The Temple 22 Façade Reconstruction Project, Copán, Honduras

Project Origins and Past Reconstructions

The Temple 22 Sculpture Reconstruction Project is actually an ongoing effort that may be traced back to the beginnings of Maya archaeology. Since 1886, this ruined structure has seen four episodes of excavation. The temple was first discovered by Alfred Maudslay in 1886, who uncovered the famous sculpted doorway and under agreement with the Honduran government, removed sculpture to the British Museum. In the late 1890s, excavations by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University again shipped hundreds of the most beautiful pieces to museums abroad, this time to the Peabody Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology, Harvard University; The American Museum of Natural History; and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Then, in the 1930s, the Carnegie Institution of Washington excavated and consolidated three-quarters of Structure 10L-22, uncovering a symmetrical floor plan with rooms to the North, South, East, and West and a massive serpent-mouth doorway. They restored the corner witz mask motif and the sculpted interior proscenium in-situ and created this hypothetical reconstruction of the first story of the structure (Figure 7, shown above). Note how the sculpted façades on the building are conveniently blurry; although the Carnegie encountered hundreds of pieces of sculpture, they did not attempt to reconstruct the façades beyond the three motifs mentioned above. Instead they stacked the remaining sculpture in large piles around the building, roughly according to the side of the building on which they were found (Figure 8, shown below). Over time these have become mixed up with sculpture from adjacent collapsed buildings.

So, in 1989, encouraged by the success of the Copán Mosaics Project in reconstructing and interpreting other building façades at Copán (B. Fash 1992a; B. Fash 1992b; W. Fash 1992; W. Fash 1994), William Fash, Director of the Copán Acropolis Project, led excavations of the relatively untouched north side of the structure (W. Fash 1989) (Figure 9, shown below).

The hope was that a façade fall pattern would be found that might serve as a template for a reconstruction. Indeed, they encountered several thousand stone mosaic fragments. The PAAC project catalogued and organized all of these in warehouses the project constructed at the Center for Regional Investigations at Copán. They identified several new motifs, restored several more corner masks on the building and in the Copán Sculpture Museum, and were able to recontextualize unprovenanced sculpture from earlier excavations around Structure 10L-22 (Schele 1986; Schele in Freidel, Schele and Parker 1993; B. Fash 1992; Morales 1997).

The Temple 22 Reconstruction Project began in 1998 when William and Barbara Fash, Co-Directors of the Copán Mosaics Project, invited me to analyze the sculpture encountered during PAAC excavations of the north side of the structure–known as Operation 39 (Fash 1989)–as well as those pieces catalogued from earlier excavations and museum collections. After a month long feasibility study, it was confirmed that a project to analyze and reconstruct the façades of Structure 10L-22 would indeed yield valuable information on the original appearance, function, and meaning of the structure.

Phase I: Background Research

The first phase of the project ran between January and August of 1999 and was funded by Columbia University. At the time the project began, twenty different sculpture motifs had already been identified by Barbara Fash, William Fash, Linda Schele, Alfonso Morales, and Julia Miller. However, before analysis of these motifs could continue, it was necessary to complete some background research. In 1999, I spent seven months in Copán building a database, taking photographs, making maps, and compiling a history of excavations of the structure from 1885 to the present (Ahlfeldt 1999).

Phase II: Motif Analysis

This phase began in 2000 and continues today. In July of 2000, with continued funding from Columbia University, I began the motif analysis by refining one motif already identified by Barbara Fash (B. Fash 1992b). I identified new components including a headdress, serpent lance, and anthropomorphic bloodletter (Figure 10a and 10b). This short season gave us a good indication of the amount of time and funding necessary to complete the analysis of just one motif from the temple. Also during this month we retagged a large sample of sculpture from Pile 10 in the Main Group and prepared it for relocation to the warehouses at CRIA where shelving and space were now made available through efforts of the PAAC/Harvard projects for better conservation and protection (Ahlfeldt 2000).

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