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 The
older residents of the modern town of Copán Ruinas
remember the earthquake that shook western Honduras in April
1934. The church in the town square was nearly destroyed,
and dozens of houses were leveled. The nearby Maya ruins
themselves suffered damage: four of the buildings on the
Acropolis, already undercut by river erosion, collapsed into
heaps of rubble, and what few sculptures remained on the
other nine major buildings toppled. When Carnegie
Institution archaeologist Gustav Stromsvik arrived shortly
thereafter, he found people living in temporary lean-tos on
the patios of their houses as they weathered the aftershocks
of the following week. Cleanup work left ancient sculptures
stacked in piles around the site.
The earthquake only added to the
disarray created over the past centuries, during which local
people and foreign visitors scavenged through the rubble of
the Maya ruins and took attractive pieces for their own.
This process began in the years following the collapse of
the ruling Classic period dynasty in Copán, in about
A.D. 820. Postclassic people removed sculpture from the
temple that housed the tomb of the last ruler, Yax Pasah
(New Dawn), and carried it off to their own homes. They
buried their children and other loved ones in the east court
of the Acropolis, using the carved blocks from what had been
a funerary temple to line the bottoms of the graves. They
carried broken fragments of stone incense burners high into
the mountains and left them in caves and crevices of the
sacred mountains where they revered their
ancestors.
Collectors of a different kind
later scattered Copán sculpture all over the world:
to museums in Brussels, Cambridge, Chicago, Cleveland,
Esquipulas (Guatemala), Genoa, London, New Orleans, New
York, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seville, Tegucigalpa
(Honduras), the Vatican, and Washington, D.C. Meanwhile sun,
wind, rain, and temperature change assaulted those
sculptures that remained. As the great Mayanist Tatiana
Proskouriakoff observed, "As if jealous of this superb
creation of man, all the most violent forces of nature seem
to have conspired to destroy it."
This history presents a challenge
for those seeking to study the ancient sculptures. As a
result of major research and conservation efforts by
archaeologists from the United States and Central America
(working under the auspices of the Honduran Institute of
Anthropology and History), in the past decade more than
25,000 stone sculpture blocks from Copán's fallen
temples and palaces have been studied and cataloged, and
indoor storage areas have been created to protect them from
the elements. Now we and our Central American colleagues
(including Honduran archaeologist Ricardo Agurcia, the
executive director of the Copán Association, and
Guatemalan architectural restorer Rudy Larios, the
codirector of the Copán Acropolis Archaeological
Project) have completed another ambitious mission: to create
a new sculpture museum in Copán.
  Built
by the Honduran government and just recently opened on
August 3, 1996, the museum insures the safekeeping of the
monuments and unveils reconstructed façades with
bold, sculptural messages from buildings throughout the
ancient city. Although less familiar to the public than
Copán's free-standing stelae (2,3) and altars, these
façades contained the most plentiful, and often the
best, stone sculptures in the city. The carvings fit
together like mosaics to depict human figures, gods,
animals, flowers, crops, and other motifs.
  Set
within the Copán National Park, the museum consists
of one main building and will eventually have several
smaller ones connected by outdoor trails. Designed by
Honduran architect Angela Stassano, the building is two
stories high, broader at the second story. A large mound
around the base is planted with trees native to the area to
help the museum blend with its mound- and tree-filled
surroundings. Natural light illuminated the Copán
monuments and buildings for centuries, and every attempt has
been made to use natural light within the museum (4,5). In
addition to skylights, the museum has a large opening in the
center of its roof to aid in circulation and so that at any
given time, the daily and yearly movements of the sun will
highlight some exhibits more clearly than others, just as
they do at the archaeological site.
 The
building was planned to reflect the central concepts of the
Maya worldview. The entrance is a stylized mouth of a
mythical serpent (6), symbolizing a portal from one world to
the next. As people proceed through the tunnel (7), they
have a sense of entering another place and time. The
entrance also evokes the tunnels that archaeologists dig to
reveal the earlier constructions buried inside the pyramidal
bases of Maya buildings.
Aligned with compass points, the
four-sided building reflects the horizontal ordering of the
ancient Maya world, to which the four cardinal directions
and the yearly path of the sun were fundamental. Four was
the number associated with both the sun god and the
perimeters of a milpa, or cornfield.
 In
addition to the horizontal directions, the Maya envisioned
an axis through a center point connecting the human plane to
the supernatural worlds above and below. This vertical axis
is also reflected in the museum. Images of deities and
denizens of the underworld appear on the first floor. These
include killer bats (8), skulls and long bones of the dead
(9), portraits of deceased ancestors, and stingray spines.
The spines were used in rituals by rulers, nobles, and
commoners alike to draw blood from fleshy parts of their
bodies as a sacrificial offering for gods and
ancestors.
  On
the second floor, the world of the living is represented by
pieces from eighteen different buildings, including seven
complete façades (11). These illuminate a series of
important themes in the lives of Copán's ancient
inhabitants: agriculture and fertility, the ballgame and
natural cycles, mountain deities, ritual sacrifice, warfare
and the ruler as paramount warrior, links to other cities,
the role of the scribe, the patron of sculptors, the royal
residence and shrines, residences of the nobility and the
role of nobles in the collapse of the king's divine
authority, and the council house. The second floor also
presents celestial deities, including sun disks surrounded
by clouds and a throne decorated with a sky band. The
ceiling that frames the opening in the roof is decorated
with Maya symbols for the celestial bodies and
constellations of the night sky (10). These tricolored
paintings are based on carvings from
Copán.
 The
centerpiece of the museum, rising through both floors and
piercing the open ceiling, is a reconstruction of an Early
Classic temple - a terraced, two-story building dubbed
Rosalila (rose-lilac) by its excavators (12). (Early
structures, discovered by tunnel excavation, buried beneath
later versions - like nested eggs - are given field names of
birds or colors to keep them straight in field records.) The
original, discovered beneath Structure 16 of the Acropolis
by Honduran archaeologist Ricardo Agurcia, is the most
intact structure ever found in Copán. A hieroglyphic
step carved on its front stairway describes it as the work
of Copán's tenth ruler, Moon-Jaguar, who reigned from
A.D. 553 to 578. Unfortunately, it is only accessible by
narrow tunnels, making it impossible to relocate and very
difficult to observe. The full-scale replica reveals it in
all its multicolored splendor. When the ancient Maya stopped
using the original structure, they painted over its modeled
plaster decorations in white (13). Barbara Fash made careful
probes beneath this white layer which uncovered several
layers of paint, each colored differently, often with
numerous repaintings. The museum replica duplicates the
final color scheme.
As a whole, the temple represents a
deified mountain - a place of creation, a source of
life-giving water (such as a cave, spring, stream, or
waterfall), and birthplace of the sacred maize plant. The
head of this mountain deity, which combines the attributes
of both mother and father, is depicted on the lower central
part of the roof crest, with a cleft in its forehead from
which maize sprouts. Draped over the sacred mountain images
and framing the image of a cave in the upper story are
two-headed celestial dragons. Mythical creatures that
combine attributes of snakes and crocodiles, they are
depicted like smoke emanating from the skeletal-head censer
in the center.
 Representations
of the Sun God adorn the lower parts of the temple. The
sun's daily journey and the life cycle of maize were linked
together in veneration of the process of birth, life, death,
and rebirth. The faces of the Sun God images are human-like,
while he is shrouded in the guise of a mythical bird. With
his serpent-shaped wings outstretched, the sun as a
celestial bird soars in four directions around the building.
On the lowermost façades are seven serpent-winged
birds, from whose open mouths emerge the head of the Sun God
(14). This is not only the Sun God however. The bird is
marked with features of both quetzals and macaws (note the
central green quetzal head over the Sun God's own, and the
yellow macaw beaks in the serpent wings). This is
interpreted to be a representation of the founder of the
Copán dynasty, K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' (Sun-faced
Green/ New/ First Quetzal Macaw), approximately two hundred
years after his death, apotheosized as the mighty Sun
God.
Within the many chambers on both
Rosalila's ground level and second story, the Maya rulers
held rituals that put them in touch with their universe and
their ancestors. When the building was closed and covered
over, in about A.D. 650, a ritual bundle with nine
elaborately shaped flints, three flint knives, stingray
spines, and marine animals was deposited on the first floor
in a small room. (see National Geographic, Sept. 1991) Other
offerings were left in large clay vessels in the central
room and altar. A portion of the lower rooms has been
reconstructed in the museum replica so that visitors will be
able to see where the offertory caches were found and will
be able to experience what a temple was like on the
inside.
  Two
important goals of the museum are to give Copán's
modern inhabitants greater insight into the importance of
the ancient sculpture and to train local workers in its
conservation and restoration (15, 16). Like the sun on its
daily journey, or the maize through its yearly cycle, the
Maya buildings and sculptures - and their meaning - are
being resurrected. The sculptors who replicated the reliefs
of Rosalila, together with all the other participants in the
project, have shared the joy of renewing their ties to their
heritage, and they take pride in returning Copán and
its artistry to its proper place among the world's cultural
treasures.
 The
Copán Acropolis and its surrounding urban core and
rural settlements lay in a pocket of the Copán River
Valley, whose fertile bottomland attracted agriculturists to
the region more than 3,000 years ago. At the city's height,
about A.D. 800, some 20,000 people occupied the Copán
pocket, and the urban concentration displaced most farming
to outlying lands. The city was a huge machine at work at
the center of a civilization with hieroglyphic writing, and
advanced calendar, and complex astronomy. The gradual
collapse of that civilization - as a result of such stresses
as overpopulation, contaminated water sources, political
unrest, and warfare - is a common theme in the story of
human life on earth.
Present Day
Copán
 In
the modern-day town of Copán Ruinas (18), people
speak Spanish, worship the Christian God, and attend schools
that emphasize history after 1492. They partake of many
aspects of Western "civilization," such as the telephone,
electricity, MTV and CNN, and a diet enriched by Old World
products. But the inhabitants of the town, as well as the
humble farming families that eke out an existence in the
mountains, still carry on many ancient Maya traditions.
Their love of the Mesoamerican trinity of crops - corn,
beans, and squash - is unchanged. Corn, prepared in myriad
ways, is still the diet mainstay of everyone, rich and poor,
rural and urban. Pom, the incense used by the ancient Maya
in household and royal ritual, is still a prized commodity
in the local market.
In the rural areas, dwellings are
still designed and constructed as they were two millennia
ago. Wattle-and-daub walls are covered by thatch or palm
roofs, and each family's compound consists of three or four
small buildings grouped around a central courtyard. One
structure serves as the bedroom; another is the kitchen; a
third serves as a storage room for maize, beans, and other
goods; and a fourth houses a shrine. Atop the shrine is a
cross, but even this quintessential Christian symbol has
pre-Columbian counterparts in the art, writing, and
cosmology of the ancient Maya. Incense is burned on the
altar in ceramic censers not unlike those found with the
ancient altars and shrines.
Other aspects of traditional
culture include beliefs in spirits that reside in the
mountains and streams, even in the ruins of the dynastic
center of the Copán Acropolis. Some of these spirits,
which bear Maya and Nahuatl (Aztec) names, can be recognized
in ceramic and stone sculptures recovered in the
archeological excavations. As in more traditional Maya
communities elsewhere, the people of Copán take these
supernatural and ancestral spirits very seriously. They
sacrifice chickens at house dedication ceremonies and when
they plant their fields of corn, beans, and squash each May.
On May 3, the Day of the Cross, a superficially Catholic
procession goes up to a concrete cross on the top of the
nearest high mountain, in hopes that the devotion will bring
the life-giving rains.
 In
years gone by, the more hispanicized, Ladino members of the
community ridiculed the traditional beliefs and lifeways of
the more humble, Indian segments of the population who lived
in the rural areas. This is beginning to change, as the work
in the ruins and at the sculpture museum have shown the
breath-taking works of art and architecture left by the
ancient inhabitants of the Copán Valley.
Travel
Information for Potential Pilgrims to
Copán
 The
Classic Maya ruins of Copán are nestled in a fertile
mountain valley in western Honduras. As in ancient times,
farming has eliminated most of the forest in the area
surrounding the civic-ceremonial center, but the
Archaeological Park protects a large forest. The nature
trail running through part of the forest is greatly prized
by botanists and birders alike.
The main park includes the
Acropolis, the Great Plaza, the ball court, and the
Hieroglyphic Stairway. Other "musts" include the residential
area of Las Sepulturas, linked to the center of the ancient
city by a causeway; the Regional Museum of Maya Archaeology
in the town of Copán Ruinas, which houses portable
art in all media; and of course, the new Sculpture Museum,
which is located at the entrance to the main
park.
Copán is reachable by bus,
tour, or rental car from San Pedro Sula, the major city on
Honduras' north coast. the best months to be in Copán
are February, July, and October, when the country is green,
the temperature moderate, and rain relatively light. Many
other archaeological features and sites are scattered
throughout the Copán Valley. Another major
archaeological park with a museum is that of El Puente,
thirty miles east of Copán, just off the main
highway. Anyone with an interest in colonial-period ruins
will enjoy the fort of Omoa, which is on the north coast
near Puerto Cortez.
Image
List
Titlegraphic:
Aerial view of the archaeological park and new sculpture
museum. © W.L. Fash 1996
1.
Copán: General view; Hieroglyphic stairway and
ballcourt. © W.L. Fash 1996
2.
Stela A. © W.L. Fash 1996
3.
Stela N. © B.W. Fash 1996
4.
Interior of museum; construction of central temple
"Rosalila" in progress; open roof and decorated ceiling.
© W.L. Fash 1996
5.
General view of the museum interior. © R. Frehsee
1996
6.
Museum entrance; serpent mouth. © R. Frehsee 1996
7.
Tunnel into museum. © R. Frehsee 1996
8.
Bat sculpture. © R. Frehsee 1996
9.
Skulls and Tlaloc sculpture from stairway of Structure 16.
© B.W. Fash 1996
10.
Depiction of Venus painted on drop ceiling. © B.W. Fash
1996
11.
Reconstructed façade from ancient royal residence,
now in sculpture museum. © W.L. Fash III 1996
12.
Replica of Rosalila temple; museum centerpiece. © B.W.
Fash 1996
13.
Detail of original stucco decoration on Rosalila showing
color investigation. © K. Garrett 1996
14.
Detail of stucco relief; bird on lower story of Rosalila.
© B.W. Fash 1996
15.
Local artisans at work on replica of Rosalila; clay. ©
B.W. Fash 1996
16.
Local masons work to rebuild a hieroglphic text. © W.L.
Fash 1996
17.
Sculpture mosaic of maize god. © B.W. Fash 1996
18.
Cobbled street in Copán village center. © D.
Flanagan 1996
19.
Modern potter in rural mountain community. © D.
Flanagan 1996
20.
The modern village of Copán. © W.L. Fash
1996
All text copyright ©
Barbara W. Fash and William L. Fash 1996
For More
Information...
Please see the article by Jonathan
Shaw in the January/February 1997 issue of Harvard Magazine,
entitled Maya
Museum: Renewing a century of Harvard Connections to
Copan
Barbara Fash, the co-author of this
article, is also happy to answer any further questions.
Please notify her by e-mail at bfash@fas.harvard.edu
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