Maya Scholars Race Against Thieves to Thwart the Looting of a Lost Civilization

A close brush with grave robbers

Mask at Kohunlich. Photo by Dan Griffin

“Tombs are robbed, temples are looted, all to feed the international market for antiquities.” Donna Yates, Archeologist and Lecturer in Antiquities Theft and Art Crime, The Netherlands.

In 1997 we drove across Mexico in our Ford Focus wagon, loaded to the nines with our belongings and cat, heading towards a new life on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Our hearts quickened after passing Escarcega. At the end of that lonely 200-mile stretch of road, we'd cross from the state of Campeche into Quintana Roo. Then we'd be homeward bound.

As we left Escarcega in the rearview mirror, the road narrowed and we settled in for the long drive ahead. We decided we’d take a break halfway when we got to some little known pyramids, have a sandwich, and let Max, then just a kitten, walk around.

I'd read about this quartet of pyramids—Kohunlich, Becan, Chicanna, and Xpuyil—near the ceremonial center Calakmul. Though these sites didn't have the star power of Chichen Itza or Tulum, Kohunlich, known for its Temple of the Masks, had gained fame in 1971 when looters tried to sell one of its huge stucco masks to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

We saw no other cars on the road and around 4 p.m. we passed Chicanna. Soon after, I spotted the tower of Xpuyil. "Want to stop?" I asked Paul.

Max as adult cat

He nodded and we drove down a deserted sascab lane through an open chainlink gate into an empty parking lot. I pulled myself from the car while Paul saw to Max. I stretched, went to the car’s back end to find the cooler and brought out pre-made tuna sandwiches. I called to Paul.

He'd put Max back inside the car. We leaned against the door, ready for our snack. After eating I wanted to have a quick look around the site. Just as I bit into my lunch, a white, older model International pulling a sizable tarp-covered trailer drove into the parking lot, leaving dust in its wake. Two men sat inside; an older man was driving.

The vehicle was 300 feet away when the guy riding shotgun jumped out. He was young and lanky and moved quickly across the lot. The truck had Canadian plates and the driver kept the engine idling.

"Weird. Why'd just one guy get out and why didn’t the driver turn off the engine?"

"It is weird," Paul said. We both watched the younger man dart through an opening in the fence and run along the path that led to the site.

With the truck still idling, we viewed the scene warily. "I don't feel good about this."

"Me neither. What are they doing?”

Paul started pushing things into the way-back. I followed his lead and closed the cooler, holding my sandwich in one hand as I tossed things into the car.

"Let's get out of here. Something’s not right. Are they scouting for artifacts? Why the trailer?”

"Not good,” Paul agreed. “And that tarp? Max is inside. Let's go."

The International had parked at just the right angle so we couldn't see the driver, as though that outcome was planned. If these guys were grave looters, we didn't want to be around when INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History) discovered them, or worse, the federales. Stealing artifacts is a serious crime.

Paul started the car and headed down the narrow driveway that led to the highway. The International was still idling when I turned around to give it one last look.

"Grave looters?"

"We don't want to know," Paul said as he eased onto the uneven asphalt, revved the engine and we headed towards Chetumal.

Is antiquity theft the world’s second oldest profession?

Antiquity looters come in many guises—unassuming tourist types, locals, businessmen looking to make a buck, collectors.

Art theft is big business. It’s a ‘trade’ worth billions. Ask any dealer of antiquities. And as the international appetite for Maya culture grows so does the hunger for illegal artifacts.

As long as there's poverty in undeveloped countries where ancient civilizations once stood, you can bank on it. Some art dealers call it the world's second oldest profession.

“Any country in civil war or conflict is ripe for antiquities looting,” says Tess Davis, legal expert and archeologist from Boston University. When conflict erupts in an archeological rich country, the world art market is suddenly flooded with antiquities from that country. Looting becomes a means of subsistence when homelands are war-torn.

The rise of narcotics trafficking

"This is not just a white collar crime. Insurgents, terrorists, are using the antiquities trade to fund their efforts. Unless we get it together soon, I fear there will be nothing left," Davis said in a lecture titled "Tomb Raiders and Terrorist Financing," for Boston University alumnae.

Most organized trafficking groups dealing drugs and other commodities are business savvy these days and have diversified portfolios. As with real estate, logging and iron ore, the prices antiquities command are too high for them to ignore.

Compared with well known ancient civilizations in Europe and Western Asia, archeological interest in Maya culture came relatively late, partially due to the forbidding nature of the jungles. The outside world was first exposed to Maya pyramids through the writings and drawings of explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s. Their memoirs about their early adventuring shone a light on the Maya.

Soon other adventurers trekked through the Peninsula, conducting rudimentary recordings of archeological sites with limited removal of Maya artifacts. The first excavations were not conducted until the 20th century.

The beginnings

Art and antiquity, according to Donna Yates in her thesis, "Displacement, Deforestation and Drugs: Antiquities Trafficking and Narcotics Economies of Guatemala," underwent a huge upheaval in the first half of the 20th century. Aestethic tastes in contemporary art shifted to modern looks and an interest was taken in tribal art. Ancient cultural objects originating from Africa, Asia, and the Americas bore a distinctly different look from classic Western models.

They didn't conform to familiar Greek and Roman styles and demand grew as connections from them were drawn to famous artists of the day such as Picasso, Kahlo and Rivera. Soon, powerful collectors began to source them from their countries of origin.

At the time, 1957, Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Primitive Art in New York. This was a watershed for the collection of Maya and other primitive cultural properties. The Maya were on the market.

The Maya purge

Endemic looting of nearly every known Maya site began around 1960, Yates’ thesis explains. Collectors and museums, inspired by Rockefeller, were looking to fill the Maya gap and demanded the best the Maya had to offer.

Clemency Coggins, a professor of Archeology and Art History at Boston University, wrote decades ago,"In the last ten years there has been an incalculable increase in the number of monuments systematically stolen, mutilated, and illicitly exported from Guatemala and Mexico in order to feed the international art market. Not since the 16th century has Latin American been so ruthlessly plundered.”

Ransacking ruins

Coggins’ landmark paper is often credited with exposing the gravity of the situation. It characterizes the 1960s as a time when bands of looters moved freely through the region, particularly in the heavily jungled regions of Guatemala's Peten, mutilating large stone monuments with power tools. Countless Maya sites were looted before they were even located by archeologists. "It was a terrible time," she wrote.

Unfortunately this meant that large carved stone stelas that depicted the events of Maya rulers and their recorded histories along with large architectural treasures from Maya temples were plundered from where they stood.

In order to understand any individual site, it's imperative for archeologists to know the provenance of a stela or piece. Without dates and locations it's impossible to place the site, the structure, even the timeline of looted antiquities.

But looters cared not for the history of the Maya. They had one mission only: how to remove stela that could be 20 feet high, weighing several tons from inaccessible jungles. Taking a power saw to a stela and cutting it vertically removed the face of it. Often they would cut that into quarters to make for easier shipping. The pieces could be sold off separately. Sometimes the inscriptions along the sides were damaged by the mutilation.

This plundering set the archeology world back several decades in trying to break the Maya hieroglyphic code.

“The 1960s looting of the Peten is tied to two jungle economies: the trade in rare hardwoods and tapping gum trees for chicle. In both instances, men (usually) at the bottom of the supply chain moved through vast tracts of wilderness searching for different tree types. In doing so, they encountered poorly protected remote sites as well as Maya cities yet unknown to archeologists,” Coggins wrote.

Chicleros play both sides

Chicleros, as chicle hunters are known, are credited with locating many important sites in the Peten—including Xultun and even Calakmul, the famous Heritage site. Early in the 20th century, archeologists worked closely with these men, paying them for info about new sites and monuments. But when chicle prices bottomed in the 1970s, financial gains for looting and trafficking antiquities grew. Chicleros could expect higher rewards for reporting an unknown site to a trafficker than to an archeologist. And they could even be employed in the demolition, for added revenue.

Said Victor Segovia, archeologist, as he peered at the damage of a Xultun temple literally cut through the middle, “I believe four more heads lie beneath the rubble but I won’t remove them until I’m certain they’ll be protected. The humans are more poisonous than snakes,” he told reporters, there to view looting damage at the overgrown jungle site.

With antiquity looting in the news, museums world-wide are being forced to return archeological gems to the country of origin. It may be too little too late, but with applied pressure from the U.N. and worldwide cultural ministers, slow progress is being made. And now at long last, the cat’s finally out of the bag.    

Kabah. Photo by Yohann Mourre on Unsplash

An aside—Puerto Morelos sits within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. By living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland we pyramid hopped on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids, the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them, not to mention meeting archeologists, tour guides, and local Maya who popped into the store. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’ll never stop being enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here in Mexico Soul. Please share this post if you know others interested in the Maya. Thank you!