vegetables got the label. These plants together, she says, feed the people, feed the land, and feed the imagination.

There are many stories about how the three sisters came into being and each of them acknowledges these plants as sisters. One take on the story tells of a long winter when people were dropping from hunger. Three women came to a villager's dwelling on a snowy night. One was a tall woman dressed in yellow with long flowing hair. The second wore green and the third was robed in orange.

They came to shelter by the fire. Even though food was scarce, the visiting strangers were fed generously, with their hosts sharing what little they had left. In gratitude for their generosity, the three revealed their true identities—corn, beans and squash—and gave themselves to the people in a bundle of seeds so that they would never go hungry again.

THE GENIUS OF INDIGENOUS AGRICULTURE

For millennia, from Mexico to Montana, women mound up the earth each spring and place the seeds of these plants into the ground, all in the same square foot of soil. It's called the genius of indigenous agriculture. In mid-May, after planting, the corn seed takes water quickly and is the first of the three to emerge from the ground. Drinking in soil and water, the bean seed swells and sends its roots deep down. It breaks the soil to join the corn, which by that time has already grown six inches tall.

Squash takes its time—it is the slow sister. It may be a long while before the first stems poke up, still caught in their seed coat until the leaves split and break free, says Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.

These three vegetables are not only the core of the Maya milpa and Central American Indigenous peoples. Native American tribes such as the Iriquois and Cherokee acknowledge these vegetables also as the three sisters because they nurtured each other like family when planted together. 

Milpas may seem mysterious to outsiders but they are a traditional agro-forestry system formed by cultures that create a spacial dynamic to maintain local biodiversity in agriculture. This farming technique has been found to bring continuity and security to a culture's food supply, nutrition, and even the social fabric of a village. 

TIME OFF BETWEEN CROPS

In the milpa system, it is customary to have years of rest in between planting crops. This leads to soil fertility, reduces the destruction of weeds, and helps control harmful pests. Because of the time between plantings of a specific milpa, the Maya, though not nomadic, required a great deal of land mass to achieve the proper platform for the milpa to produce at its maximum. In pre-Hispanic times, land was plentiful and these communal ventures—with family members and/or neighbors joining in both with work and the fruits of their labors—much resembled the structure of the Maya ejido system.

And it was not restricted to planting vegetables. The milpa was diverse and could include orchards, livestock and craft activities, even timber harvesting wood for houses, medicinal plants, beekeeping and hunting. All this made for a complex and varied system that retained sustainability and the use of the land's resources.

THE MILPA CYCLE

A Man and His Son in Their Milpa

The milpa cycle involves two years of cultivation and eight years of fallow or secondary growth to allow for the natural regeneration of vegetation. As long as this rotation continues without shortening fallow periods, the system can be sustained indefinitely.

So unique is the milpa system that after three thousand years, the milpa has received worldwide recognition from the United Nations, as noted in a recent article in "Yucatán Magazine."

UNITED NATIONS RECOGNITION

The UN was impressed by the ancient system for its complexity as a productive model that includes the combined cultivation of beans, pumpkin, and mainly corn, the basis of regional food since ancient timeSquash takes its time—it is the slow sister. It may be a long while before the first stems poke up, still caught in their seed coat until the leaves split and break free, says Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.

These three vegetables are not only the core of the Maya milpa and Central American Indigenous peoples. Native American tribes such as the Iriquois and Cherokee acknowledge these vegetables also as the three sisters because they nurtured each other like family when planted together. 

Milpas may seem mysterious to outsiders but they are a traditional agro-forestry system formed by cultures that create a spacial dynamic to maintain local biodiversity in agriculture. This farming technique has been found to bring continuity and security to a culture's food supply, nutrition, and even the social fabric of a village. 

TIME OFF BETWEEN CROPS

In the milpa system, it is customary to have years of rest in between planting crops. This leads to soil fertility, reduces the destruction of weeds, and helps control harmful pests. Because of the time between plantings of a specific milpa, the Maya, though not nomadic, required a great deal of land mass to achieve the proper platform for the milpa to produce at its maximum. In pre-Hispanic times, land was plentiful and these communal ventures—with family members and/or neighbors joining in both with work and the fruits of their labors—much resembled the structure of the Maya ejido system.

Maya Man Working His Milpa (From Society of EthnoBiology)

The appointment of the "Maya Milpa as an Important System of the World Agricultural Heritage for their Food and Agriculture Organization" also recognizes the traditional milpa for its resilience to climate and modernity changes, long life, and contributions to the conservation of both the culture and biodiversity of the Yucatán Peninsula.  

THE MILPA'S IMPORTANCE

To sum up the importance and magnitude of milpas, author Kim Wall Kimmerer says it best: "Of all the wise teachers who have come into my life, none are more eloquent than these, who wordlessly in leaf and vine embody the knowledge of relationship. Alone, a bean is just vine, squash an oversized leaf. Only when standing together with corn does a whole emerge which transcends the individual. The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone. In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship. This is how the world keeps going." Amen.

With this final nugget, may I wish you the very best of fall seasons—our harvest season—and a joyful Thanksgiving.  

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.

Nancy Drew Author Had Connections to Maya Pyramids and Central America

(Photo from Jennifer Fisher, founder of Nancy Drew Society, of The Secret of the Old Clock).

     Who of us girls, as young teens, did not love Nancy Drew? The sleuth with a voracious appetite for getting into scary trouble, being at the center of crime scenes and mysteries? Who taught us how to signal SOS with a tube of lipstick, break out of a window using spike heels, and to always keep an overnight bag in the car, just in case?

CAROLYN KEENE? NO

     For years I thought Carolyn Keene was Nancy's author but later discovered that was a pen name for Mildred Wirt Benson who would write 135 books and 23 of the first Nancy Drew detective tales that came to shape Nancy's "steely bravery" according to an article by Jennifer Fisher in Zócalo. Benson's image of Nancy would create "the tenacious, bold and independent heroine we have come to know." The real author of our favorite "girl" detective was an Iowa homegrown born in 1905, daughter of a country doctor, and the first student—male or female— to earn a masters degree in journalism from University of Iowa (later home to the Iowa Writers Workshop). For fifty years Benson worked in journalism when not penning famous mysteries, covering the courthouse beat and crime and corruption at The Toledo Blade and The Toledo Times.

HEADING TO NYC

     As a child Benson was an avid reader of children's classics. Her first short story, "The Courtesy," appeared in St. Nicholas, a children's magazine, and won her second place in a monthly contest. Finding Iowa too dull for a woman with an agenda, she ventured to NYC and landed a job with an icon in publishing, Edward Stratemeyer. Fortune Magazine said of Stratemeyer in 1934, "As oil and gas has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer."
     Stratemeyer published The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys and famously hired ghost writers for a flat monthly fee. Benson's pen name remained a mystery until the 1970s when researchers discovered Benson was the Oz behind the curtain. During the Great Depression and WWII, parents were candid with their children, according to Fisher's article, and didn't hide life's gravities. Enter Nancy Drew, a new kind of heroine for a new age of young girls. Stratemeyer penned a three-page outline for Benson and depicted her as an "up-to-date American girl at her best—bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy."

TREATED AS AN EQUAL

     In 1973, Benson wrote an essay about her famous heroine, stating Nancy was treated as an equal by her father and by many in law enforcement and she never gave up when the going got tough. Her spirit struck a chord. Nancy Drew personified "the dream image which exists within most teenagers," Benson said. According to Fisher's article, this 1930s teen remained culturally relevant for more than 80 years, even as young women's roles changed dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters. "Women still tell me how they identified with Nancy Drew and that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be," Benson told an interviewer in 1999.


MAYA CONNECTION

     But Benson, perhaps, was her own best role model for the very Nancy Drew we all came to love. She trained as a pilot in the 1960s. Traveling solo, she flew down to Guatemala to view ancient Maya pyramid sites. She traipsed through crocodile-infested rivers and hacked her way through jungles with a machete. In a particularly harrowing very Nancy Drew like experience, she was even locked inside a room in Guatemala by locals who thought she knew too much about criminal activity in their town. Channeling Nancy, she overpowered one of her captors and escaped. "Like any good sleuth," Fisher goes on to explain, "she later returned to Guatemala to learn more about what had happened to her."

THE SMITHSONIAN

     In the 1990s, twenty years after dedicated Nancy Drew lovers had discovered Keene's real name and ID'd Mildred Wirt Benson as Drew's creator, Benson donated a series of papers she'd written about her heroine, along with her trusty Underwood typewriter used for creating Nancy, to the Smithsonian where it sits to this day. And finally, the mystery author got public credit in her native Iowa in 1993 when the University of Iowa had a Nancy Drew Conference. That same year, she was named Person of the Week by ABC's Peter Jennings.

     Asked later if she would ever give up writing, Benson said, "The undertaker will have to pry me away from my typewriter." That's pretty much what happened. At 96, in 2002, she was sitting at her trusty Underwood when she died.

Stephens and Catherwood Take the Maya World: Review of Jungle of Stone

IN 1839 an energetic American writer and a talented British artist, adventurers to the core, braved the jungles of Yucatan, Guatemala and Honduras and became the first English speaking travelers to explore this region originally known only as Maya.

Though a lawyer by profession, John Lloyd Stephens fell hard for archeology after a two-year sabbatical took him to Europe and the Mediterranean in the mid-1830s.  After trekking through deserts and ancient pyramid sites he came away fueled with a desire for more of the same. Simultaneously he discovered he could write and was dubbed “the American traveler” after he penned his first best seller about Egypt’s pyramids, the Nile, Petra and the Holy Land.

British artist Frederick Catherwood gained his footing during the “Egyptomania”

craze that hit London in the 1820s. A bit older than Stephens, he reached Egypt and the Nile in 1823 and discovered he had an uncanny ability to portray ancient monuments and archeological digs with great accuracy. Egypt was the start of an odyssey that in the end would take him to Copán and Palenque, Uxmal, Labna, Chichén Itzá and beyond.

CENTRAL AMERICA BECKONS

Serendipity brought the adventurers together in London, and shortly afterwards.

Stephens received a special ambassadorship to Central America from President Martin Van Buren to negotiate treaties with several Latin America countries.

Stephens immediately contacted Catherwood and asked him to come along for the ride. After political issues were settled, they’d go exploring for ancient ruins.

The duo headed south and after an intense journey through war torn Guatemala and Honduras, Stephens finished what he could of his diplomatic workload. It was time for exploration with their first destination Copán. Spurred on by a letter written to the Spanish king about ancient sites with large stone structures from an explorer named Deigo Garcia de Palacio three hundred years earlier, Stephens and Catherwood followed the trail of Central American patriot Colonel Juan Galindo. Galindo had discovered the archived letter and traveled to both Palenque and Copán in 1834. Stephens and Catherwood would arrive five years later after pouring over sketchy site coordinates from Galindo’s report made to higher-ups.

ADVANCED CIVILIZATION

Galindo believed whoever built these stone monuments had been an advanced civilization, and the artisans who created the works did so without iron tools. The monuments were covered in hieroglyphics and he conceived it was phonetic writing, which proved accurate, though it would take more than a hundred years to confirm his theory. He believed the site was the seat of a great power, a large population and a people advanced in the arts. The site had a grand plaza that could compete with the coloseum of Rome, he said. He emphasized that local inhabitants had little knowledge of the site’s history. And unbelievably, the account that pushed Galindo to explore Copán had accumulated dust in the archives of a Spanish court for more than three centuries. This mysterious and intriguing report was the reason Stephens and Catherwood found themselves in the depths of a Honduran jungle.

Because terrain in southern Mexico, western Guatemala and Honduras is a thick tangle of vegetation filled with rain forests and swamps, parts of the land were a mystery even to the Maya who lived there. Locals had no explanation for the stone blocks and imposing structures and knew nothing of their creators. So dense was the jungle that Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés passed within one hundred miles of Palenque in the early 1500s, never learning how near he was to a massive pyramid site. (The classic Maya collapse occurred around 900 AD).

WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

Galindo’s revolutionary view of an ancient sophisticated civilization with no ties to their Northern European brethren fell on deaf ears. Early explorers of Palenque in 1787 insisted it had classical Roman and Greek influences, speculating somehow one of these cultures had crossed the Atlantic, conquered the native locals, built the structures, never to be seen again. Another explorer said it had to be the work of the Lost Tribe of Israel’s doing, underscoring how hesitant each and every western explorer who came in contact with the Maya was to give an advanced indigenous culture its due. 

These discoveries continued to baffle western intellects and religious scholars alike. The existence of vast sophisticated cities hidden in the middle of Central American jungles threatened the biblical order of the known world. Where did these people come from and how old were their cities? One explorer, a crazy outlier named “Count” Jean-Frederic Maximilien de Waldeck, made an accidentally correct claim when he stated Uxmal was at least one thousand years old, basing his claim on the concentric tree circles he counted from a tree that implanted itself in the building’s entryway after it was already in ruins.

It would take Stephens and Catherwood, seasoned with their old world explorations, to examine the evidence at the sites and forge a new, correct narrative.

CAPTURING COPÁN’S ESSENCE

Though Stephens’ written descriptions of the sites were detailed and informative, it was Catherwood’s otherworldly sketches that would forever change the way the world viewed the mysterious, previously unknown Maya culture. On their first week at Copán, Catherwood would toss out countless attempts at capturing the Maya stelae (stones with hieroglyphs) that he found. At first his western mind could simply not contemplate, then draw, what he was seeing. To him, a western European, the gigantic Copán sculptures, some four to five meters high, were so profoundly different than the antiquities of the mideast that he had a difficult time rendering them. The two veteran travelers who had toured the wonders of Egypt knew they were in the cross hairs of an incredibly advanced civilization and they were now on “new ground” as Stephens wrote later in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, his best seller about the Maya world.

To capture the soul of the sculptures and to assist himself in so doing, Catherwood took photos with his Camera Lucida, the precursor to a modern camera, then from those drawings, he attempted to re-draw what he saw.  Though it took him many tries, a slight shift in his perspective broke through and with powerful persistence, he finally got it right. He filled page after page with drawings rich in detail of the unfathomable hieroglyphics, monuments, sculptings. His drawings would prove so accurate that long into the future, archeologists would be able to read them when they finally broke the Maya code in 1976 at the famous Palenque Round Table.

But at the time, to convince an uncertain world of what they were seeing, it would take not only the stark beauty of Catherwood’s detailed drawings to put Copán, Palenque and other Maya sites on the map, it would also take Stephens’ energetic and romantic prose to seal the deal.

Copán and Palenque were just the beginning of Stephens and Catherwood’s Maya explorations. They would go on to view forty-four sites in all, many detailed in Jungle of Stone. The struggles they endured to bring this discovery to the world hit them hard. Both were forever plagued by side effects of malaria and other diseases contracted while chasing pyramids.

CATHERWOOD’S SKETCHES

Even if you’re not in the mood for a long read, Frederick Catherwood’s incredible sketches shown in the book, many in color, make Jungle of Stone worthwhile. It’s available at Alma Libre Bookstore in Puerto Morelos, 360 pesos.

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Jeanine Kitchel, author of Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, has a new novel out this April, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival.