Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Fiction • Summer 2025
9/23
Therapist (Dr Keithe) says to keep running journal of treatments, reactions, flare-ups, etc., note as happen and/or at end of each day (and take care not to let documentation of obsessive thoughts become obsessive itself (I told her saying this improved probability that it would, she said this reaction was her intention, to provoke me)), this will help with analysis, seeing progress, where to go next, etc.
Poetry • Winter 2010 - Bestiary
underwater they are terribly
farsighted, your body blurs
as you approach. their bodies
are set elsewhere. heavy
chandeliers sinking
with chains braided by wax,
tempting you to reach into
their folds and search them
for whatever you threw
into the murky sea,
see if they would spill out
or harden like shells.
you peel one, look for the heart,
highly organized water,
it is shaking. you find a stone,
apply pressure, watch it shatter.
Features • Spring 2015
*Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks.* –Friedrich Holderlin
I
In the early morning hours of January 12, 1963, a coup took place on the island of Zanzibar. It was a small, relatively silent uprising; those over whom the hand of government had switched in the middle of the night awoke none the wiser. As day broke, insubstantial rumors began to trickle in. The sun climbed in the sky like a fiery balloon, and with it rose the tide of hearsay.
A name began to circulate. It hummed in the narrow, shaded streets, along the brilliant beaches and quays where bobbed the boats of ragged fishermen. It ran through the fields of corn and cassava, beneath the coconut palms and clove trees. Soon a message, freshly composed by the revolutionaries, quaked over the radio.
John Okello, a warrior, had apparently given Zanzibar, until so recently ruled by a minority population of Arabs, back to the Afri- cans. He cut a magnificent figure, the listeners were led to believe and until quite recently had been a high-ranking officer in Kenya. He could construct, with his own two hands, 500 guns in a single day, 100 grenades in an hour, and a bomb with a blast radius of three miles—and he had been planning the liberation of Zanzibar for months.
But very little of this, as it would later emerge, was true. Seizing the opportunity to reinvent himself, Okello had disseminated a stream of fictions so rich and vermiculate that it would be months in the disentangling. The madness, turmoil, and attendant void of information associated with the revolt provided an exceptionally fertile launch pad for this reformation.
The man who post-revolution would pompously deem himself “Field Marshal” of the military was, in reality, a semi-literate laborer—variously a bricklayer, a housepainter, a stonecutter—who had raised himself after being orphaned at ten. Furthermore, he was a spiritual man, in his own mind a prophet. God spoke to him of the righteousness of the revolution, whispered at his ear in the dark night hours. Sometimes he was so bowled over by these inspirations that he retreated to the forest to contemplate his dreams in silence.
He had had no hand in planning the revolution but had merely been the firebrand, the instigator. At first a rank-and-file rebel, it was during the actual fighting that he had distinguished himself, his singular confidence and viciousness exalting him to the position of military hero and, eventually, to figurehead of the revolution.
Immediately following the revolution, Okello held great sway in Zanzibar. What followed was a confusing period of about two months. Though he had no formal position in the new government, Okello was essentially running the country, while more legitimate leaders—those who had actually planned the revolution Okello had usurped—tried to mitigate his power.
Okello made daily radio broadcasts during this period, claiming, outrageously, that 11,995 people had died during the revolt. He made strange threats, such as:
“We, the army, have the strength of 99 million, 99 thousand...Should anyone be stubborn and disobey orders, then I will take very strong measures, 88 times stronger than at present.”
He would cut, drown, burn, and shoot dissidents. The foreign press was banned, and he began to make insane demands. Off the radio, he strutted about, gussied up and armed to the teeth with pistols, knives, and a Sten gun. He burst in on private meetings and proceeded to act the buffo. He posed for an endless number of photographs.
In short, he was an embarrassment. Fortunately for his opponents, Okello’s violent Christian rhetoric, combined with the ravenous looting his armada of ruffians undertook in regular waves, was beginning to alienate his less zealous supporters. On March 8, on returning from a trip to Uganda, Okello was met at the airport by a host of guards. Unfortunately, they explained, he would not be allowed back into Zanzibar.
He was set to wandering. He still felt the desire to liberate; he still retained his taste for grandeur. With only a handful of loyal men, he halfheartedly stomped around East Africa, dreamily plotting uprisings in Rhodesia, Mozambique, even South Africa.
In 1971, he dropped off the map entirely. Speculation has it he was assassinated by a president or warlord who felt vaguely threatened by his high volatility. Regardless, his misbegotten plans, his synthetic past, the tentative grandeur of his future all disappeared, swept briskly under the rug of history. The magnificence of his illusions dissipated, their energy spreading ineffectually across the whole geography of his wanderings. He burst forth like a flame and petered out, underfed
II
It was during his exile of the late 1960s—before his disappearance—that Okello began a correspondence with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, then a relatively unknown director. Okello wanted Herzog to translate a book he’d written on the Zanzibar Revolution into German, while Herzog simply wanted a chance to film Okello, whose grandiose antics he’d followed closely as they’d trickled into the western media. The two never managed to meet, however; Okello, having learned little from his ostracization and still inclined to boil over with vitriolic language, had landed himself in jail.
Even a cursory understanding of Herzog’s filmog- raphy would seem to justify his interest in Okello. As Dana Benelli notes in his essay “The Cosmos and its Discontents,” Herzog’s films, particularly the early efforts, tend to focus on “central characters out of synch with, if not in open rebellion against, the societies within which they live” (89). The “re- bellious response” subsumes the individual, and the revolt escalates, self-augmenting, until the characters are revolting against the universe itself: Stroszek in Signs of Life (1968) demands that the sun cease its constant rising; The President in Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) runs into the desert and orders a branch to quit pointing at him.
These Herzogian protagonists tend to be characterized by their mythopoeic strivings, by the attempt at self-reinvention through a reckless and mad grab for power—elements found abundantly in Okello that no doubt attracted the director. Okello’s absurd and unsustainable demagoguery, marked by a penchant for flagrantly impossible threats, was in itself a bid for transcendence. As Herzog recalled in a 1971 interview:
Okello delivered these incredible speeches from an airplane. He circled around Zanzibar...and before he landed, he had the aircraft’s radio switched to the local radio station and delivered a short speech: “I, your Field Marshall, am about to land. Anyone who steals so much as a bar of soap will be thrown in prison for two hundred and sixteen years!”
The figure of John Okello—mad revolutionary, boastful weaver of absurd fictions—would come to influence not only Herzog’s style of filmmaking, but also the themes he undertook to excavate, most prominently in his 1972 feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film which includes a character named after Okello and which marked Herzog’s first collaboration with another mad, transcendent person- ality: Klaus Kinski.
The wonderfully strange, frequently violent, and wildly germinative relationship between Herzog and Kinski has become a bit of a commonplace in cinema history. Herzog himself has emerged as a weird wizard of cinema, with various anecdotes attesting to his eccentricity; Kinski, the blonde powder keg, has always remained a larger than life figure, renowned for the shortness of his temper, the force of his outbursts.
At the time of filming, Kinski, in his mid-forties, had a respectful though stunted career. He could act, all agreed, but his frequent and vociferous tantrums—which often bled into the physical realm— had garnered him a foreboding reputation. Many directors were afraid to touch him, but it was precisely this volatility that attracted Herzog. He was intent on making a film about revolt—who better than a revolting actor to play the lead?
The film, which follows a doomed expedition down a mid-16th century Amazon River to find the mythic golden city of El Dorado, was filmed in Peru. The jungle was hot, unbearably hot, and Herzog, hoping to draw real performances out of his actors, allegedly kept them hungry and thirsty for most of the shoot. It was nearly impossible to drag the large crew and cast through the often perilously thin mountain paths, through the webs of viridescent foliage that sprung from the soupy ground. Sickness and fever were a perennial threat; the nearest large city was often dangerously distant and only sometimes in communication.
Early in the filming, Kinski, per his wont, began to act up. “His behavior was impossible, and he raved like a lunatic at least once a day,” Herzog later recalled in an interview. “He also wanted to leave the set—he wanted to go home.” Accounts differ as to how Herzog confronted this last issue; the most frequently circulated rumor is that he forced Kinski to act at gunpoint. Herzog denies this, however. He claims, rather, to have simply threatened to kill Kinski, and then himself: “From then on, every- thing went very smoothly.”
As filming progressed, so, too, did Kinski’s antics. At one point, an extra, waiting off-screen in a hut constructed for the filming, spoke while Kinski was filming a scene. Kinski, who carried a functional Winchester rifle with him at all times, “got so worked up that he took his Winchester and shot a hole through the roof.” (Some accounts have Kinski taking off three of the extra’s fingers with his shot.) Herzog—operating on a hunch, a nugget of inspira- tion—encouraged these tantrums; he egged Kinski on, working him into a lather and watching as Kinski’s rage bled into his acting. All of which, it goes without saying, he captured on film. The environ- ment that Herzog fostered was essentially hostile: the actors should feel uncomfortable and Kinski himself should feel transgressed upon, singled out. This displacement—the alienation engendered by being treated cruelly in a foreign land—would ideally result in a purer, distilled form of acting.
Miraculously, the shoot wrapped up, and the film proved a massive success, catapulting Herzog into the spotlight of European art cinema while simultaneously reinvigorating Kinski’s career. Herzog and Kinski, battered by the process though pleased with its results, would go on to collaborate on several more critically acclaimed films, entangling themselves in a relationship that produced marvelous fictions while at the same time being, in a sense, another fiction.
In his 1988 autobiography, Kinski, who had most recently worked with Herzog in 1987’s Cobra Verde, viciously derided his partner, claiming that Herzog was an execrable, self-obsessed filmmaker—a dabbler, a dilettante. Herzog, for his part, later claimed that much of Kinski’s autobiography was pure fiction, crafted retroactively, and that he had even assisted Kinski in penning some of the more acerbic insults on his own person.
It seems fitting that Kinski’s last say on his relationship with Herzog should be undecipherable, an unresolvable entangling of the virile threads of rage and fiction.
III
Aguirre, the Wrath of God plays fast and loose with historical figures. It follows an expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro in late 1560 and early 1561, despite the fact that the historical Pizarro died in 1548. Herzog places the historical figures on expeditions they never attended, displacing them temporally. They are pawns in an aesthetic game, their very shifts and anachronistic arrangements contributing to the film’s sense of compositeness, of incompleteness.
Early in the film, the official expedition is stalled. A small party, led by Don Pedro Ursua with Don Lope de Aguirre (our hero, so to speak) as second-in-command, is sent down the river on a fleet of rickety skiffs to scout for food or help.
Throughout this developing drama, Kinski, who has donned the armor of his character, a shabby suit of leather with oversized pauldrons, is preoccupied with delivering the most menacing performance he can manage. He fully utilizes his diseased-looking habitus and the thick, Cro-Magnon ossature of his skull; Aguirre struts about vampirically, brooding and scowling and blaring with his wild, sunken eyes. Before long, his treachery is out in the open. Ursua is deposed, and Aguirre establishes the overweight and simpleminded Don Fernando de Guz- man as the expedition’s new leader—while he, of course, retains his position as second-in-command.
From then on, the film charts a general decline in sanity. The doomed party drifts down the river on a large raft that begins to resemble, with its various small additions and substructures, the barest bones of a theatrical stage. No minor significance to this, in fact. In a 1973 interview, Herzog discussed his understanding of the relation between history and theater:
[A]s a theme, this horde of imperialistic ad- venturers performing a great historical failure, this failure of imperialism, of the conquerors, the theme is really quite modern. The meth- od by which history was then made is actually one that can still be found today in many Latin American countries. History there is staged as theater, with theatrical coups.
To echo this sentiment, Aguirre claims in the film’s final moments that he “will stage history, like others stage plays.” And, of course, the platform on which he crafts his fictions is fundamentally destabilized, a portable stage that bucks and trips and in its disturbance agitates its occupants’ minds, their thoughts, and the fictions that trend from those thoughts.
Herzog indeed is interested in the essence of revolt, of rebellion, but he is even more interested in the relationship between revolution and the crafting of fictions. In his early work, he has limned a triumvirate of madness, associating these two propensities with his “out of synch” characters, snipped cleanly from their contexts, historical or other. As John Okello emerged from a dim personal past and found himself suddenly at the head of a revolution, Aguirre was transported into the tropical wilds of South America, torn from his comfortable lands in Spain—and it is no minor joke that Herzog like- wise tore Kinski, a stunningly German actor, out of Germany and thrust him into the unlikely role of a Spanish conquistador. While the other actors display the fine Spanish features so often associated with the conquistadors, Kinski stands out, his lanky blond hair and brutal features purposely inhibiting the authenticity of his role.
For Herzog, the displaced man’s propensity for revolt is irrevocably connected to his greater-than-av- erage ability (or opportunity) to remake himself— that is, his ability to craft fictions. Without a proper social context, the displaced man will expand indefinitely, revolting and creating fictions of grandeur, of power. The revolt begins to feed the fiction, while the fiction in turn feeds the revolt. It this recursive loop that becomes the madness that leads the displaced Herzog protagonist to “rebel against the universe.”
The last 15 minutes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God constitute a subtle phantasmagoria. The crew of the raft, merely a handful of tatterdemalion survivors struck with hunger, thirst, and fever, begin to hallucinate freely. They spot a complete boat—its sails billowing fluidly, dreamily—suspended in the uppermost branches of a tree and declare that it is merely an illusion. The line between fiction and reality, enervated by the crew’s physical weakness, begins to blur. Aguirre, for his part, claims the boat is real; he makes plans to retrieve the boat and use it to reach the Atlantic.
The slave Okello—so named because Herzog owed the revolutionary’s “craze, hysteria, [and] atrocious fantasies quite a bit for [the] film”—lies crumpled on the raft’s floor. With a skyward glance, he whispers, “That is no ship. That is no forest.” In a stunning moment, an arrow sinks quickly and forcefully into his thigh. He reacts calmly, continuing his delirious ruminations: “That is no arrow. We just imagine the arrows, because we fear them.” Meanwhile, Aguirre hurries about the raft as arrows and spears bombard the remnants of his crew; he fires off rifles and makes noise, insisting with supreme confidence that the arrows are real, that the danger exists.
It is then that Flores, Aguirre’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who has been carried preposterously in a sedan-chair through all these rough environs, is killed by an arrow. Aguirre cradles her, staring menacingly off into the jungle whence the missile came. We might expect reality to rush in now like a torrent, to bring Aguirre to his knees and cleanse his mind of any illusions. But, as it happens, Aguirre sets the corpse of his daughter down. He proclaims that he will marry her and in so doing found “the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen.” A procre- ative loop is established; the father will feed off the daughter, just as the fictions will feed off the revolt, the revolt the fictions.
The raft twirls and yaws down the river. It might be going to the sea.
Features • Winter 2012
On Thursday, December 8, Mayor Menino announced that he would be evicting Occupy Boston. I heard about it first on Twitter, where people were upset. Boston was one of the last places an Occupy settlement had not yet been forced out, and a restraining order had been protecting the site from police interference. In the newspapers, the announcement was framed as a success for Menino— finally he would be able to take action against a movement that had “tested his patience.” I got a few emails—the occupiers were demanding that as many people come as possible to support the movement. “You don’t have to get arrested,” they said.
My friend J and I got to the Occupy site around 10 p.m. Most of the tents had been removed, along with anything valuable, so what remained were scattered structures standing in mud. People were picking up trash and putting it into bags; a sanitation truck was parked on the street. On one end of the camp, next to a big building, a large crowd was holding a General Assembly about what to do if arrested. A man was yelling: “The police are violent people! The police don’t have law degrees! Don’t ask the police what to do—they lie!”
We went to find the protest chaplains, whom J knows. They were standing in a circle, deciding on a plan for the evening. They didn’t want to be arrested, but they wanted to show their support. It was an attractive group—tall men and women wearing white albs and clergymen’s outfits underneath their coats. A few of the members had come from Martha’s Vineyard, and they had that sort of precise, chiseled face that only New England makes. It was concluded that they would sing throughout the evening and bless the eviction as it occurred. A young man wearing a white alb spoke up. “We can say: Boston is watching, America is watching, the whole world is watching, and the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is watching.”
A marching band made up of old men had been playing in front of the T stop since we arrived. People were dancing in front of it. Members of the media arrived, and began to take pictures of the dancers. The band began playing “Solidarity Forever,” which was written in 1915 and has the same tune as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.
We walked around the camp. At this point, there were maybe 1,000 people. Everywhere, there were camera ashes. Across the street, a group of people were standing in front of an office building, watching. “I am the 99 percent and I want you to leave!” a man shouted.
In the sacred space tent, we took off our shoes and kneeled in front of a small table with books and electric candles. People were dividing up religious books so that they wouldn’t get destroyed. One man took the King James Bible, but there were no takers for a small bamboo garden in a jar. In a corner, a young man was talking about growing up in a Southern Baptist family and began to read the Book of Samuel out loud.
Later that night, after I left, the chaplains married two protestors. The crowd spilled out of the camp and into the streets, marching down Atlantic Avenue at 1 in the morning. Occupy Boston wasn’t evicted that night, but it was the next, when the police arrived at 5 in the morning and arrested 46 people.
Poetry • Fall 2009
Far back before the sun
made any sort of difference,
and the icicles hung like knots
in the light-grains that housed us,
I was unafraid to take your hand,
unaware of the future we unzipped
like a winter coat in late March,
thinking not so much I was touching you,
but somehow touch, and thus entering
some kind of experience. But it was remarkably
just like any other object, for something
with so many nerve endings.
Even your eyes, glowing in the halo
the sun praises from the atmosphere
in a still and timeless ring of dawnanddusk,
spin through it like a pair of fading globes.
Features • Commencement 2011
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.
Thompson completed several surveys for the Peabody and made plaster casts of Maya architecture to be reproduced for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That same year, he stumbled on the chance to purchase a moribund old *hacienda *estate east of Mérida, one hundred acres that happened to contain the ruins of Chichén Itzá. It was a unique opportunity—to actually own the remains of one of the most important Classic Maya cities—and Thompson pounced on it. Chichén Itzá would be Thompson’s home for the next three decades, and the site of his most momentous work. The old plantation house, the *casa grande*, was itself several centuries old, built of stone taken from the ruins, its walls encrusted with statues and carvings. “Can you imagine a more ideal habitation for me while engaging in my work?” Thompson enthused in one letter home.
Chichén Itzá stands amid the flat plain of subtropical scrubland in the north of the Yucatán Peninsula, about one hundred miles southwest of the modern resort city of Cancún. The city flourished as one of the centers of the Maya world, reaching its height around 800 CE. When Thompson arrived, the city sat crumbling, slowly dissolving back into jungle. Trees sprouted from buildings. The iconic Pyramid of Kukulkan could easily have been mistaken for a wooded hill, and not something made by the hands of men. From the city’s nexus at the Pyramid, a stone-paved causeway strays a quarter mile south into the forest. At the end of this path is the Sacred Cenote, an immense hole in the earth, 180 feet around, with sheer chalky cliffs and a perpendicular eighty-foot drop to the turbid green waters below. A collapsed stone shrine stands sentinel on the rim. More than one early visitor remarked on the mysterious influence that seems to pervade the place.
*Cenote* is a Spanish corruption of the Mayan word *tzonot*, “fresh water well.” They are sinkholes, created when rainwater erodes the topsoil and limestone bedrock until they collapse to form a natural well. As the only permanent source of surface water in the region, *cenotes *were critical resources to the Maya, and took on enormous spiritual resonance. *Cenotes* were regarded as portals between the earth and the underworld, Xibalba. These openings in the earth served as prime points of contact with the gods, and were important pilgrimage sites. There are several thousand *cenotes *in Yucatán, but this one is the largest and most sacred. From the ruined shrine at its edge, sacrificial offerings were thrown into the Cenote in hopes of appeasing the rain god Chaac. Over a period of about eight hundred years, the Maya cast precious objects and human sacrifices alike into the waters below.
An old Spanish account from shortly after the Conquest told of how, “if this country possessed gold, it would be this well that would have the greater part of it, so great was the devotion which the Indians showed for it.” Thompson set out to test this story, and chose the Sacred Cenote as the subject of his most ambitious archaeological project. In 1904, Thompson and his team of Maya workers constructed a derrick on the Cenote’s south shore, lowered a steel clam-shell dredge more than one hundred feet down, and hauled up pail-fulls of the creamy yellow silt that lined the Cenote floor.
Eventually artifacts began to show up in the muck—exquisitely carved jades, embossed gold discs, clumps of copal incense, wooden weapons, and human remains (including an incense burner made from a child’s skull). The thick muck at the bottom of the Cenote* *helped to preserve artifacts from decomposing, providing some of the only surviving wood and cloth objects from the pre-Hispanic Maya world. The high quality and craftsmanship of many of the recovered sacrificial objects, and the discovery of materials from as far away as Panama and central Mexico are a testament to the importance of Chichén Itzá’s Sacred Cenote as a center of pilgrimage. Together they represent one of the finest collections of Maya artifacts in the world.
Over the next five years, the team continued the tedious work of dredging the Cenote floor and sifting carefully through the sediment for artifacts. When returns from the dredge slowed, Thompson returned to the United States and learned how to deep-sea dive in Boston harbor. He came back to Mexico with a Greek sponge diver and two primitive globular cast-iron diving suits, and descended into the Cenote’s murky waters to search by hand for objects the dredge missed. A diving accident left his hearing permanently damaged. Two years later, Thompson declared his work at the Cenote done.
The Peabody Museum sponsored Thompson’s work, indirectly, through remittances from Frederic Ward Putnam, the museum’s director, and Charles Pickering Bowditch, a businessman and patron of the museum. The exportation of artifacts was patently illegal under an 1897 Mexican law, which decreed that all “archaeological monuments existing in the National Territory are the property of the Nation,” and outlawed the removal of antiquities from Mexico. In order to ship his finds back to his benefactors in Cambridge, Thompson presented “quite a sum of money” to Santiago Bolio, the Inspector of Ruins responsible for enforcement. “To obtain this money cost me many sleepless nights and unhappy days,” wrote Thompson, “but I knew that it was the chance of my life to put him under such obligation that he would hold fast to my interests.” The artifacts recovered from the Cenote were smuggled out of Mexico in the luggage of friends and colleagues. Thompson even employed his wife as a courier.
This amenable political status quo was upended by the overthrow of President Porfirio Diáz’s regime and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Thompson scaled back his archaeological work and focused on managing the plantation. Maya peasants, angered by the slow pace of land reform promised by the Revolution, torched the *hacienda *house in 1921. Thompson’s records went up in flame. This was only the beginning of Thompson’s troubles. The post-revolutionary government did not look kindly on foreigners digging out Mexico’s past, and initiated an investigation into his activities at Chichén Itzá. In 1926, the Mexican government seized the *hacienda* and charged Thompson with the theft and illegal exportation of archaeological patrimony. Thompson fled via sailboat to Havana and returned to the United States. Mexico sued Thompson *in absentia *for more than a million pesos in damages. The Peabody Museum and Harvard University were named accomplices in the suit.
The case of the purloined Cenote treasure ignited the press in both nations. Thompson was vilified in Mexico and defended in America. The Mérida weekly *Revista de Yucatán *denounced “the diving ducks [who] took out innumerable ancient objects, among them many of gold ... the treasures, stolen from Tlaloc [a name for the rain god] … were sold to the millionaires of New York *… *which constitutes a great shame.” Back in Massachusetts, Thompson justified himself in *The Boston Globe*. “I should have been false to my duty as an archaeologist,“ he maintains, “had I, believing that the scientific treasures were at the bottom of the sacred well, failed to improve the opportunity and attempt to bring them to light and thus make them available for scientific study instead of lying imbedded in the mud and useless to the world.”
***
Thompson spent his last years in relative poverty, living with his son in New Jersey, delivering occasional lectures, and drafting a memoir titled *People of the Serpent*, in which he wrote, “I have squandered my substance in riotous explorations and I am altogether satisfied.” He died in 1935, at the age of seventy-seven. Thompson was audacious, even to the point of recklessness, and was prone to being swept away by romanticized notions of adventure. He seemed to take a certain pleasure in risking bodily harm in the name of archaeological inquiry, such as when he insisted on diving the Sacred Cenote himself. Though his methods were unorthodox, sometimes brazen, the depiction of him as a grave robber is not quite fair. Looters do not bother to take such copious field notes. He was driven by an expansive thirst to uncover the mysteries of an ancient people then unknown to history.
The criminal case against Thompson was dismissed when he died, but the civil suit dragged on for nine more years until the Mexican Supreme Court declared Thompson not guilty, on a technicality. But the affair left the Peabody’s reputation bruised. An internal Peabody memorandum from the late 1940s acknowledged that the court’s decision still “leaves [the Peabody] as the ultimate recipient of objects exported illegally.” The continued possession of the Cenote artifacts left many at the museum discomfited. One director remarked that the museum now had a “considerable black eye in Mexico.” No Peabody excavations had been allowed in the country since.
Over the next few decades, the Peabody hosted an exhibition and published several studies and catalogues of the artifacts. In the 1960s and 70s the museum returned several sets of jade and gold artifacts in exchanges with Mexico. Several Cenote jades can be seen at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, and a few more in the Peabody’s third-floor Mesoamerica gallery. But the bulk of the thirty thousand objects Thompson sent back to Cambridge remain in the dark of the Peabody Museum’s storerooms.
***
Neither the battle lines nor arguments have shifted much in the intervening eighty years. Edward Thompson is not well liked in Mexico. He is considered a grave robber, a common thief who stole a significant piece of Mexican history. The clamshell dredge Thompson used to plumb the depths of the Sacred Cenote is now displayed in the expansive commercial complex that welcomes busloads of tourists to Chichén Itzá. The dredge sits across from the restrooms, next to a bilingual sign explaining its significance. The Spanish text is longer and more scathing than the English. Thompson, it reads, “purchased the Hacienda Chichén and made unscientific excavations throughout the site, beginning with the exploration of the Cenote ... the majority of these he removed illegally from the country and donated to the Peabody Museum of Harvard. It’s a disgrace that many materials were damaged at the time of extraction and there are almost no records of what was obtained.”
***
While many countries enacted laws protecting archaeological remains, starting with Greece in 1827, no international law governed the trade, export, or import of antiquities until the UNESCO Convention of 1970. The laws that now regulate archaeology in this country are among the strictest in the world. In 1990, the US Congress passed the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which legally mandated repatriation of archaeological and human remains belonging to existing Native American tribes. The Peabody Museum is considered a star of honoring repatriation requests. But NAGPRA applies only within the US, and so Harvard’s legal obligation for repatriation ends at America’s borders.
But as Rubie Watson, a former director of the Peabody, writes, “NAGPRA is not a temporary, passing affair. It has ushered in dramatic and, many would argue, long-overdue changes in museums, establishing an atmosphere of openness that one trusts will be a lasting NAGPRA legacy.” A growing conviction, slowly spreading among archaeologists and museum administrators in the West, holds that sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony should not be hoarded away in storage, where they cannot be accessed by the public (let alone by the descendants of those who created them).
Though Harvard is under no obligation to repatriate the Peabody’s Sacred Cenote collection, there is a strong ethical case for repatriation. The records are clear: by removing the artifacts from Mexico, Thompson violated Mexican law, and did so knowingly. The Peabody’s reputation continues to be stained by its possession of these artifacts. And for what? What purpose do they serve hidden away in the Peabody’s vaults? They were brought to the Peabody to be studied, and studied they have been. Volumes have been published on the jades, metals, and lithic tools from the Sacred Cenote, but now they are accessed only by the occasional grad student. They are simply preserved, and this is no longer a persuasive justification for their extended stay in America.
In the end, the decision to repatriate rests with the Harvard Corporation: the President and Fellows of Harvard University. The Corporation, however, is in the business of growing Harvard’s assets, not reducing them. In 2002, Dumbarton Oaks—Harvard’s research library in Washington, D.C.—came to suspect that two Byzantine silver pieces in their collection were forgeries. They sent the pieces to the Oxford Archaeological Laboratory for testing. The lab confirmed that the objects were indeed fakes, and asked if they might be allowed to exhibit them in their museum of forged antiquities. Ned Keenan, Dumbarton Oaks’ Director at the time, recognized that the fakes had no real value to the museum and determined that they might as well be given to an institution that could use them. The Corporation refused. Generally speaking, the Corporation doesn’t want to enable any precedents for the repatriation of university property. If the Corporation were to approve the de-acquisition of even a single object (even a fake!) in a Harvard collection, they would risk a deluge of similar requests that could empty the university’s museums, and coffers. Requests from Native American tribes are fulfilled to the extent the law demands, but other appeals are usually rejected categorically. Two recent case studies of successful repatriation could be helpful in laying such a groundwork: Harvard’s return of the Lowell bells to Russia and Yale’s repatriation agreement with Peru.
***
Stalin shuttered Russia’s churches and monasteries in 1929 and outlawed the ringing of bells. Many thousands were melted down. The American philanthropist Charles Crane rescued eighteen brass bells from Danilov Monastery, on the right bank of the Moskva in Moscow. The largest, called the Mother Earth Bell, weighed thirteen tons with a 700-pound clapper. Crane gave them to Harvard, and seventeen were installed in the just-completed tower of Lowell House (the last went to the Business School’s Baker Library). Here they remained, rung at 1pm each Sunday and after every Harvard-Yale football game (Harvard’s score was announced on the Mother Earth Bell; Yale’s on the Bell of Famine, Pestilence and Despair). With the loosening of religious restrictions under *perestroika*, the Russian Orthodox Church began to press for their return. Eventually, a Russian oil magnate named Viktor Vekselberg agreed to foot the ten million dollar bill necessary to commission replacements and transport the bells back to Russia. In September 2008 Harvard’s replacement replicas were blessed by the Patriarch Alexei II in a ceremony attended by President Medvedev, and on March 17 of the following year the bells tolled in their old belfry for the first time in nearly eight decades.
In the fall of 2010, Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History (endowed by the same Peabody) concluded a model agreement in a similar dispute. In 1911, the American explorer Hiram Bingham arrived in Peru and re-discovered Machu Pichu, the misty redoubt of the terminal Inka. Bingham secured permission to conduct excavations at the site and remove objects for study. The objects remained in New Haven for a century, despite public pressure from Peruvian intellectuals and officials.
The two disputes bear a striking resemblance to each other: both involve collections of pre-Hispanic artifacts removed from Latin American countries at the beginning of the 20th century and retained by Ivy League universities in their respective Peabody Museums.
After Peru brought a case against Yale in Connecticut court, the two sides began negotiations, mediated by outgoing Senator Chris Dodd. The result was “a very civilized agreement,” that Dodd says he hopes will serve as a model in resolving similar disputes. Yale agreed to return the objects to a university in Cuzco, the ancient Inka capital, which in turn committed to make the collection freely accessible to all scholars. In Dodd’s words, “Going back to the university in Cuzco, establishing a joint relationship, acknowledging Yale’s treatment of these artifacts over the last hundred years: I think sets a precedent that will allow for other such collections to be able to be moved and to be preserved and to be celebrated in ways that people haven’t thought of in the past.”
Perhaps such precedents will spur administrative headway on other deadlocked repatriation cases. Perhaps Harvard will hurry to avoid the Ivy League indignity of being one-upped by Yale. Or perhaps Indiana had it right with the Ark, “Fools, bureaucratic fools. They don’t know what they’re dealing with.”
***
Thompson’s self-defense in *The Boston* *Globe *echoes the existential mission statement employed by museums today. By what authority do museums possess the past? While the first museums grew out of the collecting tradition of curiosity cabinets and were conceived as instruments of experiential diversion, their focus shifted in the 20th century to embrace the project of research and education. Museums emphasize their responsibility as custodians of the past, stewards of the sacred debris from the shipwreck of time. Thompson conveys this vision of archaeology as a duty and a burden. In order to reconstruct the puzzle of the past, to unravel the mysteries of our ancestors and confront history head-on, it was first necessary to retrieve all of the pieces.
Thompson articulates an archaeologist’s imperative, a responsibility to make these remnants of the past “available for scientific study instead of lying imbedded in the mud and useless to the world.” It is a sad irony of history that Thompson recovered these objects from the darkness of the Cenote’s deep, only to have them returned back to the bowels of the earth, beneath the green pastures of Harvard University.
2026