Tikal's Missing Carved Wooden Lintel

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1879, the Guatemalan Secretary of Agriculture Salvador Valenzuela saw the damage to the temples of Tikal by the removal of many of its carved wooden lintels, and observed that; “The beams of the doors of these towers, which form the lintels of the doors, were pulled out by a foreign doctor [Gustave Bernoulli] the year before last, and that which time and nature could not destroy with the great trees that had grown there this man has done…." Astonishingly, Valenzuela’s next course of action was to perform the same deed that he was condemning Bernoulli for; “As that doctor of whom I spoke had done, I pulled out the lintels of the principal door of this building, saving the carved part and removing with an axe the rest of the beam, to bring them to our museum…." This paper challenges earlier assumptions that all the outer lintels of Tikal’s Great Temples were plain and presents evidence that Valenzuela removed hitherto unknown carved wooden beams from Temple III Lintel 1 of Tikal. The paper concludes following the historical record attempting to track unknown carved wooden beams from Tikal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35710.0