By Christian Stenz, Universität Heidelberg
During my SciCoMove stay in Mexico City I intended to study the history of the Maya collections in the Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA). Therefore, the Archivo Histórico of the MNA houses interesting documents that shed light on the trajectory of many objects exhibited in the museums Sala Maya. Due to my research focus on Guatemala and Sothern Mexico, I was particularly interested in a collection of lintels and stelae from the former Mayan city of Yaxchilán (Fuente: 1967). This ‘archaeological site’ is situated at the border to Guatemala in the Usumacinta region. The blog entry, however, is not about the lintels and stelae still present and exhibited in the Sala Maya. It rather follows two objects named by archaeologist lintel 33 and lintel 39 of Yaxchilán. These objects appeared in the list Esculturas Procedentes de Yaxchilan en el Museo Nacional de Antropologia (figure 1). While visitors to the Sala Maya today will find some of the lintels and stelae from this list, the two lintels 33 and 39 are missing. In the following lines, I will follow the trajectory of the two lintels, starting with their excavation and photographic recording by Teobert Maler in 1900 (Maler 1901: 113). Secondly, the blog entry deals with their journey to and integration in the MNA and ends with their return to Yaxchilán. Thereby, I want to highlight the varying and contested meanings, which were attributed to these objects in their different spatial and social contexts.

Teobert Maler – Science, Art and Technology
After studying architecture, Teobert Maler joined the Cuerpo Imperial de Voluntarios of Emperor Maximilian I. When his military service ended in 1867, he opened a photography studio in Yucatán which he called Fotografía Artística and Científica (Kohl 2018: 18). With his photographic equipment, he undertook several expeditions to various former Mayan cities in Yucatán, Petén and Chiapas. In the early years, this was a difficult endeavour. With the conventional collodion wet plate process of the time, the photographs always had to be developed immediately. Accordingly, it was necessary to carry a considerable amount of equipment. This changed when Maler returned to Yucatán in 1885 from a trip to Europe. There he obtained new photographic equipment and studied the gelatin silver process (Kohl 2018: 17-18). This new technology has not only significantly reduced the amount of equipment necessary but also made it possible to take photographs in different formats.

When Maler came to Yaxchilán in 1897 and for a longer period in 1900, these new technological possibilities and his studies in architecture doubtlessly shaped Maler’s engagement with the Mayan material culture. In contrast to many other archaeologists of the time, he was very critical of the removal of objects from their architectural context. Maler rather tried to analyse the architectural structures and their integration into the landscape in order to find missing parts and dig for them in the right places. The new photographic technologies further shaped Maler’s approach. While the older techniques just allowed the production of photographs in the relatively small carte-de-visite (5,4×8,9cm) and carte-imperial (10,8×16,5cm) formats the new processes enabled Maler to create bigger images. This made it possible to take pictures of whole architectural structures placing the lintels and stelae in their contexts.
Nevertheless, like many other travellers and archaeologists of the time, Maler also wanted to ‘save’ the Mayan material culture he encountered along the Usumacinta from its apparent ‘natural decay’. Sandra Rozental has already shown how the Mayan material culture in this region was embedded and influenced by a highly dynamic ecological landscape (Rozental 2020). Something that travellers like Maler usually interpreted as an eminent threat. He, for example, remarked that “some structures […] in consequence of the erosion, gradually fell into the river” (Maler 1901: 114).
For Maler the photographic recording of the remaining archaeological structures and especially the objects, which contained glyphs and figurines, also functioned as a means of ‘’saving’ them. And such photographs became highly popular, as it was not just easy to circulate them but also because of their apparently unmediated reproduction of ‘reality.’ Reading Maler’s report carefully, however, shows that these photographs were not so much an unmediated reproduction but rather highly artistic images. The production of these images was an elaborate and arduous task. After Maler dug out lintel 32, for example, it “had been carefully brushed and washed off and placed in a favourable light” (Maler 1901, 131-132).
The Lintel 33, which was excavated during Maler’s expedition near what he called ‘Structure 10’, “was broken in two” (Maler 1901: 132). For the photograph (Figure 3) he put the two halfs together, removed them from their context and highlighted the depicted glyphs and figurine by using artificial lighting. The same he did with all the other Lintels and Stelae in relief he excavated in 1897 and 1900. Among them also Lintel 39, which he encountered in ‘Structure 16’. Apparently astonished by the beauty of his encounter he wrote in his report: “The human form lies in so graceful an attitude that a modern artist could scarcely improve upon the delincation[sic!]” (Maler 1901: 135). Ultimately, Teobert Maler’s photographs were a conflation of scientific and artistic practice that, despite his insistence on contextualisation, highlighted specific aspects of Mayan material culture, such as the glyphs and figurative representations.
Becoming national heritage
The fascination for the material culture in Yaxchilán continued throughout the 20th century. Many archaeologists and adventurers from Europe and the United States followed Teobert Maler and often tried to remove objects from Yaxchilán. At the same time, the MNA, as a government institution, tried to control the Mayan material culture in the Usumacinta region, which they regarded as national heritage. Therefore, they hired a certain Miguel de la Cruz as “guardián de la Zona Arqueológica de Yaxchilán” (MNA, AH 1959). As guardián Miguel de la Cruz had to protect the archaeological site not just from ‘unauthorized intruders’ but especially from the dense and rapidly growing vegetation.
To fulfil this task, the MNA sent de la Cruz technical equipment such as a motor and other machinery (MNA, AH 1959). In a letter from 10 March 1959 the director of the MNA Luis Aveleyra A. de Anda thanked de la Cruz for his work and his support when they transported the first “piedra” to the MNA in Mexico City. In the following years they removed more objects from Yaxchilán to be exhibited in the new anthropological museum in Mexico City that opened its doors in 1964. Unfortunately, I could not find any further documents in the Archivo Histórico of said museum neither on the removal and transport of these objects from Yaxchilán nor on their installation in the new museum. So far, the only known documents are the list and a croquis (figure 2) of the Sala Maya where also the two Lintels 33 and 39 appear.
The social and historical context in which the lintels and stelae came to the museum, and in which the Maya material culture of the Usumacinta region was increasingly monitored, is well known. The trajectory of the Lintels 33 and 39 as well as the many other objects that came to the new museum was, as Sandra Rozental highlights, “tied to the authoritarianism of a modern centralist state that insists on forging patria through heritage.” (Rozental 2020). In this way, the Mexican state did not just try to prevent ‘foreign intruders’ from robbing the national heritage. The water of the Usumacinta, the tropical vegetation and the local population were also regarded as a thread to a national heritage in need of protection.
Back to the Roots?
The enormous effort and technical means used to create a ‘national heritage’, scientific or artistic images show that such meanings are not intrinsic to the objects. The trajectory of the lintels 33 and 39 further underline this argument. Present in the Sala Maya during the inauguration of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in 1964, they returned to Chiapas years later. This highlights once more that the Mayan material culture, even when they were embedded into an institutional framework under an “authoritarian and centralizing state” for a while, they remain mobile and its meaning contested (Rozental 2021: 286).
During my research stay, I was not able to follow the Lintels to Chiapas and visit them in their new spatial and social context. But it would strike me to elaborate further on what happened with these objects after they returned. Did their meaning change and for whom? Did they even really ‘return’ and what would that mean? The Usumacinta region and the site of Yaxchilán did not remain stagnant during the 20th century. Historical and ecological changes also took place in this region. So, instead of perceiving the latest transfer as a return should we not rather speak of another step in the long history of these two lintels? A history shaped by creativity and ambiguity, but also by violence and exclusion.
Sources and References
Fuente, Beatriz de la: Las Esculturas de Yaxchilán en el Museo de Antropología, in: Anales del Instituto de Investigación Estéticas 9/36 (1967), p. 5-13.
Kohl, Frank Stephan: Fotografie, Beruf und Berufung, in: Teobert Maler. Historische Fotografien aus Mexico und Guatemala, ed. by Frank Stephan Kohl/Gregor Wolff, Berlin 2018, p. 11-22.
Letter from Luis Aveleyra A. de Anda to Miguel de la Cruz from 10. March 1959, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Archivo Histórico, Volumen 178, Expediente 29.
Maler, Teobert: Researches in the Central Portion of the Usumatsintla Valley. Report of Explorations for the Museum, 1898-1900, in: Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 2/1 (1901), p. 5-216.
Rozental, Sandra: A Monolith on the Street, in: Museum Matters. Making and Unmaking Mexico’s National Collections, ed. by Miruna Achim/Susan Deans-Smith/Sandra Rozental, Tucson 2021, p. 265-288.
Rozental, Sandra: Estelas del Río, in: entre ríos (2020), online: https://entre-rios.net/estelas-del-rio-3/ [10.11.23].
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
alexiacomte (November 24, 2023). A Round Trip? The Lintels 33 and 39 from Yaxchilán. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved April 28, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twv6