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After Adela’s death knowledge of her work quickly disappeared. In the 1920s when the Carnegie Institution worked at Chichén, members of the expedition either did not know about or did not recognize Adela’s work of copying the murals and bas reliefs twenty-five years earlier. This is particularly curious in that Sylvanus Griswold Morley, who organized the Carnegie work, had gotten his degree from Harvard and was from the Peabody. In addition, in the 1920s there were other people at Harvard who had known Adela and her work. But a severe case of institutional amnesia had set in. Furthermore, Edward H. Thompson, with whom she used to cross swords, was at Chichén for several of the Carnegie seasons in the 1920s. And whatever his personal complaints about having her around, he admired her work very much. Thompson did not mention Adela or her work in his People of the Serpent, but this is perhaps more understandable. This is a book of reminiscences of life in Yucatán, some adventures at Chichén, and the culture and life around him. He says very little about any work at Chichén, except for his dredging of the Sacred Cenote, to which he devotes considerable attention . But archaeology and work at Chichén are not the subject of his book, and Adela is in good company among those not mentioned. In 1926 T. A. Willard published The City of the Sacred Well, an account of Edward Thompson’s work and life at Chichén Itzá based on Thompson’s recounting of that time. The book is an adulation of Don Eduardo and of little help to those seriously interested in the history of archaeology. In his chapter “Forgotten Michael Angelos” Willard extols the skill of the ancient artists and particularly the artistry of the murals in the Tiger Temple. Adela nor her work is ever mentioned—and yet Thompson, the subject of the book, was her host (sometimes nemesis ) while she did that work. And, by his own admission, he thought her work remarkable. Tozzer is the most puzzling. Adela’s great friend, companion for several of the Chichén seasons , and confidante, Tozzer remained at Harvard for many years. Yet he seems to have been singularly silent on the subject of Adela’s work. Adela’s mural drawings from Chichén were “rediscovered” in 1972 by J. Eric Thompson. When the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery reorganized its anthropology storerooms, Dr. Joan Taylor, then Curator of Archaeology, had come across the full color renderings of the mural paintings in addition to an array of other Adela Breton material. The museum asked Thompson to examine the collection, and he immediately recognized the significance of Adela’s copies of mural paintings, which had never been published. Subsequently Arthur Miller made a careful study of the paintings, and published the results in “Captains of the 205 ______________________________________ Epilogue 206 Epilogue ______________________________________ Itzá: Unpublished Mural Evidence from Chichén Itzá” (Miller 1977). Where do her manuscript copies fit into her legacy? They, too, had little or no publication, and most scholars don’t know of their existence. Manuscripts are preserved, unlike murals and stucco friezes that decay and architectural details that erode. Methods of accurate color reproduction have been available for years. Does that make early copies obsolete? Not entirely. Those copies captured detail that became less clear over time, and they remain remarkable pieces of work. The lack of accurate color reproduction answers the question of why her color copies weren’t published during her lifetime, but that obviously is a limited response. It does not explain why her copies remain unpublished, or why her material was allowed to languish. Several factors may have contributed to the neglect of her work and her accomplishments. During Adela’s lifetime she never formed an institutional affiliation. She had close ties with several institutions, most notably Harvard’s Peabody Museum, but she was an early freelance. This had advantages for her. She was not financially dependent on any institution. She escaped institutional agendas and politics. It is arguable that she couldn ’t have done what she did as an employee of an academic institution or museum. But the great drawback to that was not having an institution to champion her work—or, seemingly, even to remember it. (The Peabody did not accession her material until the 1940s.) Again, questions arise about the epidemic of institutional amnesia. Gender was undoubtedly a factor. Her...

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