The Mayas, the Sources of Their History Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries — Background and Themes

The Map as a Historical Document

Salisbury opens by praising the Plano de Yucatan (1848) as the most comprehensive map of the peninsula, noting its rarity and its value in marking ruin sites with a distinctive rectangular symbol. He observes that political changes—the division of Yucatan into two states—have rendered it outdated, and a new map by Hubbe, Aznar Pérez, and Berendt was then being engraved in Paris. This attention to cartography reveals a core tension in the volume: the desire for systematic knowledge versus the fragmentary, often inaccessible nature of the evidence. The map itself becomes a character, a scarce tool that shapes what can be known about Maya sites.

Le Plongeon's Improvised Archaeology

Le Plongeon's account of excavating the Chaacmol statue is a study in resourcefulness and anxiety. He describes working with only ten Indian companions, no machinery, and ropes made from habin bark. The statue, half again as large as life, lay five thousand years in a deep bed. To raise it, he built a capstan from a tree trunk and hollowed stones, using forked poles as supports. The operation took half an hour, but the triumph was short-lived: the statue remained surrounded by debris, with no roads to transport it. Le Plongeon's prose oscillates between pride—"my gem"—and despair, as he calculates the prohibitive laws and the threat of attack from the Chan-Santa-Cruz people.

Concealment and the Limits of Discovery

The most poignant detail in Le Plongeon's narrative is the statue's fate: buried again in the forest, hidden by Le Plongeon and his wife. He writes, "Perhaps the world will only know it by my photographs." This admission undercuts the heroic tone of the excavation, revealing the fragility of archaeological work in a contested region. The text does not clarify whether the statue was later recovered; the account ends with the need to open three leagues of road to reach Ɔitas. The reader is left with an image of a colossal artifact, exhumed with immense effort, then deliberately concealed—a stark reminder of the gap between discovery and preservation.

Contrasts in Scholarly Method

The two papers present contrasting approaches to Maya studies. Salisbury's contribution is bibliographic and cartographic, concerned with compiling and verifying sources. Le Plongeon's is experiential and personal, driven by the physical encounter with objects. Yet both share a sense of incompleteness: Salisbury notes that many ruins remain unexplored, while Le Plongeon's statue is literally reburied. The volume thus becomes a document of the challenges facing 19th-century Americanist archaeology—limited access, political instability, and the tension between field discovery and scholarly dissemination.

Readers should approach this volume as a primary source for the history of Maya archaeology, not as a definitive study. Le Plongeon's claims—such as the statue's age of five thousand years—are presented without corroboration and reflect the speculative tendencies of his era. The map and the excavation account together illustrate how knowledge of the Maya was shaped by the tools and circumstances available to early researchers. For those interested in the material culture of Yucatan, the text offers a vivid, if partial, glimpse into the conditions of fieldwork in the 1870s.

Leafing through Dr. Le Plongeon's accounts, I lingered on how he hid the Chaacmol statue, burying his own discovery. There was something tender, almost protective, in that secretiveness. It reminded me of another book’s quiet argument, Prehistoric man — Themes and Context, that our earliest artifacts were kept close for reasons we rarely name. Both feel like hushed, half-buried portraits of human care.