06 March 2009
American Professor Finds, Preserves Ancient Mayan Murals
U.S. fund for cultural preservation helps him and others restore treasures
Washington — Indigenous art is smuggled. Private collectors buy from looters. Priceless relics vanish from archeological digs. Religious treasures are stolen from places of worship and sold abroad. Pockets are lined at the expense of cultural patrimony.
But the United States is committed to combating such crimes and preserving the cultural heritage of the developing world.
As a signatory to a 1970 U.N. convention on prohibiting cultural theft, the United States forbids imports of archaeological or ethnological material when theft has placed a nation’s cultural heritage at risk.
In addition to the 1970 convention, the United States has bilateral agreements to preserve cultural artifacts with several countries, including seven in Central and South America.
At the 2004 Summit of the Americas, participating nations agreed to “support culture as it relates to the protection of a nation’s heritage.”
Since 2001, the United States Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation has provided more than $13 million to some 500 projects in 120 countries. Projects in Central and South America and the Caribbean have benefited from $2.3 million of this money. Among the projects the fund supports, two of the most noteworthy have been in Guatemala and help protect Mayan heritage.
MAYAN TREASURES
Guatemala has received more than $750,000 in grants from the fund, with the largest grant — $575,000 — awarded this year.
Guatemala’s most recent award is the largest grant to a country in the Western Hemisphere. It targets a project in San Bartolo, in the eastern Petén region, that involves murals depicting the Mayan story of creation. Restoration of the murals and a Mayan temple is under way.
“The murals at San Bartolo constitute by far the most important corpus of painted scenes known from the Late Preclassic Maya period and are of unique cultural importance for both Guatemala and the region,” said Martin Perschler, of the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation.
The preservation of the murals and protection of the site is the ongoing work of William Saturno, an archeology professor at Boston University in Massachusetts. Saturno discovered the murals in March 2001. Their preservation, the shoring up of walls of the room where they are located and the piecing together of broken fragments began in 2006, with an ambassador fund grant, and will continue this year with the large grant given to Guatemala.
Perschler credits Saturno’s dedication for much of the success of the project.
“I’M NO INDIANA JONES”
The 2001 discovery mirrors a Hollywood movie script. Saturno literally stumbled upon it. “I’m a chubby guy from the Northeast … I’m no Indiana Jones,” he told America. gov.
Finding the murals was the result of a poorly planned trip — one that was supposed to be three hours long but resulted in a two-day ordeal without food and water. “I was just getting out of the sun,” Saturno said, describing the day when he entered a tunnel leading into the mural room. Looters had dug a trench in search of pottery they could remove. Saturno, taking shelter, looked up expecting to see bats on the ceiling and, instead, saw portions of the now famous murals.
Saturno said the Mayans often built on top of previously constructed sites. This is why the room of murals survived for 2,000 years before looters tunneled into it. The Mayans built a pyramid over the room of murals, sealing the murals with mud and filling the room with rubble. The murals had been unexposed to light and air for 2,000 years.
“There is nothing like it,” Saturno said. The few previously known Mayan murals date from A.D. 800, nearly two centuries later than these, which depict the Mayan story of creation. The project has “a historical and cosmological impact on the world,” Saturno said.
Experts have called this Preclassic Mayan subterranean complex the Mayan Sistine Chapel because it holds one of the most elaborate creation scenes depicted before the Classic Period. The corn god myth depicted on the mural — a Mayan god going to the underworld and reemerging with corn — has been depicted many times. But Saturno’s find reveals that the story was around much earlier than the first century.
Shamans from a modern day Mayan community near Lake Tikal, Guatemala, recently visited Saturno. They suspect that the discovery was no coincidence and that Saturno, in a manner, descended to the “underworld” (the tunnel room) and reemerged with news, just like the ancient Mayan god in the creation story. “This is the story from the beginning of time,” the shamans told Saturno: “It was your destiny to find the murals.”
