Transcript
The 2022 Gordon R. Willey Lecture
The story of Maya culture as a once-great civilization that built towering pyramids in the jungles of Central America was developed and popularized by national governments, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Previously unable to control the story of their own culture, Maya communities today are actively reframing their heritage and centering their most recent history—not the distant past—to regain power and self-determination. Richard Leventhal discussed the importance and role that the nineteenth-century Caste War—one of the largest and most successful Indigenous rebellions—is playing in the Maya’s contested heritage.
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and Harvard Museums of Science & Culture in collaboration with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Recorded October 20, 2022
About the Speaker
Richard M. Leventhal, Professor, Department of Anthropology and Executive Director, Penn Cultural Heritage Center, Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania
Richard M. Leventhal is Executive Director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center of the Penn Museum as well as Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Curator in the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he formerly served as the Williams Director. Prior to coming to Penn, he was the President of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Leventhal received his PhD from Harvard University. He is one of the Directors of the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project focused upon the nineteenth-century Caste War rebellion in the Yucatan. He has written extensively about the Maya and about cultural heritage preservation.
Transcript: Rethinking Maya Heritage: Past and Present
[00:00:08.95] Hello? Can everyone hear me? OK, this is really weird because it's been such a long time since I've stood up here in front of a live audience for a lecture. But for those of you who don't know me, my name's Jane Pickering and I'm the director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. And I'm totally delighted and slightly like whoa to be inviting people in person to the Gordon R. Willey lecture, which of course, is named after one of the foremost archeologists of pre-Columbian America.
[00:00:48.40] And there are people sitting in the front row here who know much more about Professor Willey than I do so I'm not going to say any more about that. Probably many in the audience as well. But this is the first time, we're holding the lecture in person and it's just great to be here. So thank you all for coming. We also have many people joining us via Zoom, and so I want to welcome our online audience as well.
[00:01:15.23] And this evening we're delighted to have Richard Leventhal from the University of Pennsylvania with us. And he will be discussing how Maya communities today are actively reframing their heritage and centering their most recent history, not the distant past, to regain power and self determination. After the lecture, for those of you here in the audience, we are having a reception on the third floor of the Peabody Museum.
[00:01:44.86] So I hope you'll all be able to stay, join us, meet the speaker. There will be volunteers if you go out of that door to direct you up to the third floor of the museum. And now my final job is to welcome Bill Fash, the Bowdich professor of Central American and Mexican Archeology and Ethnology, dear friend, who will introduce our speaker.
[00:02:38.52] Hello, everyone. Welcome on a beautiful fall evening. Thank you very much, Jane for having the courage to have the event in person, and to Diana also for helping organize it. Richard M. Leventhal, as many of you already know, is the executive director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center of the Penn Museum, which he founded, as well as Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
[00:03:07.80] Richard serves as curator in the American section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology where he has also served with distinction honor and principles as the William director, William's director. Prior to coming to Penn, he was president of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And before that the director of the Watson Institute of Archeology at the University of California Los Angeles.
[00:03:38.74] It's a truly remarkable record of making a difference at major research institutions. He's one of the directors of the Tihosuco heritage preservation and community development project focused upon the 19th century caste war rebellion in Yucatan. He's written extensively about the Maya living historical and archeological for decades, where he has also set a gold standard in ethical collaborative cultural heritage preservation.
[00:04:10.39] Born and bred in the Boston area, Richard received both his AB PhD degrees in anthropology at Harvard. He was Gordon Willey Standout Student in his graduate cohort of which I was a junior member. We first met at the reception for first year graduate students when I joined the program. Richard was as always a major present at this event. After introducing himself and chatting amiably for a while, he asked what I would like to do during my graduate career.
[00:04:40.93] And he listened attentively and with interest while I did my elevator speech. Well, came the sage reply with a smile. Around here, you win some, you lose quite a few. Sage advice that have provided me with solace and perspective ever since.
[00:05:02.08] After his senior thesis on the Cozumel project directed by Jerry Satloff and his dissertation research on settlement patterns at Copan directed by Gordon Willey, Richard set off on his own and began working at the major site of Xunantunich in southern Belize. He directed and began-- pardon me, he directed several research and conservation ventures there before coming to the conclusion that he and I and many others should be approaching the archeology of the Maya in a new and different way. Once again, he charted a new course in a new context, which he-- which has led to the exciting new work that will-- he'll be sharing with us this evening and has influenced many others to do the same, myself included.
[00:05:49.65] To Richard's peripatetic fox, I've been the burrowing hedgehog, remaining in Copan ever since my first year of apprenticeship to him and to Gordon. During that single season, I learned an immense amount, was enlightened often, and occasionally humbled by each of them. I can honestly say that in the 45 years I've been laboring in the Copan vineyard, or Cacao Orchard as it were, I have never, ever seen an archeologist work harder in the field than Richard.
[00:06:24.67] We're so pleased and honored that the archeology program's prodigal son has finally returned to his intellectual home this evening that for once words fail me. This is an occasion I and many others have been looking forward to for a very long time when Richard will join the likes of Bill Sanders, Jerry Satloff, Wendy Ashmore, Debra Nichols, Will Andrews, and other distinguished archeologists of Mesoamerica as a Gordon R. Willey lecturer. He hates long intros, so I'm going to give it up and just ask all of you to give it up for Richard Leventhal.
[00:07:02.83] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:07:12.21] Thank you very much.
[00:07:23.10] Bill, Jane, thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here this evening and get an opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the work that I've done. And actually this is a bit of an adventure for me because I'd like to take you through the things that I've done over the past 30, 40 years and how I've actually changed my approach to archeology and the nature of work in the Maya area. So I think this is a bit of an adventure for me, and hopefully you will enjoy yourself.
[00:07:55.75] I want to start out with just a land acknowledgment, and there are four here related to Massachusetts related to the Massachusetts tribe, the Lenni Lenape in the University of Pennsylvania region, the Yucatec Maya, and the Q'eqchi Maya of southern Belize. Most importantly, I don't want to just put this here and say I've done it. I'm fine, I want to actually encourage-- we are working very hard at Penn that the university to begin to think about what we can do beyond simply doing a land acknowledgment and begin to try to push towards real change and perhaps the return of some of the land back to the Lenni Lenape.
[00:08:37.14] This is a lecture named in honor of Gordon Willey, so I just wanted to put a few photographs. All three of them, you'll see me as my hair is much darker. I'm a lot thinner. This is our work at Copan you can see with Bill here on the bottom right. Gordon Willey and myself, my hair is a lot longer here-- don't tell too many of my students about that please-- and Catherine Willey I just wanted to mention also.
[00:09:08.25] Bill and I and Gordon are perplexed by something in the field, and then this was Gordon's retirement party, which was a black-tie event and was very pleased to be able to be there. So Gordon was a wonderful mentor, was a wonderful archeologist. But I also want to say that Gordon would disagree with every word that I say tonight. Gordon would not agree with anything, any ideas that I'm presenting to you, and when I begin to think about some of these ideas when Gordon was alive and he and I talked abou it, he made it very clear that he didn't agree at all.
[00:09:46.24] So the main question I want to start with is is the preservation study and heritage of the Maya equal to and related only to the ancient Maya. And I want to just take you through this exploration as I began to explore this question, and I continue to explore this today. This is in some sense the nature of archeology whether it's the early 1930s at Piedras Negras or the excavation of tombs at Caracol in the 1990s. This is the way archeology has been done.
[00:10:19.99] Here I am in 1976-77 perplexed by something clearly, and here I am in 2022. And I do think that there's a big difference between these two because I'm perplexed and not talking to anybody there. I probably am-- we are perplexed, but we are all having a conversation. I'm seated only because I'm getting old. And so this was a conversation that we were having about some historic architecture that I'll get to in just a few minutes.
[00:10:50.77] Started my work in Mesoamerica with Gordon and with Bill at Copan, the excavation of some outlying settlements, probably a temple building of some sort with the excavation. I then began to move to southern Belize where I did a variety of work working with the Department of Archeology in Belize here at Nimlipunit, a beautiful carved monument excavation of a ruler's tomb, probably three or four human remains there related to reopening of the tomb and putting a body in, the next body of the king as he probably would die at that point. Moved as Bill mentioned to Xunantunich, which in western Belize.
[00:11:45.45] And again did relatively straightforward archeology, looking at the west side of the Castillo, one of the second largest building in Belize, the largest one being at Caracol, gradually stripping it down, looking at an uncovering a stucco frieze that you can see here underneath the palm fronds there, and the excavation of a buried building that you can see behind Julia Sanchez there and the frieze visible here. And then, in fact, working very hard with Rudy Larios in Guatemala and others to think about how do we preserve this and realizing we can't preserve the stucco for tourism, so we began to make a fiberglass replica that we made casts and put in front of the stucco. So the stucco was preserved behind it. One meter in front is the fiberglass replica, and, in fact, when we have gone back to look at it, it still is relatively well preserved.
[00:12:44.11] And this is what it looks like at the very end. Massive excavations to think about the various phases of construction within the Castillo and there are two visible there, A-6 1st and A-6 2nd that you can see the A-6 1st at the very top, A-6 2nd associated with the frieze that you can see there. And then tunneling in-- and you can see where we began to tunnel here-- following what people were doing at Copan, Carago, and other places and finding, in fact, the staircase for A-6 3rd going back down with a balustrade here.
[00:13:19.23] So began to understand the nature of this building and the construction of this building. This is what the site began to look like. It's not a very large site, maybe 10,000 people at the most. The central area that was built up over time, eventually the ruler's residence here, and, in fact, the Castillo located here being perhaps the center of the site with a large construction off to the south. We tried to preserve the monuments, and we moved the monuments probably very similar to the way the ancient Maya moved large rocks on rollers, trying to protect them, move them into a new building a new museum that we built and then a visitor center like this that we were able to present.
[00:14:08.41] I want to just-- it's at this moment in my career that I will admit a variety of things begin to happen, and there are probably three or four events that really begin to change the way I approached archeology. One of them is due to a man that you can see on your left there, Tino Penados, and that's picture of him more quite recent. Tino was-- worked with me at Xunantunich. Here I am. He is here. I actually don't remember where Tino is.
[00:14:39.22] But he was my foreman. He worked with me day-- day by day every day in working and doing this work. And I remember one day where he and I were walking through the site and I turned to the Castillo and I said so this is your heritage. What do you think of that? What do you think of what we're doing? Are you enjoying the work that we are doing? How important is it to you?
[00:14:58.93] And he said to me no. This is not my heritage. I'm not from here. My family comes from southern Mexico.
[00:15:08.80] And so, in fact, the work that we're doing I think is great, but, in fact, it's not about my heritage. And I said, well, you're a Maya person. He said, yes, but this is not me. This is not my heritage.
[00:15:18.91] So I had made an incorrect assumption about the relationship between heritage and identity in modern Maya people as if all Maya people think alike, are alike. It was my mistake. So Tino corrected me on that and made me think quite a bit about the nature of this.
[00:15:37.76] I want to just mention another moment which is in southern Belize at the site of Uxbenka. It's a site that I was taken to with some of my students back in 1983 when we began to look at the site, and it's up on a hill. It's a series-- some other archeologists have done work there.
[00:15:58.31] This is a photograph of an incredibly beautiful partially destroyed monument. The head would have been up here. It has gone, but, in fact, you can see the legs facing to your left. Very important monument because it actually talks about the relationship between this side of Uxbenka and Tikal off to the west.
[00:16:20.09] And so we began to clear the site-- this is that same photograph again-- back in 1983. A number of years later, I went back to the site, and, in fact, this was a local Maya community. And this is what happened to the site. They began to have-- the community had major disagreements with the government of Belize, and they burned all of the protective huts over the stela. They obviously wrote on the stela, and this is that same monument that I just showed you, basically destroyed.
[00:16:54.75] And when I spoke to the people in the community, again, it was interesting because they said this is a tourist attraction. It's not our heritage. You're making the assumption that it is part of the heritage, and they were willing to destroy this not because it was their heritage that they wanted to destroy but rather the fact that it wasn't their heritage. And they were willing to destroy it in order to catch the attention of the government of Belize.
[00:17:20.60] Another event I think at least for me was very important. And this event is coming back to the early days of Maya epigraphy and thinking about how to begin to interpret Maya writing and particularly with The Blood of Kings coming from Linda Schele and Mary Miller back in 1986. And it was a disagreement among two people that I respected both of them quite a bit. I knew Linda well. I knew Victor Montejo, and Victor said to me-- but I said publicly-- what you say about Maya people today, about what you say about the ancient Maya reflects on what happens to modern Maya people.
[00:18:06.33] You can't talk about The Blood of Kings and not expect, in fact, that there's going to be pushback. There's going to be fights from the government of Guatemala. As it turns out, the Maya people were represented by the government of Guatemala as being savages because of this, because of The Blood of Kings, so there's impact of what we say.
[00:18:29.21] It's not about scientific truth. It's about the impact in the 21st century or the 20th century. So this is a fight that I spent a fair amount of time talking to Linda about, a fair amount of time talking to Victor about.
[00:18:42.22] And then finally I began to work in the Yucatan. I just again a fascinating framework about how the Maya are represented to tourists going to Cancún. And Cancún gets anywhere from 8 to 12 million people landing there at the Cancún airport every year, so you can think about how many people end up on the beach, spending time drinking beer, enjoying themselves on the beach, going perhaps to Chichén Itzá for a day, and then heading back. And, in fact, what you can see here is tourists at a restaurant.
[00:19:17.22] And what's fascinating is, yes, the Maya people are dancing, but most importantly the tourists are told a story that the Maya people have disappeared. And this is a story about the collapse. This is the story of rival of the Spanish. And they're conflating time, but it doesn't matter. The story that the Mexican government tells, the story that the tour operators tell, the story that the tour guides tell is that the Maya have disappeared while at the same time, they are the ones constructing the hotels. They are the ones who are the busboys, the meseros. They are there right around the tourists. As the story of the disappearance of the Maya is being told, the Maya people are right there.
[00:20:01.01] And this is a story, again, that doesn't really connect to the modern day world. And so, again, in a place like Cancún, what you see is the Cancún museum about the ancient Maya. They had one vitrine with one photograph of a time period after about 1800 AD. This is a hotel, and, again, it's constructed with the ancient Maya iconography.
[00:20:27.68] So what you begin to realize is that although Mexico says the foundational story of the country is based upon these ancient civilizations of the Olmec, of the Maya, of the Aztec, of the Mexica of the Mixteca, what they're really talking about is mestizaje, the mixing of the races as they perceive it. That is the core construct and belief of in fact an early explorer marrying-- being left behind, marrying a Maya woman, and this is the symbol of what, in fact-- as you enter Chetumal, this is a symbol of what you see.
[00:21:10.01] So to go back to the question we still have to ask the question what about the preservation of the study of the Maya. Is it just the ancient Maya, and thus far, in fact, it has been about the ancient Maya. And it's about Maya heritage and about my tourism, and you can see at Chichén Itzá. And, in fact, I could easily show you a photograph of 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 people at Chichén Itzá as part of the tourism trade.
[00:21:35.40] Do Maya people benefit from that? The answer is basically no. The hotel operators are all people much wealthier controlling the hotels, controlling the buses, controlling the restaurants. There are a few of Maya people who are selling trinkets at Chichén Itzá. So when you begin to look at this landscape of the Yucatan and you begin to think about this landscape-- this is, in fact, a landscape that's being redefined today not about the ancient past but about, in fact, the 19th century and 20th century, thinking about my heritage as it's perceived today in this part of the world.
[00:22:19.60] And so, in fact, there was a war-- there is a d called the War of the Caste, the caste-- the Guerra de Castas en Yucatan or the Maya Social War-- there are two names for it-- that ran from 1847 to 1901. And on the ground, in fact, you can see that there are monuments like this, which is to the martyrs of the caste through the Maya Social War or, in fact, a painting like this on a wall that says the Maya zone is not an ethnographic museum. We are part of a town or an entity moving forward into the future.
[00:22:54.91] So we think about the Maya of the past. We have to think about the Maya today. And so you go to a place like Tihosuco, which is a small town in Quintana Roo, and, in fact, the caste war started in Tihosuco in 1847. It was started by this man, Jacinto Pat, that I'll show you a little bit more about him in just a second. But when you go to the center of Tihosuco, you don't see a monument to the ancient Maya. This is a town of Maya people who put up monuments to the leaders of the rebellion from 1847, and, in fact, the church was completely destroyed by Maya people in 1866.
[00:23:36.60] And it's been reconstructed partially with INAH, the Institute of Anthropology in Mexico, partially with other funds, but it was left open on behalf of the people in Tihosuco to remember the blood that was spilled during the Caste War. So this war is within the land in a place like Tihosuco.
[00:23:58.60] This is that landscape that, in fact, was contested and is contested today. This is the tourist trade here on Tulum, Cancún further to the north, but, in fact, both today and during the Caste War, this was the center of power. And this is the center of a rethinking of the nature of heritage within the Maya area.
[00:24:21.62] So when I wandered through this region-- actually let me just back up. I wandered through this region in the early 2000-- 2010 and went to a variety of towns, and I kept going back to Tihosuco. There's a small Caste War museum there. Kept going back.
[00:24:38.45] And I said so do you have anything that remains in the jungle or even in the town that relates to the Caste War. And over and over again I was told no, and I would come back the next year. I would come back six months later.
[00:24:52.64] And about three years later, I was sitting in the town square of Tihosuco. We were going to have coffee with-- I was going to have coffee with a friend. And he said-- he showed up, and he said get your boots. I said we're having coffee.
[00:25:07.55] He said get your boots. We're going out into the jungle. I said why. He-- and this is Carlos Chan Espinosa right here. He said, of course, we have stuff on the ejido. Of course, we have stuff in the jungle. We've been protecting it for the past 170 years.
[00:25:26.33] But we didn't know who you were, and we don't take most people to these places. We have been protecting them. And, in fact, as it turns out, not only have they been protecting them, but they actually ran the Institute of Anthropology in Mexico out of one of these ancient-- these sites from the 19th century.
[00:25:44.99] So, in fact, we have Carlos Chan Espinosa, Eladio [INAUDIBLE], and Freddy [INAUDIBLE], and they were the three who took me out the very first day. Behind them is a site. But I'll just mention this is called X'Culumpich. This is a hacienda. This is a hacienda of Jacinto Pat.
[00:26:04.22] This is to the people Tihosuco, this is Mount Vernon. If you think about George Washington, we've created Mount Vernon, we've protected Mount Vernon because this is who he was. Now we're changing the story because we're thinking about George Washington owning slaves. But at least the story is one that we're talking about and changing and developing.
[00:26:25.67] This is the site-- this is where Jacinto Pat lived to create the rebellion in 1847. This is the arch into the hacienda. It still stands today. And in fact, I'm trying to figure out how we can work with the community to make sure this is protected. But really, it doesn't fall because most of the arches into these other haciendas that we've seen in the region keep falling.
[00:26:51.59] This-- there is no photograph of Jacinco Pat. There is no likeness of him from the time that he lived. This is his statue in the front-- in the middle of the town square. And this is a reconstruction of what his face might have looked like. I have no idea if it's close but he's wearing the gold earring which, in fact, indicates that he is a leader in this rebellion, starting in 1847.
[00:27:16.93] Out in the jungle is an entire abandoned town that probably had 3,000 or 4,000 people living there. This is the church. The roof is gone. It was probably a perishable roof.
[00:27:30.91] This is still an active church. It is sacred. There are crosses here. There is painting from the 19th century. And when people go to this church, they still get on their knees and pray. This is the center of power for the Maya people in Tihosuco.
[00:27:48.95] And so we began working with the people in the town to develop a project, focused on the preservation of the heritage for the development of Tihosuco. It is a collaborative project because we're working directly with this community. And we're also trying to think about--
[00:28:07.93] [BEEPING IN THE BACKGROUND]
[00:28:10.47] --some truck backing up-- we're trying to think about tourism as, is this a way to bring money into this community? And the problem is, we're really almost too far from the coast, from Tulum or Felipe Carillo Puerto or Cancun to really get tourists there. So we're thinking about other ways to bring economic development with that preservation of this heritage, and to tie these things together.
[00:28:36.25] So just a quick note, the caste war, from 1847 to 1901, was one of probably the most successful Indigenous rebellion in the Americas. It almost created-- it almost allowed the Maya people to create their own country. There was actually some conversation about this region tying itself to the United States and actually being another state or something of that nature.
[00:29:02.36] But it was a massive war that killed tens of thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. And this is a painting done after the war. But you can get a sense of the scale of this thing. It was massive. It was huge. And it was destructive.
[00:29:20.83] In 1901, General May, who was a general in the Maya world, signed a peace treaty. The Mexican army had come in. General Bravo, right over here, had basically brought a huge number of troops in and instead of trying to fight the Maya within the jungle, they literally cut a swath through the jungle, about a quarter to a half a kilometer wide, and just marched down it. And anybody in the way, anything in the way, was leveled.
[00:29:57.51] So in the end, Mexico won, in 1901, with a peace treaty. To a certain degree, General May today, is perceived as a trader for having signed the peace treaty. And in fact, with the Zapatista revolution going on in Chiapas, there is a direct connection between the Caste War of 1847 to 1901 with the continuation of Maya people standing up and demanding recognition, from 1994, when the Zapatista Revolution started, to 2022, and as it continues.
[00:30:32.81] This type of push back, by Maya people, against the government of Mexico, against tourism, against a whole range of things, continues not just in Chiapas, but also in the Yucatan.
[00:30:45.41] So what we began to do is begin to work with a variety of parts of the community, worked with the Museum of the Caste War in the town, talking-- and working to represent the three leaders of the Caste War and in fact, a fourth one that I'll mention in just a second, as well as trying to get information about our work with the community, and to make sure it's in free languages, Spanish, English, and Yucatec and again, to make sure that Yucatec, as a language, is created as a primary language.
[00:31:24.42] So this is, in fact, part of the museum. And this is quite literally the donors' room. This is the room that the people in the town bring the stuff that they find in the jungle that to them, is important. It's not about whether it's valuable. It's about whether it's important.
[00:31:42.07] So these are some old machetes, some musket-- very large cannonballs, musket balls, a whole range of things, some of them made in modern times. It doesn't matter. It's important to the people in the community.
[00:31:55.03] So our heritage is not about whether it sells for $2 million at Sotheby's. Heritage is about how you identify the value of things in terms of who you are and how you're represented. And as it turns out-- in fact, this is Bernardino Ken, a leader of the Caste War, later on, after Jacinto Pot and the other leaders had died. He was killed in a battle.
[00:32:20.10] This is his skull. It is on display in a position of prominence within the museum. It had been taken, by the government of Mexico, to Merida, eventually was returned. But it is on display because this represents who the Maya people are.
[00:32:37.06] So we started a project. In this project, in fact, right now, has nine different parts to it. Whether it's archaeology or oral histories, he's worked in the archives and the museum and so on. And I'll talk a little bit about these.
[00:32:50.16] But it's also critical to understand that of these nine things, at least four, if not five of them, were created and developed by the people in the community, not by me, not by an archaeologist who showed up and said, OK, let's dig and do this. That's what's happening over and over again.
[00:33:07.26] And what we're trying to say is, Maya people have to have a connection to the work that we do in an active way. And so in fact, the preservation, revitalization of the language, the church, the museum, oral histories, were all coming out of the local community in a development of this.
[00:33:28.29] And this is a conversation that we do every year. We sit down with the community and make decisions about what are some of the things we're going to focus on. And this is the ejido, or the land organization of Tihosuco. This is the City Hall in Tihosuco. And this is the Caste War Museum, along with the Pan Culturla Heritage Center.
[00:33:48.57] So in fact, one of the ones is archaeology. So in fact, what we're doing is going out and mapping the settlement within this region. It's a good, straight, archaeology project. But we're looking for 19th-century and 20th-century remnants on the ground. And what we're also looking for is the roads that connected them.
[00:34:13.20] So what you can see here is the land organization-- land of the ejido of Tihosuco and within it, all of the various haciendas-- the haciendas here in red squares, here-- that were occupied prior to the Caste War and then abandoned.
[00:34:28.47] This is some of the work that we did at XCulumpich to clear and to understand the water system and the complexities of what this hacienda looked like in 1840, 1845, somewhere in that range.
[00:34:40.53] This is that abandoned town. It's called Tela or Lal Kaj. This is this abandoned town with a church in the middle that I'll show you in just a second. But you can see the roads that led in from the outer edges, into the center of the community. Each of these is a land-- a family would live in each of these as part of their little plot of land, within the central part-- the larger plots are along the outer edges-- and then probably get subdivided as the family would grow. Somewhere between 3,000 to 4,000 people would live there.
[00:35:13.93] This is, in fact, Tela. This is the church that I showed you before. And this is, in fact, another part of the church. As you can see, it's a rather large entity with-- this is the entrance into the church. But in fact, it was slightly known by the government of Mexico, but it wasn't being preserved particularly well.
[00:35:34.16] So in fact, the work that we do is trying to-- in fact-- not to beat up the government of Mexico-- this is the work that they did in preserving a small chapel, in [INAUDIBLE], in that section of the church, which was disastrous. And in fact, in the middle of that work, because it was so bad, the people of Tihosuco kicked them out.
[00:35:56.61] They literally ran after the people from the government of Mexico, from Ina, with guns and machetes, chasing them down the street, and kicked them out. They wanted to protect, they wanted to control, their own heritage.
[00:36:12.37] If you go into the town of Tihosuco, this is the center of town. This is the church, here. This is the plaza. And so on, a variety. But all of these red squares, here, are buildings, in fact, that were occupied in the 19th century, abandoned for 75 years, and then reoccupied by people who created the modern-day town of Tihosuco.
[00:36:34.24] This is one of the buildings that was reconstructed by the government of Mexico. This is one of the buildings that Dona Paulina is in front of, here. She owns this building. But she doesn't have the money to build a roof. So what she did is, she built a palapa inside-- a thatched-roof building that she lives in, inside this. But she is, very proudly, an owner of one of these casas coloniales.
[00:37:02.71] And she sees it as being very important, that she wants to hand onto her children and her grandchildren. Part of the oral history that we're doing is having Marcelina Chan Canché, who is one of the co-PIs on the project, interviewing some of the abuelas, some of the abuelos, within the community, the elders of the community, to understand, really, how they perceive the world today.
[00:37:29.96] And the interesting thing is, none of these people were alive for the Caste War. But the Caste War lives within each of them as they think about the past. And they talk about the Caste War as if it happened yesterday. They talk about the Caste War as being an instrumental, critical event in their life.
[00:37:51.25] But we know, in fact, that none of them, or in fact, their parents, or even, barely, their grandparents, could have participated in the Caste War. So it's not a question of reality. It's a question of connecting events of the past and heritage of the past with people today and how they perceive that world that we live in.
[00:38:14.53] And then, an attempt to also think about-- and all of you have seen National Geographic photographs or layouts, where Indigenous people are perceived as being this very strange other, as it's represented. So in fact, in thinking about a photography project, we began to think about not taking a picture of them, as we often, in National Geographic would do, women cooking on a hearth and smoke in front of them.
[00:38:44.06] We asked them, where would you like your photograph taken? Who should be in the photograph? Where should it be? And what do you want to write about yourself? So again, changing the nature of even photography away from the way we see photographs and the way we see Indigenous people today to the nature of they get to decide, they get to understand the nature of how they want to represent themselves.
[00:39:11.23] We're also doing a variety of other things with the community. This is a series of graphic stories about the heroes of the Caste War. And every one is done with in two languages-- forget English. It's Spanish on one page and Yucatec Maya on another page. So every page is repeated as you open it up. And it has Spanish on one side, Yucatec on the other.
[00:39:38.98] We're also gathering photographs of anything that the people have, as they've collected photographs from their weddings, from their communions or whatever, the construction of various things. We have some photographs going back into the 1970s, maybe the 1960s, not really getting much earlier than that. And then we're beginning to put them together into a series of small booklets that again, we're publishing each year with the community, as people are writing about the stories of Tihosuco.
[00:40:13.56] Excuse me. Language, as it turns out, is a critical element in the nature of heritage. I think we see this around the world, that people see language as being a critical element in the preservation of culture and the preservation of communities.
[00:40:31.19] I will be honest with you. When I started this project, I had no interest or knowledge about how do you think about language preservation or revitalization. But as it turns out, it became a central part of what the community wanted. And in fact, we have-- there were two graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, working-- the two of them here-- working with students, working with people in the museum, and thinking about how to, in fact, make it so that the language-- the Yucatec Maya language-- is not perceived as being a language that shouldn't be spoken in public.
[00:41:07.92] Today, we see over and over again, that kids do not speak Yucatec Maya. There's an embarrassment. There's a-- the nature of the language not being important. And so gradually just trying to set up situations-- along with that graphic story that I mentioned to you, but also other ones-- trying to make sure that people realize, kids realize, that speaking Yucatec Maya is not something to be ashamed of.
[00:41:35.44] The history of someone like Jacinto Pot, not being told by me, but in fact, being told by people within the community. And in fact, this is his life. And this is after he has died and his bones are being scattered by [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. And here he is, dead, right in the middle. And this is the story of him being born and his life.
[00:41:56.56] It was painted by somebody within the community. The story is, as they see it today-- actually, it was-- this particular one was painted in 2012. There are many of these. But this is the story we have to begin to think about.
[00:42:11.69] Also trying to get into archives and think about how the archives can help us. And there's Carlos Espinosa, on the left, Suzanne Abel, from Stanford. And this is Julio Joyo Gutierrez. Julio is a dear friend. He's a PhD from [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] in Mexico and works in the archives.
[00:42:30.56] He's a Maya person. And it took him somewhere close to 10 years to get a job, having received a PhD in one of the most prestigious organizations within Mexico. But he felt-- and I think he's probably right-- he was not able to get a job because he was a Maya person, a Maya Indian.
[00:42:46.97] So he's working with us. He does have a job now, working at one of the new universities that AMLO has started within some of the smaller Indigenous communities. But we began to think about archives and, in fact, were able to find a series of censuses that relate to Tihosuco and other communities.
[00:43:04.67] And just to lay this out for you, to get a sense of it, there's a census that's done in 1832 of a nearby town of Tepich in Tihosuco, in Tela, the abandoned town. So in 1832, 2,600 people plus here, 7,400 2,300.
[00:43:22.49] 1847 is one year before the war. And what we've been able to do is to realize, in fact, that one year before the war has given us an insight into the fact Tepich loses close to 700 people. Tihosuco loses close to 800 people. And in fact, about 400 more people show up at Tela.
[00:43:43.13] We think-- and this is the conversation, again, within the community-- there's a thought that, in fact, the year before the rebellion, people know this rebellion is about to happen. They are trying to get out of the center of this rebellion, move as close to the jungle as they can, at a place like Tela. And in fact, we lose roughly 1,000 to 1,500 people. We don't know where they went. We think they ended up out in the bush.
[00:44:08.72] And in fact, this area is perceived to be abandoned after the war. There were thousands of people living there. They just didn't live in a single location. So we're able to learn about the war as we're beginning to work with the local community.
[00:44:22.89] And again, that information begins to get presented, with the community, on the walls of the Casa Ejidal, the main house, the building that's being used as the center for the land-socialized organization, a small, community museum, during, in fact-- and just to bring this up, after a period of time, we also begin to see someone like Don Clemente, here, who is beginning to think about not just to work with us, but to start his own project.
[00:45:01.21] And he's now on his second project. This was his first one, the Proyecto Lal Kaj, trying to develop this site, developed, in fact, a logo for it. And here he is, speaking about it. He's now working on a second project, where he's getting money from some of the organizations in Mexico, meaning he is going out, on his own, to think about how to begin to preserve his heritage without, necessarily, the outsiders, like me, participating in that, which I think is critical to what we see happening.
[00:45:30.26] So I just want to tell a very quick story of a meeting that happened in Oaxaca in 2013 and there I am in the corner and next to me is Marcelina Chan Canché. I've already talked about her briefly. And sitting over here as an INA archaeologist.
[00:45:46.44] And the INA archaeologist gave a paper. And he stood up and he went through this archaeological conversation, wanted to make sure that it was clear that he was an INA archaeologist, wasn't working, really, with the community, didn't really care about the community, wanted to do good archaeology, great.
[00:46:06.14] I wasn't presenting that day. Marcelina was presenting. And Marcelina has her huipil on. She's listening to this. And I know Marcy well enough. And her anger just starts to go up. And her face is getting flushed. And she stands up as the next speaker and says, that's not the way we do archaeology or community work in Tihosuco. We don't do it that way. We work together.
[00:46:32.58] And I will honestly say that, as I'm sitting there, this was probably one of the great moments for me, just to hear her say that because I'm not sitting there, prodding her to do this. This is how she believes Maya heritage has to be assessed and thought about in the 21st century.
[00:46:49.62] What we are also doing at the end is, there's a huge celebration at the end of July, for the four days representing the start of the Caste War. And every year, from July 26 to the 30th, there's a massive celebration in town. Hundreds of people are coming together. The politicians have started to come now, which is the scary part.
[00:47:12.15] We're also putting up photographs of the work that we're doing with the community. And then we are standing, literally, in front of the community and presenting some of our work-- this is earlier in the evening, before the events begin to get rather raucous and rowdy. But this is where we're trying to present some of the information about what we're doing.
[00:47:32.07] And I will simply say that one of my students, Tiffany Cain, who's now a professor at the University of Michigan, is actually speaking to the community in Yucatec Maya. I can't speak you could Yucatec Maya. But she's doing it. And I'm speaking Spanish, as are other people. But we are making sure that there's a clear understanding that this is not just us, but in fact, all the other leaders within the community.
[00:47:55.75] I very quickly want to shift for one slide, and then shift to another country, of Belize. I just want to talk again about another conference in Oaxaca. And this is 2017. And here, one of our compatriots, Bartolo, here, is talking about Jacinto Pot. And this is during the Third International Conference for the Society of American Archeology.
[00:48:19.90] At that same conference, we are visiting a community museum in Santa Ana Del Valle. And this is Teresa Morales, who is helping us, and some of the local community people.
[00:48:32.50] But we're beginning to think about how can-- it's not just the work that we do, but how do we present that work? How do how does the community present that work? In the Museo Comunitario movement is very strong in Oaxaca. And we learned a lot during that trip.
[00:48:47.26] And so I just want to-- we're going to try that. We're going to work on a Museo Comunitario in Tihosuco. But I want to shift, just very quickly, to Belize, just for a moment. And you can see the location of Belize on the left, there. This is the country of Belize, and the work that-- I'm working with a series of my activists-- down here, in Toledo.
[00:49:11.64] As I was preparing this talk, I was looking for different maps of Belize, just to try to get a sense of the best way to explain what I was doing. And I came across this map. And it shows turtles and tapirs and jaguars and toucans and a Maya woman. I don't need to explain this to you, about the relationship between this and the way, in fact, Maya people are represented in Belize.
[00:49:38.73] But in fact, in this region is, in fact, a group of Maya people who have come together with villages to think about and to focus on how to get land rights, not just to own land. Owning land actually is not particularly good in many of these small communities because you take out a mortgage from the bank, you borrow on it, in some ways, to put coffee or other types of crops on it. And it's the fastest way to lose land.
[00:50:10.31] What they're beginning to do is to say, we want a very large area of this region with all the villages in it, and to own it communally, to keep that land for our children and to own that communally. And in fact, over a period of literally 20 years, whether it's 2010 and we can see a series of conversat-- this is what the Supreme Court of Belize writes, or in 2015, where there's an international court-- and this is some of the group of the people that I'm talking about-- they were able to win the right to that land. Doesn't mean, the government has to agree.
[00:50:45.51] So the Supreme Court agrees, the international court agrees, the government has been backpedaling. But they have won the right to have a Maya homeland. That word, "homeland," they're discussing whether they want to even use that.
[00:51:00.28] But this is the area that we're talking about. This is the area of the villages, here. This area, they're going to connect this up. And this is all the area of communal lands that they want. And this however, is the area of the Indian reservations.
[00:51:13.95] So much of the land between this is controlled by the government, who can send-- who can sign contracts for hardwood with a Malaysian timber company and all the hardwood leaves. So they have no rights to it. So this is the attempt that they're doing to make sure that they have Maya land rights, Maya control, communally, so they don't lose the land.
[00:51:35.70] And we have started-- so in working with people there-- I don't know enough about land, in terms of the development of a Maya homeland, to really successfully help. But we began to talk about the need, in fact, for a community museum or a series of community museums that represent what the May activists are trying to do and why they're trying to do it.
[00:51:58.53] So we're presently working in the village of Laguna. This is how they drew it in 1997, with the road coming in and most of the community here and some of-- where the fields are and some of the lagoons that you can see, in blue, here. And in fact, this is a photograph from about three weeks ago, when I was in Laguna, as we are beginning to work with a community of people, about 18 to 20 people, as the committee for the creation of this community museum.
[00:52:29.01] Now within this region, there is Nim Li Punit, that I already showed you. So in fact, it gets about 5,000 or 10,000 people of tourists there. But what do they do?
[00:52:38.31] They visit the site to look at the carved monuments. This is, in fact, Norwegian Cruise Lines. And it says, Nim Li Punit had everything we were looking for a Mayan temple site, tranquility and beautiful views. Great. And where do the tourists go? They go to the island owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines. They get on a bus owned by somebody else. They go to the site. Maybe a few people are selling trinkets. That's the best that Maya people get from their own heritage.
[00:53:07.47] So one of the questions is, with Maya homeland, who's going to control Maya sites? Is that the government of Belize? Is it the Maya people? Is it co-management?
[00:53:17.13] But this is actually one of the scariest parts of this whole movement for the government of Belize because if they lose access or control over some of these archaeological sites, the money won't be rolling into the government. It's going to be tied to Maya people. But this is their own heritage. So this conversation is not just about how to control sites, but also to think about how to use them into the future.
[00:53:46.62] One of the most interesting events that took place was, in fact, just before the pandemic, on October 25, 26, in 2019. And what the people in Southern Belize-- and I'll point out who they are in just a second-- what they did was, they had some-- they called together an [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. And the word, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] means-- and I've been told this-- it means to listen, listening.
[00:54:13.24] But what they wanted to do was, they wanted the traditional knowledge holders and the academics to come together. So they invited people and they basically said, instead of going off to your conference in archaeology, come down and report to us. Tell us what you've been doing. And tell us how we can work together, not just allow you to work, but actually work together into the future.
[00:54:37.72] And so what they did is they held this [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] where they would listen. But they were also very clearly stating who they were and the control that they felt they needed to have. There I am, speaking during it, and literally had to fly down on Thursday night, try to get there Friday, midday, flew down to southern Belize, got met at the airstrip, ran over, and was able to participate in this for a day and a half.
[00:55:01.62] These are the three sort of main activists, Filiberto Penados, who actually is a brother of Tino, that I showed you at the very beginning of this talk, Cristina Coc, who would become the face of this movement, has a very large presence, internationally, and Pablo Mis. These are three of the activists.
[00:55:20.46] And just here, this is a dear friend of mine, John Morris, who's been head of archaeology for Belize, talking to Cristina, hopefully beginning to have a conversation, although I'm not sure there was that much of a conversation.
[00:55:34.85] Just a final note. Prince William goes to Belize. This is part of the 70th anniversary of the Queen's reign. And he's doing a tour around a variety of the countries within the Commonwealth. And he and his wife land in Belize. And they are supposed to go to one of the Native American-- one of the Indigenous communities near where I work, called Indian Creek.
[00:56:02.33] And you can see what happens. They aren't going to be displayed like an ethnographic museum. They're basically saying, we don't want you if you're just going to come look at us. They're taking control of their own representation, their own identity. And they basically kicked out Prince William and told him, we don't want you to come here.
[00:56:26.71] Huge set of counter protests and protests over the next several days. I don't have time to go into it. Fascinating set of moments. In the end, they go to a different village to look and gawk at the Maya people. But this is what, in fact, I guess, the Royals do.
[00:56:44.60] So I want to go back to the basic question. Is the preservation of studying heritage of the Maya about the ancient Maya? No, it cannot be anymore. I've discovered, over a period of time, that in fact, working with Maya people is what brings us much further along in our quest to understand both the ancient Maya and modern-day cultural people and all of-- to understand myself.
[00:57:08.93] I need to understand that to understand the nature of what work that I do. I can't do it alone. And I don't care whether you're digging at [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] or some other place. This is a process of thinking about how to communicate and work with local, Indigenous communities, not to become a site like [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] by itself, but to people these locations and to think of this not as an ethnographic museum, but rather as a group of people moving forward into the future.
[00:57:42.99] So this is my journey over the past 30 to 35 years. This is the people of Tihosuco, who are celebrating the rebellion of the Caste War at the end and July 30. They are celebrating the initial victories that they had, of July 30, in 1847.
[00:58:06.14] So it's this type of heritage that I think we need to think about as we begin and continue to study people around the world. I don't care whether it's Maya or other people or ourselves. It's about community efforts. It's about the change in the perspective from being just a researcher, looking in, to be part of a collaborative venture. Thank you very much.
[00:58:28.58] [APPLAUSE]