Video: One Woman's Fight to Protect Ancient Maya Legacy
2025 Tatiana Proskouriakoff Lecture
When the looting and illicit trade of cultural artifacts surged In the 1960s, one voice rose in defense of archaeological sites in the Americas—Clemency Coggins. A pioneering art historian and legendary figure in Maya archaeology, Dr. Coggins stood with Ian Graham in calling for ethical stewardship of cultural heritage. Join an illuminating evening as Dr. Coggins recounts her groundbreaking advocacy that helped shape U.S. policy and UNESCO conventions on cultural property. With vivid stories and a special video presentation, she reflects on her collaborations with notable figures such as Tatiana Proskouriakoff and the role of the Peabody Museum in the protection of Maya heritage. This conversation, moderated by Maya Corpus Director Barbara Fash and research associate Steven Quinchia, will bring to life the intersection of scholarship, activism, and international policy—and the extraordinary woman who helped change the course of cultural preservation.
Speaker: Dr. Clemency Chase Coggins, Professor Emerita of Archaeology and Art History, Boston University; Research Associate, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
About the Speaker
Professor Clemency Coggins has served on the Boston University faculty since 1989 in the Archaeology and in the Art History departments. Professor Coggins received a BA from Wellesley College, after studying a year in France, and her MA and PhD from Harvard University in Fine Arts, with a dissertation on the reconstruction of historical context at the ancient Maya site of Tikal, Guatemala. She also taught at Harvard, the University of Texas, and the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico. Most of her research and publications concern Maya and Mesoamerican archaeology, international cultural property, museums, and the international trade in antiquities. In 1997 she received the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America. She has also received awards for outstanding contributions from Rutgers University, the American Society for Conservation Archaeology, and for outstanding service from the United States Information Agency.
Recorded October 16, 2025
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.
Transcript
One Woman's Fight to Protect Ancient Maya Legacy
[00:00:06.44] Welcome both in-person and to our online audience. My name is Jane Pickering. I'm the William & Muriel Seabury Howells director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and I'm delighted to welcome you here and also online to the 2025 Tatiana Proskouriakoff Award lecture. And thank you for being here.
[00:00:33.84] And before we start, I do want to acknowledge that Harvard University is located on the traditional land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of Boston and Cambridge, and we acknowledge the nearby Wampanoag and Nipmuc tribal communities as well.
[00:00:54.56] So tonight, the lecture is named after the internationally nationally respected scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who many of you in the audience, I'm sure know more about than me, but I have learned as being director that she came to the Peabody in 1958 as an architect and expert in Maya art, architecture, and hieroglyphic writing.
[00:01:18.75] Her research became the foundation for the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics, and her studies of Maya art are considered classics among archeologists and art historians. And her work is just beautiful. Let's just say that. I have one in my office. Not an original, she adds quickly.
[00:01:38.59] The Proskouriakoff Award was established by a gift from Landon T. Clay to recognize the artistic achievements of non-European cultures of the new world, along with outstanding contributions in the field of new world Indian studies.
[00:01:54.99] And we are delighted and honored to welcome the 2025 award recipient, Dr. Clemency Fisher Coggins, Professor emerita of archeology and art history at Boston University, and I'm delighted to say, a research associate of the Peabody Museum. So welcome, Clemency. It's an honor to be here this evening and also to welcome your family, including a very, very little one who may not be in here right now.
[00:02:25.27] So following the program, I invite you to join us in the galleries of the museum. Those of you who are here in Cambridge to join us upstairs, and there will be people to direct you if you're not aware of where to go. And also suggest if you want to learn about upcoming museum events, you can visit our website, hmsc.harvard.edu. And you can sign up for our newsletter. And you can also follow us on social media. And we are always so grateful for our members and supporters that enable us to have programs like the one tonight.
[00:03:04.34] So it's now my pleasure to turn everything over to Barbara Fash, who is the director of the corpus of Maya hieroglyphs here at the Peabody Museum and who has been the mastermind behind this evening's festivities that I'm looking forward to. And we're all really in for a treat, I think. Thank you.
[00:03:27.86] [APPLAUSE]
[00:03:32.34] All right. Thank you, everybody, for being here tonight. And welcome. Many of you colleagues from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and Belize out there somewhere.
[00:03:48.18] I want to extend my thanks to Jane for support of the event. And there's several people, Diana Munn and Faith Sutter here at HMSC and Johnny DeKam and Ken McGowan at Harvard media productions, who really made this event possible. Also, Cynthia Mackey, our image registrar at the Peabody Museum.
[00:04:10.66] So there's a lot of technology in this event, and we're trying something a little different tonight. Instead of just the usual lecture, we'll be having more of a conversation and a video.
[00:04:26.38] So tonight, we honor Dr. Clemency Chase Coggins, a friend and colleague who, as Jane mentioned, has been a research associate here at the Peabody Museum since 1979. Clemency holds an MA in library science from San Jose State University and a BA from Wellesley College, and she received her PhD from Harvard in 1975, writing a seminal dissertation.
[00:04:55.46] Oh, and I wanted to point out, for those of you unfamiliar with Mesoamerica, that we have site of Teotihuacan over there in Central Mexico and Tikal, and those little-- both figured prominently in Clemency's dissertation, which was writing, painting, and drawing styles at Tikal and historical and iconographic reconstruction.
[00:05:18.49] Tatiana Proskouriakoff was actually one of the scholars who signed it, and it's never been published. However, our colleague, Norman Hammond, says it is the most cited unpublished work in Maya archeology. And it's because it laid a foundation about the interaction between two metropolises, Tikal in the Maya petén region and Teotihuacan in Highland Mexico.
[00:05:43.13] So one happy outcome of the research and planning for tonight's event was to locate and view her original dissertation with the color images pasted in and request the Harvard Library to digitize it. Because it is extremely important to Guatemalan archeologist and descendant communities today who only have access to poor xeroxed copies, that obscure the image details. And you can see some of those in that slide over there on the far end. It will be available online through requests initially, but we will be also working to make it open access.
[00:06:27.24] So Clemency served on a dozen academic boards and received many awards, including the gold medal for distinguished archeological achievement from the Archeological Institute of America. She authored over 50 publications, including the 1992 Peabody Museum memoir Artifacts from the cenote of sacrifice and others such as Heritage and Property, a Latin American perspective Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Guatemala in a 2007 edited volume, Who Owns the past? Rights and Responsibilities in a Multicultural World.
[00:07:04.00] In 1969, as a graduate student, she published a now famous article titled Illicit Traffic in pre-Columbian antiquities in the College Art Association's Art Journal, exposing large-scale theft and export of Maya monuments from Guatemala and Mexico while revealing the complicity of American museums and collectors fueling and benefiting from this destruction and illicit trade.
[00:07:28.48] Clemency's detailed list of specific sculptures was influential and hard to ignore and raised more awareness, and attracted more attention to the problem than any previous publication. She worked with Ian Graham, another Maverick in the crusade, who was the founder of the Maya Corpus program I now direct.
[00:07:49.68] While Ian was collecting data in the field, he'd pass it on to Clemency, who then published it in articles such as the list you just saw. Ian really confronted the problem head on, returning to a site to find pillagers had sawn and sledgehammered large monuments into pieces that were smuggled out in private airplanes, boats, or hidden under fruit and commercial trucks and then laundered through trading networks, passed on to dealers, and then sold as legal items to galleries and museums.
[00:08:20.75] Combating this looting and the illicit traffic of pre-Columbian antiquities in the 1970s and '80s became the cause celebre of Clemency and Ian. Together at the 1970s UNESCO convention, they exposed the veneer of legitimacy stemming from the high profits at one end of this chain that encouraged looting on the other.
[00:08:42.19] Clemency's pivotal role was controversial, and as a woman, she was often sidelined in the US for advocating this unpopular stance and convincing policymakers in Washington, DC, to ratify and adopt regulations for international action to regulate the art trade. Balancing moral values and cultural preservation over art market and dealers interests was no easy battle. Preserving context was the primary goal.
[00:09:08.23] We're all indebted to Clemency's courageousness for often being the lone voice, bringing the destruction of cultural heritage into the limelight. At a time when women struggle to assert their fundamental right to be heard, she advocated for cultural heritage protection laws that empowered source countries to take action to reclaim their lost cultural property.
[00:09:29.59] So this whole program tonight began as an archival project a year and a half ago, when I pulled a series of boxes off the shelf in the Maya Corpus office that Ian had left behind. They had labels that read Antiquities Trade. I asked research assistant, Steven Quinchia, who's here with us tonight, to make a detailed finding aid, and in the process, we became utterly fascinated by the material on the 1970s UNESCO convention. And it really became apparent that these regulations would not have been enacted if it were not for Clemency.
[00:10:04.38] So we sought her out in her home, and those conversations led to the making of the video interview that will be played next. So think of that as really part of the lecture. And that will be followed by a conversation with Clemency on stage and then questions and answers.
[00:10:23.06] So bear with us as we navigate through the technology here. But it's an opportune moment, I think, to revisit these important players who played an important role in shaping Harvard's archeological legacy. And we're so proud to bestow Clemency Coggins the Tatiana Proskouriakoff Award lecture to celebrate her extraordinary contributions to the field. Thank you.
[00:10:50.40] [APPLAUSE]
[00:10:55.72] [VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[00:10:56.21] - As an art historian, I was very object oriented. For me, it was very, very important to understand where things came from. By my interest in what is basically provenance or provenience is what motivated me to get involved.
[00:11:13.97] I'm Clemency Coggins. I'm an art historian and archeologist, retired. I had majored in the history of art at Wellesley and studied history of art in Paris for a year, eventually working with archeology, real archeology and not just collections. I was this older graduate student. I had three children, and we had lived in various places like Cyprus and the Mediterranean and California, and we had moved around. So I became very focused on context.
[00:11:50.49] What was the actual original location and finding point of any object, which to me was some of the most important things about it rather than what it looked like, I became attached to the Peabody Museum.
[00:12:09.37] I must have looked very honest, because I was put in charge of cataloging the gold collection, which was an extraordinary experience, which no one else is ever going to have. It's mind boggling now to think of me sitting in that basement by myself with all this gold, most of which came from Panama, which actually all came from Colombia, or almost all.
[00:12:38.13] Some years after this, years of cataloging and so forth, I put in an exhibit at the Peabody, and this Tyrone, a beautiful Tyrone piece was exhibited in a case as you went in. It was possible easily to reach around the back of the exhibit and take this incredible gold. It was stolen. Quite simply, it was stolen.
[00:13:15.20] The course of doing that work, I became very interested in the collections and where they came from. I published somewhat inflammatory articles, which interested people enough to start working on legislation. And I was on a committee in Washington for a number of years, where we worked out a legislation which corresponded to the UNESCO convention and applied to the United States and the accession of objects by the United States and which various other countries eventually adopted.
[00:13:55.24] I remember going to Pat Moynihan, Senator Moynihan's office, which in those days, it was just amazing. You could walk into the Capitol, and then you could see them. You could meet with them. Well, anyway, he was marginally interested. I did not have an academic position, so there was no institution that was behind me that they could attack.
[00:14:21.14] I wrote an article which appeared in the College Art Journal. It was called The Illicit Traffic of Pre-Columbian Antiquities, which had pictures of monuments of stelae on the ground and monuments that were gone. Of course, I took the famous museum course as a graduate student at the Fogg with John Coolidge, who was the director of the Fogg, and nobody understood the way I saw this problem. They just-- they were art historians, and art historians work with what you've got, not where it came from, really.
[00:15:01.51] Tania was someone I love very much, and she was a good friend. I worked on some collections in her lab, large lab, the valuables, not collections. All the rest of the cenote collections I had up in one of the first halls in the Peabody on some big tables, and I had them all spread out. These were all the ordinary things, which were some of the most interesting, really, in some ways, because they were wood, and they were preserved in the cenote.
[00:15:37.33] I was particularly interested in working in the more perishable ones that survived, which was a rare opportunity because such things, nobody pays any attention to such things. And they only survived because they were underwater all that time.
[00:15:56.30] In the case of otter level, if you came across this and said, oh, this came from Chichén Itza, and you think, oh, well, that's interesting, but you might not know that this had been thrown as an offering into this sacred watering hole as some kind of an offering.
[00:16:22.32] And of course, there's all the jades. The jades from the cenote had already been published, studied and published by Tania Proskouriakoff, who was most interested in the jade itself rather than where it might have come from. Some of it came long distances. For instance, might come from Colombia. And then we find it in the cenote of sacrifice, a gold object from Colombia or Panama in the cenote of sacrifice at Chichén Itza. How did it get there? Did it come through Panama? Did it come over land the whole way?
[00:17:04.42] Provenance is what the art world likes to use. And it doesn't mean the same thing that I mean. When I say provenience I mean, where did it really come from? What is it really about? What's its ultimate source, story? From my point of view, is the most important thing about an ancient object.
[00:17:29.14] I mean, these things are here in the museum. We look at them, and the label tells us what they are and how they-- to some degree, how they got here. And that's as far as most people ever think.
[00:17:41.42] George Kubler had been given the commission to find art historians to cover different aspects of the excavations of Tikal. I was given drawing and painting, which effectively meant burial ceramics and the very occasional wall painting. Very few have ever survived at Tikal. And it was an extraordinary experience, and I was very, very fortunate to do that. And that was the topic of my dissertation.
[00:18:19.99] I used all of the excavated material from excavated burials, which created not only a chronology but a sequence of rulers which I wasn't even aware I was creating. And there was some anthropologist-- I've forgotten who-- who took this information in my dissertation about the ceramics, painting, drawing styles of deco and created a whole genealogy of Tikal.
[00:18:50.73] I worked in the bodega, in the bodega, in the storeroom, really, where all the ceramics were stored on tables, working with things that had been excavated, which was all I ever wanted to do in the world. It was wonderful. I would still do it if someone gave me a site or a collection to work on.
[00:19:18.77] I was able, fortunately, to rely on wonderful drawings made by the Tikal project because I am no artist, and they had drawings and photographs. And then I was able to work with the actual objects. And it was a wonderful experience. The preceding here, Kubler had taught a course that included or maybe even focused on Teotihuacan.
[00:19:52.46] I was totally sensitized to Teotihuacan and its architecture, its iconography, everything. And then it was so clearly present. And now, with the extraordinary altar which has just been found-- I mean, it's just another, in this case, huge example of the relationship, which was-- as far as from my point of view, was evident in ceramics, in burials, and also on the famous Stela 31, which had reference to Teotihuacan.
[00:20:37.12] In this Congress I went to in Vienna, where it was international, all kinds of things. And there were a bunch of dealers there, and they lined me up and took my picture, which I have always thought must be on the wall of various dealers, both to identify me and so they can throw darts at it. I was generally persona non grata, the fact that I had published articles about the antiquities trade and traffic, and that it was an illegal and dangerous traffic, which was, from my point of view and from the point of view of any archeologist, destroying so much.
[00:21:29.03] One lovely figurine, jade figurine like this, how much was destroyed getting to that and then getting it. I mean, it's just so beyond-- you can't barely understand how much is destroyed, how much is lost by bringing this one beautiful, expensive object to a gallery in New York.
[00:21:54.31] Well, that's not the way they saw it. From George Kubler's point of view, we were all going to be destroyed by atom bomb anyway. Once he said hidden in annoyance with me in what I kept saying and he make me stop. So that hasn't happened yet.
[00:22:19.03] Once when I went to New York and went to Ed Marin's place, Marin, who was a feisty guy, he made a fairly obscene remark to me saying I was just making life hard for myself. What was the point? I was interested in objects, I love objects. Why make all this fuss was the underlying logic of his approach, which was attacking me, but this was all very genial.
[00:22:51.62] And Betty Benson was there from Dumbarton Oaks at the time. It was just coincidence that she and I both turned up at this dealer. She was his friend. I was his antagonist. And the fact that I had a kind of invulnerability was certainly very lucky.
[00:23:18.94] And quite a few countries passed legislation trying to protect their own antiquities, huge amounts of work to be done in the Mexico and Guatemala. Certainly, countries are trying, but it's an impossible problem. You cannot control all the areas where there are important, valuable s I hate to say that, but that's the fact.
[00:23:48.77] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:24:04.86] [END PLAYBACK]
[00:24:07.82] [APPLAUSE]
[00:24:12.78] Well, thank you all for coming. May you learn it's a bad idea to loot Maya art, if nothing else.
[00:24:23.10] Well, you've had an extraordinary life, and you've done some extraordinary things. I'm very impressed, I'm sure everybody else is, with your determination. It seems like you never let people stand in your way.
[00:24:37.69] And if people said no to you, you didn't let them get to you. I think that is pretty amazing, especially like the story about the Vienna conference where they stood you up and took pictures of you to essentially identify you. I mean, it seems like that was an intimidation tactic, right? Did you feel threatened by that or did it just make you more determined?
[00:25:05.25] It was too long after the fact, I think. I think I can say-- and I think this is an important thing for people to know, that I felt-- actually, effectively, I was an older woman with no connections to the field. This was an entirely new field to me. I had children in school, and I came to graduate school, and I discovered this field where there were suddenly these incredible problems.
[00:25:36.64] And so I thought, well, there must be something I can do. And then the fact was, since I had so few connections, that I had a kind of invulnerability if there's something that often women maybe have in such situations. And that's basically how it worked. And once I started talking, they let me keep on talking.
[00:26:03.96] You mentioned the difference between provenance and provenience and explained in the video that distinction. That provenance is really the documentation of ownership of an object, and provenience is the archeological context where an object was found or excavated.
[00:26:23.80] So what happens when a looter erases the context of an object? I mean, what do archeologists do to preserve that information? So here's two slides. One shows what remains after the archeologists have excavated some pottery, and the other is Rio Azul, a bunch of pottery left by the looters. So can you explain to people what kind of information is lost in that process?
[00:26:57.14] Well, that comes down to the burials. What are burials? Burials are expressions of a whole culture, of the end of a culture. And they include many, many different kinds of objects that reflect that culture, the people in that culture, the history of that culture at a particular moment of kind.
[00:27:19.96] And so that's what the whole provenance, which is the dealer word or provenience, which is the more archeological word, what it's all about, is what, in fact, do we know about where something was actually found and how much do we know? And that depends so much on how it was found and how it was excavated.
[00:27:47.55] And of course, when you see things in a dealer's shop, there basically is no real provenance or provenience because they will be saying whatever will sell the object. And they don't know anyway. It came through various different levels of transport from wherever it started.
[00:28:12.83] Provenance is the art historical term. I'm an art historian, but I'm saying it in a negative sense, provenance. And provenience is the more ordinary word that refers to the real, in fact, source of something.
[00:28:31.11] Yeah. So, for example, we wouldn't know anything about those pottery shards in that color photo where as we'd know something because that was carefully excavated and you see these four to five pots together, you know they came out together out of a certain burial, out of a certain site, whereas pottery from Rio Azul was sold on the market. No one knew where it came from.
[00:28:59.32] And it may not have come from Rio Azul anyway. Right. So those two words are slippery, and they have very different significance.
[00:29:15.18] So Dr. Coggins, in the video interview, you mentioned a stolen gold pendant. It was an incident that occurred here in 1978, as reported by the Crimson. It was a golden pendant, Columbian in origin, from the Cauca region, acquired by the Peabody in 1899 and featured in your masterpieces of the Peabody, which you wrote up an article on it.
[00:29:38.62] We were able to track down these images that you see here. These are really, honestly, never-before seen. These were in the Peabody Museum archives and exact color images of the item that was stolen on that day.
[00:29:51.08] Have you found it now?
[00:29:52.70] Maybe. No.
[00:29:53.80] No.
[00:29:55.10] With the tools that we're going to look at, maybe that will be a possibility in the near future. Speaking of, do you think there's still a chance of this item being recovered this far along?
[00:30:08.82] I think they took the accession number of the forehead where it used to be, typical Peabody artistic location. But it would be obvious if it turned up. I doubt very much if it should turn up for a long, long time. Unfortunately, the Peabody Museum as a museum, basically of anthropologists, yes, archeologists but anthropologists, they're really not so much interested in the objects at all.
[00:30:40.97] And they did not take terribly good care of things, and hence very low security for something like this exhibition, which had this extraordinary gold pendant from Colombia, was on exhibit just inside the front door case of the Peabody, where anybody with a fraction of sense could walk in and walk around behind it and take it, which they did. Because nobody was thinking about security in those days, just they weren't thinking about it.
[00:31:18.63] And frankly, the anthropologists were not that interested in objects. They were interested in anthropology. And they get someone like me, an art historian, who suddenly focused on all these things. They're just grateful. That's all. That's all.
[00:31:36.73] Well, now we do have a lot of security, so--
[00:31:39.97] Yes, there's better security.
[00:31:42.69] A better security anyway.
[00:31:43.89] This isn't going to happen.
[00:31:45.25] No, but--
[00:31:45.71] This was long, long ago.
[00:31:47.01] Yes.
[00:31:47.29] Long ago.
[00:31:48.11] No, but it's interesting to see the contrast. And also, Stephen and I didn't know really about this piece, and we thought it's a good time to bring it out again so that in case it does turn up somewhere, which it might because some of these things go into hiding for long periods, and--
[00:32:06.05] It'll turn up.
[00:32:06.83] They brought out again, and somebody tries to sell them. So it's good to know what it looks like so that if it does appear, then you can alert authorities to it.
[00:32:19.29] Speaking of, this is actually one of the newest tools. And I don't know if just the stars aligned for us, but this was just released by UNESCO. It's their virtual museum for stolen artifacts.
[00:32:29.43] Really?
[00:32:29.69] You can access it-- yes. You can access it online. Here we have a walkthrough, and right here what you're looking at is the kind of UI experience here. You'll start seeing these virtual galleries as you see here.
[00:32:45.72] Here we looked at the Latin American artifacts in particular since obviously it's relevant for tonight. So really, what they're doing here, they're including 3D renderings of objects using available images, historical images, archival images in order to create a more interactive experience to try and educate and track down some of these items.
[00:33:07.60] Here we have a ceramic piece. As you can see, the rendering, it's only half rendered, and the next pop up explains why. It's a 3D rendering produced with AI from existing images. So this is the best they can do, but it's pretty good. And below they give you a bit of the provenience, details about where it comes from, dates, possibly, of its creation, and then the original image where all of this stuff is really based out of, because, again, they're working with very minimal sources because these are stolen objects from decades past.
[00:33:42.07] I like to think that a lot of this is like off the record, kind of off the grid, because this was before the internet. So to get this stuff on, especially like the previous image of the gold item, I think would be a great way to hopefully get these things back repatriated.
[00:33:56.11] This is a really great piece that we were really happy to present to you in particular, because it caught us by surprise literally three days ago. It was released October 3.
[00:34:05.31] Just for you.
[00:34:06.21] Just for you. I think they didn't want to get shown up today.
[00:34:10.27] So they had to get this out here quick.
[00:34:13.03] So this UNESCO database is now open?
[00:34:16.51] That's a website that, yeah, you can go visit. I just recommend googling UNESCO virtual museum, and it'll be the first one.
[00:34:23.07] And the gold Peabody piece is in there?
[00:34:25.17] No, but maybe that would be a great one too.
[00:34:26.47] No, we haven't had time to do that yet.
[00:34:28.51] Maybe it would be a great idea to communicate the gold pieces to the UNESCO virtual museum, have it in there, since who knows we'll might be able to talk about that as the next project.
[00:34:39.25] There's a very large jade that was stolen from an exhibit while it was in Mexico City from Copan, and it was.
[00:34:48.77] Oh, I remember.
[00:34:49.12] And so that would be another good one to put out there.
[00:34:52.83] Next up here, we have the Rio Azul mask, which I know you personally had-- you saw it personally in an art gallery in New York from my understanding. And well, obviously, during these times you were interacting with these dealers, and they had their own ethics. You had your own as well.
[00:35:10.91] They knew who I was.
[00:35:12.17] You were on their radar.
[00:35:13.57] They didn't like the sight of me.
[00:35:15.87] Their arguments, if you just follow the newspapers, they were all pretty cookie cutter arguments. They were claiming that they were preserving history from destruction, that they were the best option instead of letting the items get destroyed in their homeland. How did you counter those arguments?
[00:35:32.40] Well, they wouldn't have said that to me. They knew better than that. They were just sort of embarrassed. Would change the subject. I don't know. I saw that. That was in the Andre Emmerich gallery where I saw that mask. Yes, from Rio Azul.
[00:35:47.58] And it was pretty-- it wasn't too far off from the suspected time of looting. It was the--
[00:35:53.82] Oh, no, no, no, it wasn't.
[00:35:56.46] So the velocity of this trafficking was something to be noticed. This wasn't just something that would just disappear for a few decades. It was on sale before you knew it and the galleries. That's pretty incredible and unbelievable.
[00:36:09.70] I think it's people who love ancient objects and archeological objects. It's often hard for them to understand that these come from somewhere and wondering how they came from wherever it was. And this is what we're talking about is the way archeological sites are destroyed in the process of producing these objects for the art market, which had they not been destroyed, we would never have known them. There you are. That's what someone would say. Well, we would never have seen these things. So then what?
[00:36:48.16] So as if our perception, our ownership, was the most desirable final outcome for such a-- whereas from an archeological point of view, it's the remains of a whole culture, of a whole society, of a whole archeological site, which is a very complex, complicated thing, more than a burial.
[00:37:14.10] Great.
[00:37:14.82] Well, that really sums it up. Thank you. Well, we have a couple of video clips from two of our colleagues in Guatemala. And they can't be here, but they wanted to talk a little bit about your impact on them and on Guatemala.
[00:37:37.35] [VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[00:37:38.13] - When she became involved with the protection of Guatemala's cultural heritage, it was a critical moment for Guatemala. And Edna Nunez de Rodas was the director of the Cultural Heritage Institute in Guatemala, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. And they work together very closely.
[00:38:01.51] It was the time when many sites had been looted in the petén, and she was a really elegant liaison to do this. And we as undergraduate students at the time saw her as this super interesting, super elegant lady. We always thought we want to be like her, because the way she behaved and the way she just-- her persona was open and so willing to talk to so many people.
[00:38:35.30] And then, of course, through the [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] and being so important instrumental for working towards the first memorandum of understanding of illicit traffic in the country, which, of course, didn't happen immediately, but she was instrumental in it actually happening and being signed by the Guatemalan government.
[00:38:54.56] She was also very strong about Rio Azul, the looting of Rio Azul, because there were so many pieces in the market, just from the local perspective of Edna Nunez de Rodas and Dora de Gonzalez, who were super strong at protecting Guatemala's cultural heritage, discussing and bringing in the relevance of Clemency Coggins as a major figure for all these agreements or the paperwork that they were working to protect Guatemala's cultural heritage and to sign all these official agreements.
[00:39:32.76] By Clemency doing that for Guatemala, she set the pace for other Latin American countries. Because perhaps Guatemala was one of the first, at least for Central America, one of the first countries that signed the agreement, but then others came afterwards. And actually, this was an example that was followed by other countries and obviously, the United States government supporting it, so--
[00:39:59.95] But she went through a lot of trouble. She spent a lot of time, and she did a lot of work outside her duties as a professor, probably at the university to do this. And that's the service to the community that one has to do.
[00:40:17.92] She was an instrumental figure to get the US government to actually pay attention to what was happening, and not just the US government but also the Guatemalan government. Her work was critical for the protection of cultural heritage in the Americas. I have her in this pedestal, and that she's been a great model.
[00:40:46.23] - Hi my name is Francisco Estrada-Belli, and I'm proud to be one of Clemency's former graduate students. One of my very first assignments was for Clemency's my iconography class. And she sent me to the Peabody Museum to do a formal analysis of one of those Maya ceramics from Holmul that were on display. I had to go back three times before she gave me a passing grade on that one. And so that was my first contact with Maya ceramics from Holmul.
[00:41:22.67] And Clemency's teaching had a huge impact on me. Everything I know about my iconography, I learned from her in my iconography classes. One of the areas in which Clemency Coggins had a huge impact in our field and on me personally, my education is a cultural property.
[00:41:45.59] Coming from Italy, I should have known this, but I didn't really understand it the way she saw it. And within a short period after taking her class and then reading, I became a true believer that the antiquities trade is very bad, collecting is bad, and auction sales are bad, to the point that one time she send me to New York City.
[00:42:23.38] There was an auction sale in an art gallery in Manhattan. I don't remember the name of it. But she couldn't go, so she sent me to work with the district attorney. And my job was to go into the auction exhibit and identify some potential pieces of ceramics that may have been from Guatemala or from Mexico for that matter.
[00:42:51.94] I got involved with the antiquities trade and collecting and the ethics, or lack thereof, of collecting, was when the November collection was put on display at the MFA. Even though Clemency didn't tell me to go, I was such a convinced believer the fact that the collecting was the same as stealing.
[00:43:24.51] And so I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe about how this November collection was made of stolen artifacts. It was terrible. And I even went to the museum and did a little protest there. And I remember getting into a discussion with somebody who was a museum donor or someone who was on the board. And so there was also a proud moment for me, and I thought Clemency would be proud.
[00:43:59.13] And now I am getting involved with the antiquities trade and collecting and museums once again, because this summer, I was working around this and found that one of the stele, La Stela 7 Honradez, had been cut off and the top part-- just the entire image of the ruler was missing. And then Alex Tokovinine showed me a picture, and it was on display in California in the San Bernardino County Museum.
[00:44:33.89] And so I am going to do something about that. And with the pictures that Ian Graham took-- and they're in the Peabody right now. I took those pictures in 1976. So I don't know when the stela was taken out of the country, out of Guatemala, out of the site, out of Guatemala, but I know it was after Ian Graham took that picture in 1976. So it's illegal.
[00:45:02.13] The key, I guess, is not the looter. The key is the buyer. And so luckily, the UNESCO convention that Clemency was instrumental in enacting has had a huge impact on the antiquities trade.
[00:45:19.44] I remember when I started as an archeologist in the US, there were auction sales all the time. And now it's actually maybe just a trickle. It's quite rare to see an auction at an art gallery with nonfake pieces. Because there are lots of flake pieces for sale on eBay and such, but otherwise, it's become a trickle.
[00:45:47.36] My message to Clemency is that I send her my love, and I thank her so much for everything she did for me during my career as a graduate student and after. And I want to congratulate her on this great honor, this great award she's receiving. And it's a recognition of her huge contribution to our field.
[00:46:12.21] [END PLAYBACK]
[00:46:12.68] That was a former graduate student of mine who seemed to have entirely too much to say.
[00:46:19.20] Anyway, it was a real pleasure to have both of them speak about Clemency's impact, and I hope you got a bigger understanding, a better understanding of that.
[00:46:32.98] Well, it's 7:00, and I think we can adjourn to the reception upstairs. Thank you all for coming, but mostly, I want to thank you, Clemency, for all you've done for ancient Maya legacy and beyond, because as Barbara Arroyo said, many other cultures and countries followed suit after the UNESCO convention was ratified and Guatemala signed. So we all want to thank you tonight.
[00:47:03.36] And thank you. Thank you all. Thank you all.
[00:47:06.76] [APPLAUSE]