Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915 (review)

This excellent study focuses on how the discourses surrounding the "discovery" of Maya antiquities in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century were put in the service of varied scientific, nationalist and religious enterprises. As Evans succinctly puts it in his Introduction, "For nineteenth-century archaeologists working in Latin America, the absence of any certifiable, historical information about the ancient Maya explains how they were able to mythologize the Mesoamerican past; in effect, no scholar could conclusively challenge even the most bizarre theory about the ruins' age or authorship. Why these explorers invented or distorted archaeological information however—and why American explorers showed a particular susceptibility to this practice—is the subject of this book" (p. 2).

The 1820 starting point for Evans's investigation is well chosen. With Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, the fledgling republic was no longer as closed off to outsiders as during Spain's zealously vigilant colonial rule. Also, important texts dealing with Mexico's early colonial history, such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de México, and surveys of its social and cultural makeup, such as Humboldt's Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), were translated and published in English. Thus it was as much the creation of a literary gateway, as well as a political one, to Mexico that spurred interest in Europe and the United States regarding the indigenous antiquities of the region.

Evans begins with a chapter on nineteenth-century European representations of Maya ruins, followed by discussions of the literary and pictorial representations produced by John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, Joseph Smith, Désiré Charnay, and Augustus and Alice Dixon Le Plongeon. The most intriguing chapter is that which examines the efforts of Stephens and Catherwood to document the Maya ruins at Copán, Palenque, and in the Yucatán Peninsula. Probably the best known of the antiquarians that Evans deals with in his book, Stephens and Catherwood are famous to this day for their accounts (by Stephens) and illustrations (by Catherwood) of now well-known Maya sites. Catherwood's illustrations were so painstakingly precise, that Maya epigraphers continue to refer to them to read some of the Maya glyphs that have eroded since Catherwood recorded them. Evans situates Stephens's travel narratives, which were extremely popular with nineteenth-century readers, within a larger nationalist discourse of Manifest Destiny and the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine. (In one memorable episode, Stephens purchases Copán for fifty dollars and plans to ship the stelae to New York City for a proposed museum of American antiquities.) In locating Stephens's project within a larger nationalist enterprise, Evans joins the company of Bruce Harvey, who advances a similar argument in his thoughtful reading of Stephens in American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865 (2001), and of David E. Johnson, who made one of the earliest critiques of Stephens's travel books as "political fictions" in an essay published in 1995. With the addition of Evans's chapter on Stephens to the earlier critiques of Johnson and Harvey, we now have a new way of looking at and conceptualizing these travel books that so captivated the American imagination in the nineteenth century. Evans also examines claims made by Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, who pointed to Maya ruins as proof that "the Americas had been settled in ancient times by wandering members of the House of Israel" and that those ruins "provided the historical foundation for his new Zion" (p. 4). Of the five chapters in Evans's book, however, this was the least interesting, perhaps since it is more a rehearsal of Mormon theological history and discussion of the Maya is tangential.

Nevertheless, on the whole, this is an excellent scholarly study. Evans has meticulously researched his subject and writes in...