Ch'orti Maya Area: Past and Present

7. Ethnographic Analogy and the Archaeological Construction of Maya Identity at Copan, Honduras

7 Ethnographic Analogy and the Archaeological Construction of Maya Identity at Copan, Honduras Allan L. Maca John Lloyd Stephens was a U.S. diplomat, explorer, and Manifest Destinarian active in the first decades after Central American and Mexican independence from Spain (Evans 2004). His travel books (for example, 1837, 1838, 1841, 1843) explained the world to a rapt and fledgling America and brought the ancient Maya ruins into homes across the globe. Because he combined his storytelling with amateur research, many scholars (for example, Hammond 1988; Coe 1992; Demarest 2004) credit him with founding the field of Maya archaeology. Stephens’ earliest work in the Maya region (1839; published in 1841) expended considerable energy on the ruins at Copan in western Honduras, and since that time, and partly thanks to Stephens, the ancient city there has been identified as culturally Maya. This designation was initially based on the evidence of inscriptions and the proximity of Copan to the ancient and modern Maya heartland of Guatemala, Belize, and southeastern Mexico. Since Stephens’ day, numerous prominent scholars have upheld the “Maya-ness” of Copan based on evidence of material ties to the core Maya area to the west. Sylvanus Morley (1920) even included Copan within a grand geographic framework for the ancient Maya realm (explained in somewhat greater depth following). While more recent research (for example , Longyear 1952; Baudez 1983; Viel 1993b; Willey et al. 1994; Bill 1997; Webster 1999; Fash 2001; Sharer et al. 2004) has generated significant refinements in our understanding of Copan and its place in the ancient Maya world, conventional wisdom still sees Copan as a cultural artifact of ancient Maya peoples. The effect that Copan’s Maya-ness has had 90 Ethnographic Analogy and Archaeological Construction · 91 on Honduras, especially in light of the site’s prominence internationally, has been enormous and is only now beginning to be understood. The Honduran historian Dario Euraque highlights the ways in which early twentieth-century Honduran intellectuals and politicians, in dialogue with North American capitalists and archaeologists, were invested in the idea of Copan’s Maya-ness. Euraque (1998, 2004) explains that from the nineteenth century onwards Honduras, in its search for a modern identity, took hold of a cultural heritage tied to the grandeur of Copan , ostensibly the remnant of an ancient Maya city-state. He refers to this effort as the “mayanization” of Honduras. The mayanizing phenomenon arguably begins in 1845 when Honduras declared the ruins at Copan to be property of the state. This established national control of archaeology and heritage conservation there and also voided John Lloyd Stephens’ 1839 purchase of Copan’s main ruins. In the decades following national control, certain objects from the site were brought to the capital (Euraque 2004: 45), effectively extending the reach and force of Copan’s Maya heritage to other areas of Honduras. In discussing the intensifying trend towards mayanization in the twentieth century, Euraque (2004) looks at the interplay between, for example, the Carías dictatorship (1933–1949), the United Fruit Company, and the archaeologists who were supported by them, namely, Sylvanus Morley and Gustav Stromsvik, working in Copan for the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Doris Stone, daughter of Samuel Zemurray, president of the United Fruit Company. These archaeologists had a significant influence on the growth of archaeology in Honduras and, in particular, on the emergence in Honduran national consciousness of the Maya ruins at Copan. Citing Curtis Hinsley (1985: 69–72), Rosemary Joyce (2003: 86) notes, “The civilization of the Maya was a crucial component of the cultural capital used by international archaeologists to establish their status, and was of particular significance to U.S. institutions seeking an equivalent in the Americas to Classical antiquity. . . . Archaeologists and Honduran elites thus shared an agenda: to valorize the archaeological sites within the country as Maya.” Among segments of the Honduran intelligentsia of the early twentieth century, there existed a theory that the Maya were the ancestors of all Honduran indigenous peoples; this, of course, added to the mayanizing trend. As Euraque (2004: 45) explains, this idea was fueled by the papal diplomat in Honduras, Monsignor Frederico Lunardi, an aficionado of archaeology. The leading (previously mentioned) archaeologists disregarded Lunardi’s theories, but the force of Copan archaeology in national consciousness gave his ideas life well into the 1960s (Euraque 2004: 92 · Allan L. Maca 64). Owing to an array of international (and transnational) forces at work in Honduras...