MEXICO'S FIRST WOMAN ARCHEOLOGIST— ISABEL RAMIREZ CASTENADA

Isabel Ramirez Castenada

Isabel Ramirez Castenada was the first Mexican woman to work as an archeologist and anthropologist in Mexico. Born in 1879 in Milpa Alta, a pueblo not far from Mexico City, she studied to be a primary school teacher and worked in pre-school for a number of years.

In 1906 she received a scholarship and was part of the first generation of Mexicans to study archeology, history and ethnology at the National Museum of Mexico, (Museo Nacional de Antropologia) the only institution offering these courses at the time. In 1907 and 1908 she worked for Eduard Seler and later Leopoldo Batres in the National Museum collections, classifying and cataloguing over 10,000 artifacts. She worked as an assistant and also taught archeology till 1911 when she joined the International School of American Archeology and Ethnology. The school, established to conduct research, also trained Mexican archeologists and ethnologists. Isabel secured a scholarship from the Mexican government and Columbia University to attend, as well as paid leave from the National Museum.

Around this time she accompanied Eduard Seler and his wife Caecilie Seler-Sachs on archeological expeditions to Palenque and the Yucatan Peninsula. She conducted fieldwork and did surveying while studying the site. She also participated in various ethnological field trips to the surrounding area of Mexico City and carried out the systemic collection of ceramics in the Toltec and Nahua city of Culhuacan.

Isabel at Palenque, 1911 (Archives)

Proficient in languages, she wrote and spoke Nahual, though it's not known if this was her mother tongue or if she learned it as part of her studies at the National Museum. Being bi-lingual enabled her to carry out important ethnographic work in her village, Milpa Alta, as well as other indigenous Nahua villages near Mexico City. Her primary ethnographic work consisted of compiling indigenous stories and myths which she later transcribed and translated into Spanish. These folktales, titled Ten Folktales in Modern Nahautl, were published in 1924 by Franz Boas, a mentor to Isabel who became known as the father of modern anthropology. 

The titles she translated were The Old Man of Teutli and the Rabbit, The Squirrel and the Prairie Dog, and The Fox and the Coyote. They read like Aesop's fables, usually with a moral at the end.

When the Mexican Revolution began, the International School closed down and the director left the country. Isabel was designated to secure the collections and transfer them to the National Museum. After the Revolution she remained in the museum's folklore section and became its head in 1918. Unfortunately the position lasted just one year due to lack of funding. She would not return for 20 years.  

Little is known about her during those years but on returning in 1936, she joined the education department, devising courses on archeology for teachers. Following this she continued to work for the museum in low-paying positions, mostly from her home due to poor eyesight.

Like other women in the field of archeology before the Revolution, Isabel had to fight for her place at the table, pushing boundaries to make room for her to work or study in the male-dominated emerging field.

Unlike other women who made up the Mexican archeological field, Isabel was born, raised and educated in Mexico which gave her a leg up, even though her family did not come from wealth. She had no affluent patrons supporting her work but despite challenges, she did valuable work, and became well known for compiling and analyzing indigenous knowledge and stories from Nahua communities.

Isabel Ramirez Castenada, 1908

She authored three papers of original research on the pre-colonial carved stones from the archeological and ethnographic collections at the National Museum and presented her research at the Tlalnepantla Parish church. These were on the folklore of Milpa Alta, traditional medicine, and superstition in the markets of Zumpango.

For decades her contributions in the development of archeology and anthropology were overshadowed due to criticism from male colleagues, especially Manuel Gamio. Though the discourse for the falling-out between Gamio and Ramirez is not clear, it appears it was based on a famous excavation in 1912 at a brickyard near Atzcapotzalco. Gamio, working for Boas as was Ramirez, originally outlined a document outlining the work and Ramirez followed up and elaborated on it. As the excavations continued to be carried out, dissertations were produced but apparently Gamio felt they were poorly published with mis-spellings that he blamed on Ramirez. At the same time, another excavation took place and a substantial collection of ceramics was found by Ramirez. Ramirez's accounts of both excavations were written up and as her find had been larger than that of Gamio, her accounts influenced the sequence that formed the basis of the Valley of Mexico chronology for years to come. Though never stated, Gamio may have felt slighted and retaliated by trying to discredit her achievements.

Shortly afterwards, while her group studied indigenous stories, they discovered that strong Spanish influences appeared in the phonetics. A common goal emerged to collect as much folklore and phonetic info as possible in order to compare both Spanish and Indian sources. Fellows threw themselves enthusiastically into the research and with Ramirez's understanding of Nahuatl, she became an integral part of the project, making contributions to the folklore from her native Milpa Alta. These investigations were one of the first attempts by anthropologists to deal with the problem of acculturation and its impact on New World cultures, a theme that would dominate the field in the 1930s. 

Even with her 20-year absence mid-career, Ramirez's star shines brightly as the first recognized woman archeologist in Mexico.

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.

WOMEN IN ARCHEOLOGY: LINDA SCHELE—MAYA SCHOLAR, ARTIST, AUTHOR—GONE TOO SOON

 

Linda Schele at Palenque (Photo Justin Kerr)

It's hard for me to write about Linda Schele. Not just because she was so central to the study and understanding of the Maya culture, their writings, civilization and how the world came to view them, but because she was my gateway into understanding the Maya. Just several short months after I'd 'discovered' her by reading her works in my bookstore smack dab in the middle of Maya country, she died at 55 from pancreatic cancer in 1998 in Austin. Since it was pre-internet days and we were in rural Mexico I didn't learn of her death until five months later—a customer broke the news. I was devastated. Even though I only knew Linda Schele through the printed page, I felt I'd lost a friend.

A FOREST OF KINGS

Schele became my Maya mentor for a number of reasons. By way of introduction, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya, co-authored with David Freidel, held me rapt for days. Not only was she an author, she was a woman studying and doing, taking chances in archeology, predominantly a man's world at the time (and who's to say, probably still is). She was vibrant and exciting and wrote beautiful volumes about this mysterious civilization which bordered on the mystic but were firmly rooted in science. First and foremost an artist, she wove a story about the ancient Maya, who at the time were lauded yet elusive. Her work and writings were approachable. She made remarkable progress in a short period of time. She learned the names of Maya rulers, a true breakthrough. Along with fellow scholars Floyd Lounsbury and Peter Mathews, they were first to decode a Maya king's name, Pacal, in 1973, at Palenque's Mesa Rodunda. It was the first meeting of Maya archeologists, scholars and admirers, also known as the Maya Roundtable. Pacal, by the way, was Palenque's greatest and longest running ruler. Nothing like starting at the top, Ms. Schele.

THE CALL

How did Linda fall under the spell of the Maya? A graduate from the University of Cincinnati with degrees in education and art, she was teaching studio art at the University of Alabama. In 1970 she traveled with David, her husband, to photograph Mesoamerican sites in the Yucatan for the University's collection. The next year they returned to Mexico in an obligatory visit to Palenque. "When they arrived at Palenque, she was mesmerized," wrote famed Maya photographer, artist and scholar Merle Greene Robertson, who lived and worked on site.

Palenque Temple of Inscriptions (MacDuff Everton)

"The morning they left for Uxmal we said good-bye and hoped to see each other again" said Robertson. "At five p.m., guess who appeared at the door, Linda. They'd been to Uxmal but turned around and returned to Palenque. It was the beginning of a long, dear friendship."

Meeting Robertson, her most important mentor during the early stages of her new voca-tion, drew Schele into the world of the ancient Maya, their art and their system of hieroglyphic writing, at the time not fully understood.

Schele described her trajectory like this: "I was a fair to middling painter who went on a Christmas trip to Mexico and came back an art historian and a Mayanist."

UNVEILING A DYNASTY

Schele went on to become world famous and a leading authority in her new field. She believed her background in art assisted in seeing the Maya writing in an unencumbered, less scientific manner. Soon Linda's speciality was decoding Maya hieroglyphics, especially after the 1973 Mesa Rodunda at Palenque. Prior to that, though greatly studied by epigraphers and iconologists, no one had much luck deciphering them. 

How Glyphs Were Read by Schele and Others

Concerned that Maya research was limited to a few experts with special access to key resources, Robertson's brainstorm for the Palenque gathering drew authorities, students, and local Mayanists together to hash things out. Schele, along with Mathews, an undergraduate who'd spent a year working on famed archeologist Eric Thompson's T-numbers—the only 'de-coding' attempt so far at breaking the Maya glyphs—began piecing together Palenque's history using what was called the Tablet of 96 Glyphs. Researchers understood this to depict a line of royal accession, and within hours, through a combination of luck and Mathew's intimate knowledge of glyphs, they unveiled most of Palenque's dynastic history, including the aforementioned ruler Pacal. This achievement became the stimulus that led to many later discoveries by Schele and other scholars. 

Merle (center), Fellow Scholars and Linda (right)

VERTICAL ASCENT

Schele's accomplishments moved vertically. In 1975-76 she was a fellow in pre-Columbian studies at Dumbarton Oaks, D.C., while also working with fellow scholars to accelerate the process of Maya hieroglyphic decipherment through word order in Maya inscriptions. In 1980 she was awarded a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies and her dissertation, Maya Glyphs: the Verbs, 1982, won The Most Creative and Innovative Project in Professional and Scholarly Publications, by Association of American Publishers.

In 1977 she founded the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at Texas. These meetings, held at UT/Austin, have become a major source for many significant epigraphic discoveries made about ancient American civilization over the last two decades.

In 1981 she continued her teaching career in the Department of Art/Art History at the University. In 1988 Schele was named the John D. Murchison Professor of Art at University of Texas.

In 1986 she organized a ground breaking exhibition of Maya art, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. The catalog, co-authored with Mary Miller, continues to be used as a major text for the field and was awarded The Alfred Barr Award of College Art Association for the Best Exhibition Catalog/1986.

CONTEMPORARY MAYA

Also in the mid-80s she expanded her academic interest to include the culture of the contemporary Maya. Along with two colleagues, she organized and presented 13 workshops on hieroglyphic writing to Maya speaking peoples of Guatemala and Mexico in order to re-introduce hieroglyphic writing and interest of the ancient Maya to the modern Maya. The Maya trained in these workshops are now actively engaged in the translation of the writings of their ancient ancestors and tutoring others to do so. Working with young Maya was her most cherished activity.

For general public interest she actively promoted making scholarly research accessible to the general public which included the annual Maya Meetings at Texas. She made numerous speaking arrangements around the world, took tours of Mesoamerican sites by Far Horizons, and wrote three more books: Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path, co-authored with Freidel and Joy Parker, 1993; Hidden Faces of the Maya, 1997; and The Code of Kings: The Sacred Landscape of Seven Maya Temples and Tombs, co-authored with Peter Mathews.

Code Breakers Peter Mathews and Linda Schele, Palenque 1973 (R. Thornton)

In a 25-year period, Schele produced a number of important works on ancient Maya art, culture and writing. But she was also a hands-on Mayanist who traipsed to and explored numerous pyramid sites from Mexico to Belize and Guatemala, looking at each Maya cityscape for symbols, clues to their astronomy, meanings of rituals deciphered from hieroglyphs, and the legacies the Maya left behind. Schele's unique combination of art, history and teaching gave her a fresh and unique overview of the civilization she came to love, know, and help bring to light. Her influence on how the world views the ancient Maya is unparalleled. RIP Linda Dean Richmond Schele.

Linda Schele and Bust of Pacal

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.

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 when the latest Indiana Jones film starring Hollywood's favorite archeologist came out, 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 ARTIST AND SCHOLAR MERLE GREENE ROBERTSON'S IMPACT ON THE MAYA WORLD

Dos Pilas, Stela 16

Merle Greene Robertson was an artist, scholar, and Maya explorer, but these are merely 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 reading her autobiography, Never in Fear, she well could have been the glue that stuck it all together, and with fellow scholars, shaped an understanding of the Maya civilization. She galvanized others—as an organizer, planner, dynamo. She knew everyone in the field, from Eric S. Thompson and Alberto Ruz to Michael Coe, George Stuart, and anyone and everyone 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, two explorers who entered Maya sites at Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Copan for starters, literally blew the collective mind of the world. No one had any idea that intricate stepped pyramids lay hidden, covered by centuries of vines and foliage, deep in Mexican and Central American jungles. Before the release of Stephens' and Catherwood's book, the word "bestseller" had not yet been coined. 

Frederick Catherwood Drawing

Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, Vol. One

The world clambered for more knowledge of this mysterious unknown 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, they were now in an iconic limited club along with other greats such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, and Persia.

ROBERTSON AND HER WORK

Robertson is nearly indefinable, so interwoven was the role she played with her Maya work over the past 50 years—from assisting in breaking the Maya hieroglyphic code, to co-founding the Palenque Roundtable talks, trekking to and exploring scores of pyramid sites in Mexico and Central America. Not to mention the body of work she left of an ancient archeological rubbing technique using Japanese ink on rice paper.

Robertson created beautiful reproductions of countless stela, columns, tombs, sarcophagus lids, often produced in the most unfavorable circumstances—trekking through rugged terrain and dense rainy forests crawling with snakes and bothersome mosquitoes, including the occasional close call 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.

Ixkun Stela 1 (Merle Greene Robertson)

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 and thanks to a generous heart, many of these gems have landed in museums and universities throughout the world. She not only explored these faraway Maya sites but shared her knowledge with others. Many expeditions included lucky students who accompanied her in what for each of them would no doubt become the experience of a lifetime.

As an anthropology student at New College of Florida, Carol Wheeler, anthropologist and writer from Guadalajara, Mexico, spent summer, 1977, in Palenque to prepare her undergraduate thesis. A former art major, she planned to do field drawings at the site. She explains how she met Robertson along with artist, author, and Maya scholar, Linda Schele. 

"Both Linda Schele and Merle Greene Robertson were in residence that summer," said Wheeler. "I followed them around like a puppy dog, earnest and annoying as only undergrads can be. They were so kind and gracious about it. Linda listened to my questions and explained their work in her Texas accent and Ms. Robertson invited us to her cottage in the afternoons for lemonade... In my mind, Howard Carter had nothing on these brilliant women."

Never in Fear

NEVER IN FEAR 

With a career that spanned close to 60 years, it will be impossible in this single post to condense all that Robertson accomplished. In reading her autobiography, Never in Fear,  I didn't expect to be so wowed—but I was. Turning page after page of her many accomplishments and explorations, it seemed she lived her life in warp-speed.

So, do we shape our lives, or are our lives shaped by our experiences and those we meet along the way? After stumbling onto Robertson's autobiography, it seems her future unfolded while she was growing up in rural Montana where she developed an interest in Native American culture.

EARLY BEGINNINGS

A Doubtful Handshake, Charles Russell 1910

Born in Great Falls, Montana, she lived on land flanked by the Rocky Mountains. Her interest in Native American culture was ignited when her father took her on visits to see Blackfoot Indian chiefs. She was also influenced by nearby Montana neighbor Charles M. Russell, one of the greatest western artists of the US. Both Russell and her father encouraged her interest in art and drawing. The duo of meeting Blackfoot Indians and watching Russell paint may have shaped her future early on. 

Eventually her family moved to Seattle. 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. At that time she also started recording monuments by means of rubbings. The technique is an ancient one, with earliest known rubbings taken either from Buddhist texts on wooden blocks in Japan, 8th century, or from rubbings practiced in China, 2nd century. But 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 jungle 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 becoming 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 PACAL'S TOMB

Though Tikal initially stole her heart since it was her first jungle excursion, 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 needed to be constructed of mahogany beams and planks for her to stand on. Nothing she did was easy. Her rubbing of Pacal's sarcophagus lid, Palenque's greatest ruler, took super-human tenacity.             

Sarcophagus Lid of Pacal, Palenque

In her words, "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 and for that matter, it had never been photographed head on, only at an angle, by Alberto Ruz...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) to do the rubbing. Also, I had to use oil paint instead of sumi ink; there could be no way I could work on so much space and keep an inked area from running into the sheet of paper next to it. After two weeks of working on the Sarcophagus rubbing, doing several parts of it over time, I felt that Pacal was not only my friend but a long lost relative."

After the lid, she began on the side. "I was ready to do the glyphs around the edge of the Sarcophagus lid...Standing in the 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.

THE SCULPTURE OF PALENQUE

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

Temple of Inscriptions, Pacal's Burial Site

The results of her Palenque work in the 1970s was documented in a series titled The Sculpture of Palenque, in which she precisely detailed how the intricate structures were built, layer by layer. She searched out pigment sources in that region to exactly duplicate the colors used by Palenque artists, all those centuries ago. The impressive collection of Merle's rubbings represents a major archive of Maya stone monuments throughout the Maya world and has been a major resource for scholars studying the culture.

At Palenque, she met Moises Morales, head guide and major domo of the site. Her friendship with Moises and the Morales family would be a staple in her and Bob's lives for decades. At first they rented a room from him and later built a house next to his in the La Cañada compound in the 1970s.

Temple of the Sun
Reconstruction Painting

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 even tourists, and their house, Na Chan-Bahlum in Palenque, became a meeting place for every archeologist working in Chiapas, the Yucatán Peninsula, and Belize as their door was always open. Palenque is where Linda Schele and Merle met and became fast friends.

A MAYA ROUNDTABLE IN PALENQUE

 In 1973, much was beginning to gel in the Maya world. Through conversations initially with Linda Schele and soon with other Mayanists, an idea emerged, the story goes. Why not have a gathering of like minds? They put together a list and in September, sent out feelers for a get-together. Soon after the letters went out, Merle heard from famed archeologist Michael Coe. He suggested that December would be a good time. Not much notice. But the idea struck a nerve and the first Maya conference took place mere months later, mid-December, 1973, and through discussions, lectures, late nights, and visits to the pyramid structures footsteps away, it served as a beginning to breaking the Maya hieroglyphic code and figuring out just who the ancient Maya were. The conference was named Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque.

The topics on the table ranged from art, history, chronology, iconography, early explorers, inscriptions, sacrifice, trade, and the surrounding area. Word soon 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, Gobernador Dr. Manuel Velasco Suarez, 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, Na Chan-Bahlum.

Temple of the Inscriptions (Merle Greene Robertson)

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 Pacal's sarcophagus was buried.

Eventually, through the melding of minds, the Maya hieroglyphic code was broken, the turning point being the first Roundtable in 1973. But that is another story. 

Robertson was asked to do The Florida Project and finished it in 1976—beautiful reconstructive color paintings of the Temple of the Sun and Palenque trade, six feet in height each. Other panels accompanied these as well.

Rubbing from the Platform of the Eagles and Jaguars, Chichen Itza

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. 

MAYA SITES VISITED

During her time studying and recording the Maya, these are some of the pyramid sites she 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.

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

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at 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 available on Amazon where my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy, can also be found. 

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.