New Evidence of Old Looting, 19th Century Looting of Tikal’s Carved Wooden Lintels.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 1879 the Guatemalan Secretary of Agriculture Salvador Valenzuela saw the damage at the ruins of Tikal caused by the removal of carved wooden lintels and observed that; “The beams of the doors of these towers… 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…”. If so, which lintels did he remove? This paper challenges earlier assumptions that all the outer lintels of Tikal’s Great Temples were plain and presents overlooked evidence that Valenzuela removed carved wooden beams from Temple III Lintel 1 of Tikal.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow