For
30 years, "Site Q" has been a mystery name anthropologists attached to
an unknown, ancient Mayan city that was the source of exquisite looted
artworks and hieroglyphs showing up in museums and private collections
in the 1960s.
On Tuesday, anthropologists from Yale and Southern Methodist
Universities announced they have found the location of Site Q in a
remote Guatemalan jungle.
The discovery was good news for anthropologists because it will allow
them new avenues of research into Mayan history. It could however, be
bad news of holders of looted Site Q objects, including the Art
Institute of Chicago, which owns the most famous one. The discovery
opens the possibility of efforts to bring the artworks back to
Guatemala.
A 17-inch by 10-inch carved limestone panel purchased for $12,500 by
the Art Institute in 1965 from a New York dealer proved to be key to
finding Site Q. It has long been known as the "Ballcourt Panel"
because it depicts two royal figures playing a Mayan game. The Art
Institute has kept it on nearly continuous display in its first floor
pre-Columbian gallery.
About the same time the Art Institute bought it, other, similar
pieces--all especially fine examples of carving from the classic 7th
Century Mayan period--began showing up in other museums in private
collections, none with any information about their origin.
In the 1970s, a group of anthropologists through Harvard University's
Peabody Museum began a catalog of the sculptures, about 30 in all, and
called the mysterious site from which they came "Site Q", the "Q"
coming from the Spanish word que, meaning "which?".
In 1997, anthropologists working in a little-known ruined Mayan royal
center called La Corona in a flatland jungle region of Guatemala named
Peten found carvings mentioning a king named "Red Turkey," the same
king depicted on the Art Institute panel. But the La Corona carvings
were much cruder and on stone inferior to the Site Q artworks, making
La Corona a dubious candidate for being Site Q.
For about a week in April, however, anthropologists from Yale and
Southern Methodist returned to La Corona to clear away jungle from
Mayan ruins to copy inscriptions on wall carvings. On the last day of
their work, Yale anthropologist Marcello Canuto was doing quick
sketches and global positioning of unexamined ruins on the site, which
is about two-thirds of a mile square.
"I saw a trench we call a `looter's pit,' where somebody obviously dug
through to the interior of a ruin some time before," said Canuto in a
telephone interview.
As he got into the interior, he said he was so startled to see a
finely sculpted hieroglyphic panel, he recoiled, his head slamming
into a wall. Such panels are extremely rare, valuable finds, so he
raced out to find Stanley Guenter, a scholar from Southern Methodist
who is an expert in reading the hieroglyphs.
The two spent several hours clearing debris away from the roughly
40-inch-by-14-inch panel, but it was soon apparent by the style of its
carving, what it said and the type of stone that it was identical to
the mysterious Site Q artworks.
The panel dates to 677 A.D. Perfectly preserved, it appears it and
other Site Q panels were in an interior room of a temple recording the
feats of a king. The temple, according to Mayan custom, was ritually
destroyed after the king's death as a way of keeping its contents
safe.
"This discovery, therefore, concludes one of the longest and widest
hunts for a Maya city in the history of the discipline," Canuto said.
Guenter, too, called the discovery the "final, concrete proof" that La
Corona is Site Q.
"The Chicago piece certainly sparked all of this off," said Guenter in
a phone interview. "[Now] we have with the new panel ... not only the
same people [kings] talked about, but probably the same artist working
on the Site Q pieces and the La Corona piece."
With Site Q definitively located in Guatemala, museums and private
collectors holding looted pieces from the site may now face
repatriation claims for the artifacts from Guatemala, though an Art
Institute official Tuesday said that probably will not happen.
"Back in the 1960s," said Richard Townsend, the museum's curator of
African and Amerindian art, "it was a legal and common practice to
acquire monuments like this."
