Features

Hidden away from view behind unassuming doors, under humming fluorescent lights and encased in corrugated steel, rest most of the six million objects in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The place is deliberately hard to find. If you’re lucky enough to be taken inside, it’s hard not to be reminded of the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. After two hours of fisticuffs and truck chases, Indy rescues the Ark of the Covenant from nefarious Nazis and hands it over to the government. The relic is crated and wheeled through a vast storage facility, eventually disappearing into anonymity among thousands of identical boxes containing who-knows-what other priceless treasures.

The Peabody Museum was founded in 1866,  the first anthropology museum in the Americas. This was just as archaeology was beginning its transformation, from what had been a hobby for gentleman antiquarians into a regimented systematic science, and the Peabody helped pioneer excavation techniques and methodology. The museum dispatched expeditions around the globe to collect archaeological and ethnographic artifacts. 

At this time museums served two essential functions: to save things and show them. In its first half century, the Peabody focused on exhibiting. As the collection grew, new wings were added to the stately red-brick museum on Divinity Avenue, north of Harvard Yard. Eventually the rate of acquisition outpaced the availability of space and funds for new construction, and the museum’s focus shifted, from display to study and interpretation. Objects were gradually put away. Today, less than half of one percent of the museum’s collection is on public display. The most valuable objects are never exhibited. The museum’s security isn’t good enough. So they stay in the vault, protected from curious eyes as much as loose fingers.

Among the objects in the Peabody’s storerooms are approximately thirty thousand artifacts from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá, collected by the American archaeologist Edward Herbert Thompson at the turn of the 20th century. These objects are among the most storied—famous and infamous—in the Peabody’s collections. Mexico alleges they were removed from the country illegally, and the artifacts have since been the subject of a lengthy legal battle and long-standing antipathy.

I entered this story in the spring of 2008 when William L. Fash, the Peabody Museum’s current Director, hired me to investigate the questions at the heart of the dispute over the ownership of the artifacts from the Sacred Cenote. I searched the archives to determine the legal status of the artifacts at the time, the conditions under which they were removed from Mexico, and the basis and extent of the Peabody’s proprietary claims on the collection.

***

Edward Thompson’s zeal for archaeology was born from his childhood rambles hunting arrowheads around Lake Quinsigamond, near his home in Worcester, Massachusetts. Thompson eagerly devoured accounts of adventures in distant lands and took a particular interest in investigating historical riddles. While studying engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Thompson published an essay in Popular Science Magazine titled “Atlantis Not a Myth,” in which he suggested that refugees from the lost island had come to the New World and constructed the pyramids of Mesoamerica. It caught the eye of several prominent archaeologists, and six years later, in 1885, Thompson received an invitation to a dinner party with members of the Peabody Museum and the American Antiquarian Society. They confronted Thompson with a proposal: travel to Mexico, investigate Maya ruins there, and send specimens back to the United States for study. Massachusetts Senator George Hoar arranged to have Thompson appointed US Consul to Yucatán, a post that provided some financial stability, as well as cover for his real objective.

With his wife and infant daughter in tow, Thompson arrived in Mexico in the spring of 1885. He set up shop in Mérida, the drowsy capital of Yucatán Province. The place was sticky-hot, thick with dust in the dry season, bogged with mud in the wet. He took his time before setting out to the ruins in the interior: learned to speak Spanish and Mayan, attended to his consular duties, and studied the customs of the local Maya, the descendants of the people who built the ruined cities he was meant to explore.