Treasures From the Jungle

By Patricia Blake

"America, say historians, was peopled by savages, but savages never reared these structures, savages never carved these stones." So said John Lloyd Stephens in 1839 at the sight of the lost Maya city of Copan rising eerily out of the Honduran jungle. The pioneering American archaeologist was amazed by the art objects that lay around Copan's crumbling pyramids and palaces. "Architecture, sculpture and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest; beauty, ambition and glory had lived and passed away," Stephens wrote. "All was mystery, dark impenetrable mystery."

Since then, archaeologists and anthropologists have penetrated at least some of the mystery surrounding the Central American Indians, descendants of roaming Ice Age hunters, whose civilization reached a magnificent level of culture from 250 to 800 A.D., then inexplicably declined during the next 500 years. The rain forest engulfing the Mayas' monumental cities has long been cleared, making way for tour buses. The gigantic pyramids have been restored and, on some sites, wired for sound-and-light shows. But few Americans have ever observed the Mayas' masterworks.

That loss is now remedied by two exhibitions. "Maya: Treasures of an Ancient Civilization," organized by the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico, is on view at New York City's American Museum of Natural History. Next month it will move on to four other U.S. cities. A less ambitious but highly illuminating show, "Cenote of Sacrifice: Maya Treasures from the Sacred Well at Chichen Itza," drew crowds at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. It will move on to the Oakland Museum in California in the autumn and is scheduled to continue on the road in U.S. museums during the next two years.

The exhibition in New York, which was coordinated by Maya Scholar Charles Gallenkamp, features objects of ineffable fragility and beauty. These include six polychrome ceramic bowls excavated over the past five years at Tikal, the largest of all the known ancient Maya cities. Found in tombs at a site dubbed Mundo Perdido in the Peten jungle of Guatemala, these funerary vessels depict the underworld gods and beasts that haunted the Mayas. One bowl rests on a turtle swimming in a painted, stylized underground sea. Rising from the lid is the symbol of resurrection, a long-beaked water bird.

Also from Tikal are incense burners that reflect the Mayas' grotesque imaginings of hell. The 14-in.-high Old Fire God is a satanic orange figure that holds out a human skull. Another censer represents a Maya lord whose throne is decorated by the long-nosed figure of the Cauac Monster, who rules the Maya underworld.

Unlike much of Maya art that celebrates or serves gods, priests and lords, some of the lively figurines found on the island of Jaina mirror the life of ordinary folk. One peasant woman jauntily waving a big conical hat will look strikingly familiar to anyone who has visited the wretchedly poor Maya villages in modern Yucatan.

The counterpoise to these exquisitely delicate objects is the 1,000-year-old, 1,200-lb. limestone Chacmool, the ceremonial figure that is the very emblem of Maya civilization in its later phases. Found at the most celebrated of all Maya sites, Chichen Itza in Yucatan, the semireclining statue is a splendid example of the Chacmools found guarding the entrances of temples. Typically, the male figure leans back on his elbows, pulls up his knees and turns a forbidding gaze on intruders at the sacred gates. A flat plate poised on his belly is believed to have been a receptacle for the hearts of human victims in sacrificial rituals.

All 300 works in the St. Paul exhibit are also from Chichen Itza. They were selected from a collection of 30,000 sacrificial objects that the Mayas threw into a 200-ft.-wide limestone sinkhole that was their sacred cenote, or well. The pieces -- jade pendants, gold jewelry, wooden idols and painted jars -- offer a peerless view of Central American aesthetic traditions over an 800- year period. Says the St. Paul museum's curator of archaeology, Orrin C. Shane III: "The objects from the cenote are the single most important archaeological treasure ever recovered in the Americas." Incredibly, nearly all the pieces were stored in the basement of Harvard University's Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Mass., for 75 years, until Shane and one of Peabody's Maya specialists, Clemency Chase Coggins, set out three years ago to organize the traveling exhibition.

The sacred well, once regarded by the Maya as the abode of their gods, had been a place for pilgrimage from 800 to 1500 A.D. Following the Spanish conquest, the gold-greedy conquistadores heard gaudy reports that the Indians had thrown gold, jewels and young virgins into the cenote to propitiate their deities. Nothing was ever found until 1904. Then American Archaeologist Edward H. Thompson, working with a steel bucket appended to a simple boom and derrick, and later with primitive deep-sea diving equipment, spent more than five years exploring the sinkhole. Thompson gradually brought up gold bells in the shape of monkeys, sheet-gold masks, scepters, sacrificial knives and a multitude of other objects including an assortment of human bones, mostly of men and children. He shipped his discoveries to the Peabody Museum for safekeeping. A suit for the recovery of the objects brought by the Mexican government was not resolved in Thompson's favor until 1944. Then, when the works could be legally displayed, the Peabody had neither the room nor the funds for an exhibition. Never before seen by the public, this precious cache of Maya objects evokes some of the same sense of awe and wonder that assailed Thompson 81 years ago when he drew the first glistening jewel out of the murk.