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1 ______________________________________ Getting to the ruins of Chichén Itzá1 in 1900 was a rugged proposition. As intriguing as the stories were of the overgrown Maya ruins and pyramids in the jungle, Yucatán was not a tourist destination . But then, Adela Breton was not a tourist. Far from it. She was at Chichén to work. She was fifty years old, an age where most men and women at that time were settled and perhaps slowing down, their major work having been accomplished. In contrast, she was about to embark on her life’s work. She began her travels as an artist, with strong interests in antiquities, archaeology, and geology. In Mexico she found scope for these interests, and increasingly her interests— and her art—focused on architectural details of the Pre-Columbian ruins. The next step was perhaps obvious, but no one else was doing it. She began systematically copying the murals and carvings, capturing the incredibly complex detail before it vanished or eroded, becoming victim to the elements. Accurate copyists were rare, and the ability to copy accurately was highly valued in those days before color photography . Adela had that rare ability. Adela’s work was unique, as she was. Archaeologists and anthropologists working in Mesoamerica recognized her knowledge and professionalism and prized her work. She became an international presence in the world of Mesoamerican anthropology and archaeology, and its major participants would be her colleagues. The late 1800s was the glorious age of the amateur , before entry to professions became more credentialed or, some might say, more calcified. Women were making small inroads into professional ranks, albeit slowly. Adela used her work to carve out an identity for herself within a scientific profession. If she ever aspired to the institutional and male-dominated inner circles, she gave no indication of it. Instead, the impression she gives is quite the reverse, that she rather enjoyed being professionally in demand yet outside the politics and bureaucracy and not tied to an institution with its potential for limiting her range of work. She was committed to the importance of Chapter One The Bretons of Bath . . . all my life have been learning archaeology as my Father was much interested in it. —Adela Breton to Richard Quick, January ,  2 Chapter One ______________________________________ professional associations and the opportunities they provided for meeting with colleagues to share research and scholarship. After World War I her efforts had a significant part in reviving the International Congress of Americanists; she saw it as a resource for the new scholars in the field—as well as an opportunity for long-standing colleagues, some of whom had been on opposite sides of the War—to reconnect. After her death, her work “disappeared” from the public eye. The new generation of archaeologists and art historians were absorbed in new discoveries and new technologies. They sometimes repeated work that had been done, either out of ignorance of its existence, or because of assuming they could do it better. And, after all, they did have new techniques to work with. But those new techniques couldn’t recapture what had been lost. Frescoes, stuccoes, and bas reliefs are fragile. Architectural details are more durable, but the elements erode and damage them as well. Details quickly disappear. Eventually—relatively soon—only smudges and faint traces remain to tantalize the viewer with hints of what had been there. The enormous importance of Adela’s work lies in not only what she did, which is almost unimaginable in its painstaking detail, but the fact of when she did it. There was a genius of luck—if there is such a thing—in her timing. She was there just after the frescoes or murals or stuccoes were uncovered, before their rapid decline to visual obscurity had set in—that defining moment when they still existed, damaged, yes, but still with breathtaking color and detail. And Adela captured it. Today her copies are the only record in color and detail of irreplaceable elements of “lost” cultures. In some respects Adela had many of the fixed ideas and traits of the late Victorians. At the same time, however, she had a resilience and adaptability all too scarce in any era. Once she’d begun her work, at age fifty, she literally worked the rest of her life. She would have it no other way. She had traveled a long way from her Victorian upbringing in Bath, England—but she came by her wanderlust...

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