[Aztlan] Secrets uncovered at Tazumal

[michael ruggeri]

www.archaeology.org/0609/abstracts/pyramid.html


Deconstructing a Maya Pyramid
Volume 59 Number 5, September/October 2006
by Roger Atwood
El Salvador rediscovers its past beneath a layer of concrete.


On the morning of October 18, 2004, after a drenching rain,  
caretakers entered the Maya site of Tazumal in western El Salvador  
and found what they thought was a catastrophe. Nearly an entire flank  
of one of the site's two main pyramids had collapsed. On the  
pyramid's south face, a sloping concrete wall erected in the 1950s  
and intended to resemble the structure's original contours, had  
loosened in the rain, slipped off, and lay in a heap of rubble. Where  
concrete had stood, the caretakers could now see only exposed mud.

By the following evening, el colapso de Tazumal had become a national  
scandal. News media accused government authorities of neglecting  
Tazumal, the country's best-known archaeological site, which had  
appeared on Salvadoran postage stamps and the 100-colón bank note.  
Politicians demanded the resignation of the director of the state  
cultural institute, Concultura, which owns and operates it.

Yet El Salvador's small core of professional archaeologists saw an  
opportunity. To them, the collapse of the 60-foot-wide flank  
corrected overnight what many had long viewed as a horrendous  
mistake--encasing the pyramid in concrete as part of a dubious  
restoration project. Officials at Concultura agreed and soon  
announced that not only would the concrete not be reerected, but that  
all the concrete that had wrapped the pyramid for nearly 60 years  
would be removed and the site brought under full-scale excavation to  
see what secrets lay inside. A second, much larger pyramid was not  
affected by the 2004 rains and no plans were made to remove its  
concrete casing.

Two years later, the cement enclosing Tazumal's pyramid has been  
almost completely removed and a team of Salvadoran and Japanese  
archaeologists have made some startling finds. Led by Fabricio  
Valdivieso, chief of archaeology at Concultura, they have found  
burials where none were thought to exist, an intriguing array of  
ceramics, and architectural elements that suggest a vastly more  
complex history of occupations, invasions, and Mexican influences  
than previously realized. Few Salvadorans now want the concrete back  
at Tazumal (an indigenous name whose meaning is unclear).

Tazumal and a dozen nearby ruins are providing new insights into  
ancient Mesoamerica that, if not for the downpour in 2004, might have  
remained locked in cement forever. With successive building phases  
spanning the years before the end of the Maya and after, Tazumal  
reinforces a growing view that the Maya may have experienced more of  
a slow, inexorable decline than a sudden collapse. Buildings erected  
before their fall weren't abandoned; they were just refurbished with  
different architectural styles. The Maya world may have been  
transformed less by cataclysm than by a kind of cultural mutation, as  
central Mexican influences seeped in by invasion or migration.

The pyramid's collapse also forced a reconsideration of the legacy of  
the man who "restored" Tazumal, Stanley Harding Boggs, a colorful  
American émigré often credited with bringing modern archaeology to El  
Salvador. Grandson of U.S. President Warren Harding, Boggs excavated  
a wide variety of sites in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. At  
two sites where he directed excavations, Tazumal and the late Maya  
ruins of San Andrés near San Salvador, he concluded his work by  
wrapping the structures in concrete with the aim of preserving them.  
He rebuilt walls, floors, ramps, and staircases based on his  
understanding of Maya architecture, and then swathed them in tons of  
Portland cement to create sleek monuments that looked too perfect to  
be real. In El Salvador, much of the popular understanding of what a  
Maya monument should look like--step pyramids, ball courts, plazas-- 
was generated by Boggs's reconstructions.

Though more heavy-handed than most, he was by no means alone in his  
approach. Throughout Latin America in the middle decades of the  
twentieth century, overeager reconstruction efforts were creating  
what some viewed as artificial pseudo-sites meant to appeal to  
tourists. These projects relied on an archaeologist's imagination,  
bags of cement, and armies of workers more experienced in building  
houses and laying tennis courts than in restoring ruins. Tiwanaku in  
Bolivia, Pachacamac in Peru, and Uxmal in Mexico, among other sites,  
have been criticized as examples of too much "restoration" based on  
too little knowledge about what the site looked like in antiquity.

Contributing editor Roger Atwood's book Stealing History is out in  
paperback.


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© 2006 by the Archaeological Institute of America
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