Introduction
In the first half of the twentieth century, U.S. archaeologists in the Maya region worked with corporate interests focused on the commercialization of tropical resources. The presence of extractive industries like mahogany cutting and chicle production overlapped with the operations of agricultural firms like the United Fruit Company (UFCO). In the context of a broader U.S. imperial orientation towards Central America, the Conquest of the Tropics went hand in hand with Romancing the Maya. Footnote 1 The production of scientific knowledge and the extraction of tropical resources came together in public discourses that suggested that Central American territory was open to exploitation for science and commerce, of which the Colossus of the North was the rightful beneficiary.
The United Fruit Company is a case in point. The Company was founded in 1899 via the merger of U.S. railroad-building and banana-commercializing firms, and pursued an aggressive strategy of vertical integration through the middle of the twentieth century.Footnote 2 It operated across national borders at a hemispheric scale—acquiring land, planting bananas, contracting Indigenous and West Indian workers, building segregated enclave-style settlements, developing shipping lanes, and driving demand for bananas in the United States—usually to the detriment of local democracy and organized labor.Footnote 3 United Fruit achieved a practical monopoly in Guatemala and Costa Rica, with sizeable interests in Honduras, Colombia, and elsewhere.Footnote 4 The development of a UFCO-supported tourism industry, including transportation via sea and rail, package tours, and guidebooks, promulgated an image of the region that dovetailed with U.S. interests.Footnote 5 The Company’s ideological alignment with U.S. imperialism functioned “through a corporate colonialism that complemented Washington’s activities in the region,” like the creation of the Panama Canal Zone in 1903.Footnote 6 United Fruit and its apologists considered their work as “civilizing” in the U.S. mold, projected against the terra nullius of the tropics: “a great but unused asset” in which “any enterprise or statesmanship which increases the productivity of these tropical sections adds directly to the assets and welfare of all of the people of the United States.”Footnote 7 Between 1900 and 1945, the governments of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama tended to agree.Footnote 8
Along similar lines, the interpretations produced by archaeologists drew from, and supported, U.S. imperialism. What Juan Ortega y Medina called “archaeological Monroism” describes how, in the mid-nineteenth-century Maya region, the United States claimed an autochthonous, hemispheric, and “American” past that demonstrated a civilized history on par with Europe’s claimed classical Mediterranean heritage.Footnote 9 These claims stressed a disconnect between the builders of pre-Hispanic monuments and contemporary Indigenous communities.Footnote 10 This rupture enabled scholars and the state to justify further U.S. research in the region. “As the governments of Mexico and the Central American republics are making little to no effort to preserve or care for the antiquities within their borders,” archaeologist Marshall Saville wrote in 1892, “it remains for the United States to do something to preserve these vanishing memorials of the past.”Footnote 11 Such scholarship, in turn, reinforced the United States’ hegemonic influence by generating regional disciplinary knowledge in fields like archaeology.Footnote 12 The circulation of archaeologists’ interpretations in the public sphere further made U.S. publics stakeholders in the broader appropriation of Maya pasts.Footnote 13
In discourse, archaeological and corporate interests converged in their support for U.S. imperialism.Footnote 14 Examining UFCO publications, James W. Martin argues that “studying the eclipse of ancient primitives and comparing them to their backwards modern descendants in the context of a triumphant, racialized culture of corporate colonialism provided deep historical resonance to the company’s power over laborers and landscapes.”Footnote 15 Markéta Křížová suggests that archaeologists emphasized the prosperity of pre-Hispanic settlements in the lowland tropics “in a context that critics of the United Fruit Co. claimed was uninhabitable in view of the high mortality rates among plantation workers.”Footnote 16 The United Fruit Company used images of the Maya, past and present, to promote its burgeoning tourist business.Footnote 17 These interpretations reinforced support for access, lodging, and logistics that, in turn, furthered the Company goals of commercializing bananas, building a tourism industry, and “civilizing” the tropics.
These convergences were not specific to U.S. imperialism or the Maya region. A venerable historiography in the politics of archaeology explores how archaeological interpretation draws from, and legitimizes, ideas of nationhood and empire.Footnote 18 Examples abound. In the nineteenth-century United States, racist assumptions about the capacity of Indigenous peoples meant that precolonial mounds were attributed not to their ancestors but to an ancient, advanced Moundbuilder race without living descendants.Footnote 19 Archaeology thus legitimized settler colonialism, justifying the displacement of Indigenous peoples to clear the way for the United States’ expansion.Footnote 20 The precolonial past proved a valuable resource for elite ideas of national identity in the newly-independent states of Latin America—to the exclusion of the region’s contemporary Indigenous communities.Footnote 21 In the aftermath of the War of the Pacific, the Chilean state, Peruvian nationalists, and residents of conquered regions all drew on the ancient past to make claims of national belonging.Footnote 22 There is increasing acknowledgement of the interdependence between archaeology and political strategies like these.
These convergences found their parallels on the terrain of logistics. Commercial firms frequently facilitated travel and shipping for archaeologists and materials alike, aided scholars with permissions and permits, and, on occasion, funded research. The United Fruit Company, in particular, has been noted for its collaborations with archaeologists.Footnote 23 Yet comparing two cases of corporate-archaeological entanglement—Quiriguá and Zaculeu—suggests considerable variation in such relationships. This approach entails a close attention to the administration and conduct of field research, in which the production of archaeological knowledge was tied to broader political economies of racialized labor in ways not determined by the convergences of archaeology and industry, by U.S. perspectives on Latin America, or archaeologists’ racial attitudes.
The research I present here shifts the focus of the politics of the past from imaginaries, interpretations, and discourses to the work of archaeology in the field. Recent research in the history of science has called for “recogniz[ing] the products of scientific work as reflective of broader political economies of labor,” while ethnographic and historical research by archaeologists has documented the exclusion of workers from the products of interpretation.Footnote 24 This exclusion is constitutive of disciplinary epistemology, and reflects broader forms of inequality typically related to the relationships between foreign archaeologists (often white) and local communities (often Indigenous).Footnote 25 Across national contexts and time periods, the employment of workers has been shown to reflect colonial inequalities and understandings of race, while the management of workers is related to capitalist forms of exploitation and hierarchical, military-style forms of organization.Footnote 26 I will suggest that, in early twentieth-century Guatemala, the operations of the United Fruit Company conditioned how archaeologists instantiated broader ideas of race and labor.
I follow this line of analysis to contribute to ongoing research on the politics of archaeology and its corporate connections, as suggested above, taking the opportunity to bring this literature into dialogue with the extensive scholarship on race and labor in the operations of firms like the United Fruit Company. This dialogue stands to benefit both archaeology and histories of science in Latin America. As William S. Willis, Jr. wrote half a century ago, “white anthropologists are members of racist societies, and color prejudice and discrimination must be incorporated into any history of anthropology.”Footnote 27 Archaeologists have likewise demonstrated that grappling with the intersections between whiteness, colonialism, and archaeology is key for more informed and ethical disciplinary practice in the present.Footnote 28 As I will show, archaeological fieldwork was a domain in which discriminatory ideas of race were renewed and put to the service of eventual knowledge production—but in ways that were not determined by the simple fact of collaboration between scientific and corporate interests.
In Quiriguá (1910–1915), archaeologists drew on United Fruit Company precedents in racializing Indigenous and Afrodescendant labor, implementing them via payroll procedures and divisions of labor; these patterns are especially visible in representations of Afrodescendant workers’ speech. In Zaculeu (1946–1949), UFCO-funded archaeologists collaborated with physical anthropologists, employing deeply-rooted ideas about the capacities of Indigenous peoples and racial continuity between the precolonial and contemporary Maya. Comparing these projects further suggests parallels between types of archaeological research otherwise regarded quite differently, across distinct periods of Guatemalan history. Between the 1910s and the 1940s, Maya archaeology transitioned from an object-focused antiquarianism emphasizing description and funded by wealthy patrons to an institutionalizing, scientific characteristic set of methodologies oriented to a series of common research questions.Footnote 29 At the same time, the Guatemalan state transitioned from the authoritarian governments inaugurated by the Liberal Revolt of 1871 to the democratically-elected governments of the Ten Years of Spring in 1944, with concurrent changes in policies towards the country’s diverse Indigenous communities.Footnote 30 Despite differences in scientific and political contexts, comparing these cases illustrates how the United Fruit Company functioned as a conduit through which broader political economies of race and labor conditioned the practice of archaeology.
An emphasis on racialization, “the process through which groups come to be understood as major biological entities and human lineages,” provides a productive framework for interpreting the source base of this study.Footnote 31 In this context, a racialization approach complements previous work that has elucidated how archaeological evidence is deployed to support racism.Footnote 32 Focusing on racialization involves attention to the contextual, processual, and directional dimensions of racial identification in context. Concentrating on what “is done to a group, by some social agent, at a certain time, for a given period, in and through various processes, and relative to a particular social context” brings the analytical lens to fieldwork.Footnote 33 Such an approach also complements biographical studies that have explored the racial attitudes of individual archaeologists, but goes beyond beliefs to demonstrate how these attitudes applied in the day-to-day of fieldwork.Footnote 34 The fact that racialization does not specify mechanisms—or the means by which the process occurs—opens a range of field-related activities to critical scrutiny.Footnote 35 Such activities include, but go beyond, archaeologists’ published interpretations to include worker contracting procedures, payroll administration, and collaborations with other scholars. Finding common ground across these distinct spheres of activity elucidates the broader social and political contexts affecting how archaeologists understood race and what these scholars did with the ideas of race they brought into the field, keeping the analytical focus on fieldwork.
Archaeology, Race, and Labor in Guatemala
Archaeologists brought particular ideas of race into the field. The field, too, was already structured by long-standing national and international efforts to racialize labor in the service of capitalist development. The archaeologists under study were associated with the “Bostonians,” who were key to the consolidation of the territorial imaginary of a “Maya area” in the 1890s; these included Harvard University, the associated Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW).Footnote 36 The CIW, a key actor in Maya archaeology, was a private, nongovernmental research institution.Footnote 37 Founded in 1902, it operated a wide-ranging multidisciplinary research program in the Maya regions of Mexico and Central America between 1914 and 1958.Footnote 38 The archaeologists employed by the CIW shared similar backgrounds: they were white, from the upper classes, and of northeastern origins.Footnote 39 The United Fruit Company shared these origins: its management drew from the “racism of corporate officials [as] set in the upper-class context of Boston’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society.”Footnote 40
Scientific and corporate interests alike drew on labor forces that were the products of Guatemala’s complex social terrain. Precolonial ethnolinguistic diversity, the long-term effects of Spanish colonization, the trafficking of enslaved Africans, and nineteenth-century labor migrations were among the processes that generated regional variation. By Guatemala’s independence in 1821, the country was already integrated into broader circum-Caribbean patterns of migration—especially in the coastal region of Izabal, home to the archaeological site of Quiriguá.Footnote 41 The presence of Afrodescendants dated from the early colonial period.Footnote 42 During the nineteenth century, the state recruited international laborers for work on the railroads and in support of foreign colonization efforts. Many workers were from the West Indies, especially Jamaica, and the southern United States.Footnote 43 For its part, the United Fruit Company’s recruitment efforts focused on West Indians for a variety of reasons, including high local unemployment, familiarity with plantation relations of production, and racist ideas about the capacity of Black men to labor.Footnote 44 The migrations soon proved a concern for the Guatemalan state, which preferred European immigration and was long committed to seeing the population divided between Eurodescendant Ladinos and Indigenous communities.Footnote 45 West Indian population growth peaked in the mid-1910s, after which racist, discriminatory policies tended to discourage Afrodescendant migration.Footnote 46 These migrations were less well-marked elsewhere in the country, though important communities and broader cultural legacies remain today.Footnote 47
The western highlands of Guatemala, home to the archaeological site of Zaculeu, were historically populated by diverse Maya communities, including Mam, K’iche’, and Q’anjob’al, among others. While direct Spanish colonization was relatively sparse, nineteenth-century reformers sought to develop an export-oriented economy centered on coffee.Footnote 48 To this end, governments liberalized land tenure, instituted labor drafts, and by the end of the century sought to remake the state in a Ladino image.Footnote 49 In this context, Indigenous communities proved an obstacle to elite ideas of modernization. Julie Gibbings provides an example of the logic by which late nineteenth-century elites racialized Q’eqchi’ Maya labor vis-à-vis coffee plantations: “Mayas refused to work on the coffee plantations as needed for the meager wages coffee planters were willing to pay. Therefore, Mayas will not work on the coffee plantations. Therefore, Mayas will not work. Insolence was rendered as indolence, and Mayas were racialized as lazy…. According to these elites, the abundant and fertile Guatemalan landscape required little effort to produce the basic necessities for primitive Mayan life. As a result, the reasoning went, Mayas had failed to follow the path of modern European nations in the development of habits of vigorous work and aspirations for ever-increasing material wealth.”Footnote 50
The development of indigenista policy in the 1930s and 1940s, broadly focused on integrating Indigenous communities into national cultures along capitalist lines, stood in contrast to past discrimination. The democratically elected government of Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951) founded the Instituto Indigenista Nacional de Guatemala to conduct applied social-scientific research. The succeeding Árbenz (1951–1954) regime’s indigenista policy considered Indigenous communities as a barrier to national unification, though they had certain cultural values that were worth conserving.Footnote 51
Archaeologists arrived in Guatemala with their own ideas of race, conditioned by their origins. In so doing, they crossed paths with the long-running ways in which the Guatemalan state dealt with, and discriminated against, Afrodescendant and Indigenous populations. While the archaeologists in question collaborated with state authorities, their most important intermediaries were corporate firms, especially the United Fruit Company. It provided a set of racialization mechanisms on which archaeologists drew in their treatment of Afrodescendent and Indigenous workers. The cases of Quiriguá and Zaculeu illustrate the variety of such mechanisms at play in the field, illuminating a diverse set of relationships between archaeology and commercial interests in early twentieth-century Guatemala.
The UFCO Comes to Quiriguá
Located in Izabal, on the Motagua River, Quiriguá was first made famous by diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and draughtsman Frederick Catherwood in their well-circulated travelogues of the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 52 A Classic Maya provincial capital, Quiriguá was occupied between at least 426 and 810 C.E. and closely related to the well-known city of Copán, in modern Honduras.Footnote 53 The Motagua River floodplain that made the location ideal for Quiriguá’s builders also proved productive for bananas.Footnote 54 The site came to the United Fruit Company via a railroads-for-concessions deal, one of the firm’s common tactics for land acquisition.Footnote 55 In 1904, UFCO Vice President Minor C. Keith negotiated with the government of Guatemala under dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) to complete a railway to the Caribbean coast. In return, the Company received control of the railway and 67,650 hectares of land.Footnote 56 This kind of deal was often welcomed by governments like Estrada Cabrera’s, which encouraged export-led development via direct foreign investment.Footnote 57 Land values increased, and so did speculation: the 9,602-hectare Quiriguá estate changed hands a few times before becoming the base of operations for the UFCO’s newly founded Guatemala Division, headed by Victor Cutter, in 1906.Footnote 58
The Company’s interest in pre-Hispanic Quiriguá is reminiscent of the late nineteenth-century structures of patronage through which contemporary U.S. archaeology was funded, in contrast with the later Zaculeu project.Footnote 59 What became the Quiriguá project appears to have been a contingent outcome of the United Fruit’s ownership of the land, and of the support of well-placed individuals in the Company hierarchy—especially Keith and Cutter. Both were noted for their interests in the pre-Hispanic past: Keith’s collection of 16,308 artifacts eventually ended up in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation), and he was a member of the latter’s Board of Trustees at its 1916 incorporation.Footnote 60 Cutter was known for his “collection of Mayan objects of arts and crafts,” and he published a piece in the Bulletin of the Pan-American Union on Quiriguá.Footnote 61 These interests suggest that both were favorably predisposed to support the project headed by Edgar L. Hewett of the School for American Archaeology. The project was initially planned for Palenque, then Chichén Itza.Footnote 62 When the Mexican Revolution made such plans untenable, Hewett credited Cutter with an invitation to excavate at Quiriguá; the research was initially underwritten by the St. Louis Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and the United Fruit Company.Footnote 63
The project began in March of 1910.Footnote 64 For the 1910 and 1911 field seasons, foreman Lisandro Castillo, “a native of Guatemala Antigua, a young man of about twenty-four years of age, and of much more than average native ability,” led a group of between twenty and fifty workers whose labor enabled the archaeologists to carry out the research.Footnote 65 Hewett’s ostensible assistants, Sylvanus Morley and Jesse Nusbaum, directed the fieldwork, removing vegetation and mapping a seventy-four-acre tract that encompassed the site core.Footnote 66 The St. Louis Society underwrote the season in the amount of $2,800.Footnote 67 United Fruit approved a total of $7,500 for the work at Quiriguá, with the funds administered via its treasury.Footnote 68 The 1911 and 1912 field seasons were jointly funded by the St. Louis Society and the UFCO; the former ended its support in 1913 and the latter, in 1914, over issues with Hewett’s management.Footnote 69 During these seasons, research consisted of photographing monuments, surveying mounds, and excavating major structures. For the 1914 field season, directed by Earl Morris, Hewett found funding with the organizers of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, whose interest was in acquiring glue casts of Quiriguá’s famous stelae for the event’s commemoration of the opening of the Panama Canal.Footnote 70
Today, the Quiriguá project is occasionally noted for its early efforts at monumental reconstruction, its recognition of the importance of stratigraphy, or for the artifacts taken to the United States.Footnote 71 However, the excavation methodology was destructive and the reporting was limited to a few short articles.Footnote 72 The documentation was regarded as “scientifically useless” even by 1933.Footnote 73 Conflicted operations aside, United Fruit did not abandon Quiriguá; it maintained the seventy-four acre tract as a park, and it proved willing to facilitate Carnegie Institution-sponsored research at the site in 1919, 1933, and 1934.Footnote 74
Race and Labor in Quiriguá
Archaeologists drew on the United Fruit Company labor pool to find workers for the Quiriguá project. In 1912, the Guatemala Division was staffed by around 3,175 employees, of which 175 were “White” and 3,000, “Colored.”Footnote 75 In general, “White” referred to Euro-Americans, who tended to be English-speaking professionals and what the Company considered skilled workers; the “Colored” category likely included “the laborers of this Division [who] are mainly of three races: the West Indian negro, the Carib, and the Central American native (Spanish and Indian),” as a contemporary Medical Department report explained.Footnote 76 In dealing with these workers, archaeologists followed United Fruit administrative precedents, which went beyond the general distinctions between white and non-white.Footnote 77 The workers that Cutter requisitioned included “specially picked natives for heavy work, clearing logs, etc.…Jamaican and American negros…and Caribs,” while Hewett’s notes on payroll distinguished between “Native workmen” paid at “15 pesos per day” and “negros for shovel work” paid at “$1.25 gold per day.”Footnote 78 While the rates of daily payment may represent an adaptation to the specific requirements of archaeological labor—workers were otherwise paid on a piece-rate basis—the racialized distinctions between rates and currencies replicates the Company’s payment procedures.Footnote 79 These, too, drew on the Panama Canal’s silver and gold system, in which race determined whether workers were paid in silver Panamanian pesos or gold U.S. dollars.Footnote 80 The archaeologists were functionally unable to deviate from this system: Hewett’s attempt to raise wages and change the pay schedule met with a threat to terminate support from Victor Cutter.Footnote 81
Archaeologists found the political economy of racialized labor familiar. “I don’t know what the itinerant archaeologist would do in these countries,” Morley wrote in a 1917 diary entry, “if it were not for the U.F.Co. Its establishments are the only places where you can really live as at home, and its employees almost the only congenial people to be met along the coast.”Footnote 82 “Living as at home,” in this context, recalls not just the infrastructure but the United Fruit’s segregation practices and ways of racializing labor.Footnote 83 As Andrew Bell suggests, archaeologists expanded the Company’s racial categorizations into the production of scientific knowledge by playing overseer roles.Footnote 84 “All the Fruit Co. men who know anything about labor problems” reportedly regarded Morley’s management of workers favorably, suggesting commensurability between the organization of workers on banana plantations and on archaeological excavations.Footnote 85 Workers compared Morley to the other white male managers of the Guatemala division: “One of the Jamaican boys was marvelling how I could stand the heat, and said there were not two white men in the whole division who could stand it like I do.”Footnote 86 Managing archaeology on the ground derived from United Fruit’s approaches to labor and race, which were grounded in broader plantation logics.Footnote 87
Archaeologists’ comments suggest not just familiarity but agreement with the United Fruit Company’s implementation of racialized labor practices.Footnote 88 James W. Martin cited a Company engineering manual of 1920: “‘It is the custom to allow the negroes and natives to do most of the manual labor,’ the author of the fruit company’s manual noted, the supervisory and technical tasks only being suitable for whites.… ‘The natives are usually very quick and are exceptionally good for woodland work,’ but ‘are not very rugged or strong.… The negroes,’ on the other hand, ‘are more regular and steady, but not so quick to learn.’”Footnote 89 Archaeologists followed such patterns of racialization, not simply in differentiating between white and nonwhite but by confronting a diverse labor force by allocating tasks based on race and, perhaps, by segregating the workforce. The archaeologists differentiated between the “machete men,” described as “native laborers…[who] while not physically strong, are remarkably efficient with the machete,” and the “Carib choppers,” credited with skill at “removing the forest monsters from the temples and from the vicinity of the monuments without a single instance of damage.”Footnote 90 Hewett made such distinctions when describing workers’ labor, as when the “natives man the ropes and pulleys while the Caribs cut down the tree.”Footnote 91 Other project participants, like Charles Fletcher Lummis, made similar distinctions using more racist language.Footnote 92
Material from Morley’s diaries further suggests that the division of labor may have resulted in segregation by race, in addition to racialization by task. For the 1912 field season, archaeologists contracted William James, a Black mason from Jacksonville, Florida, and Hamilton Wray, possibly of Belize, as foremen.Footnote 93 The entry from 17 February 1912, notes that “payday and work [were] largely demoralized, though we only took our black gang for one-half day, and our natives not at all.”Footnote 94 For a follow-up field season in 1919, Morley hired two foremen. The first, ex-foreman Wray, was instructed “to engage a native gang” that Morley later described as “the best natives I have had.”Footnote 95 The second, Belizean Alexander Ifield, was charged with contracting workers for what Morley described elsewhere as a “negro gang.”Footnote 96 Elsewhere, he describes them as the “Paisanos” and the “Jamaicanos.”Footnote 97 Such distinctions, between Indigenous and Afrodescendant workers, mirror United Fruit’s well-known segmented labor practices.
Examining archaeologists’ descriptions of workers’ speech, especially that of the English-speaking Afrodescendant workers, illustrates such patterns of racialization.Footnote 98 In a retrospective that recalled Hewett’s contemporaneous comments, Morris praised the skill of the “Carib axemen,” and related an anecdote in a telling style:
Next morning when I gave the call “Let’s go” the workmen remained clustered under a tree at the edge of the clearing with no move to respond. It was a matter of minutes before one of them hesitatingly came forward and said in his queer Jamaican vernacular: “Cap’n, Sah, it be told the treasure lies inside yonder portal. But before you can remove it, the life of one of us blacks must be taken as blood sacrifice. We has to know if this report is truth or slander." Brief questioning laid the tale at the door of a practical joker and the men came smiling to get their tools—as fine a crew as could be recruited among blacks, whites, or browns anywhere on earth.Footnote 99
Morris makes clear that “queer Jamaican vernacular” corresponds to a Black worker. This tendency is not idiosyncratic: Morley, for instance, quoted a “Jamaica boy[‘s]” quip that the Maya glyphs “sure de han’ writin’ on de wall!”Footnote 100 Despite archaeologists’ consistent positive evaluations of these workers, these uses of quoted speech are suggestive. As Alexandra Jaffe has argued, “the act of using nonstandard orthographies to represent others is inherently an act of representational control and authority, which both distances the author from the speech represented and thus—even if unintentionally—confers a textually subordinate position on the subjects of the respellings.”Footnote 101 This representation links a racial identification with dialect respellings to exoticize the speaker relative to the writer.Footnote 102 Such tendencies reflect, and reinforce, the racializing approaches to labor that archaeologists drew from the United Fruit Company.
The Company’s participation in Quiriguá seems to have been contingent on the interest of Minor C. Keith and Victor Cutter, though it was certainly willing to make use of the results in the development of its tourism business.Footnote 103 The resulting relationship between archaeologists and the United Fruit Company, however, went beyond the convergence between corporate and scientific interests, extending to how archaeologists dealt with workers in the field. The resulting racialization of labor was not an automatic outcome of U.S. perspectives on Latin America, or a simple artifact of archaeologists’ racist attitudes. Rather, archaeologists employed Company payroll procedures, segmented labor practices, and dialect respellings to instantiate categories of race, Indigenous and Afrodescendant alike, in the day-to-day of fieldwork. Despite the differing scientific and commercial contexts, archaeologists dealt with workers in much the same way that United Fruit officials dealt with plantation laborers.
A UFCO Public Relations Project in Zaculeu
By the beginning of the Zaculeu Project in 1946, the United Fruit Company, Guatemala, and Maya archaeology were in very different places than they had been at the end of the Quiriguá project in 1915. With the Great Depression and Second World War in the rearview, the Company changed leadership, adjusted policy, and shifted operations from production to marketing towards the 1950s.Footnote 104 National politics, too, made themselves known at the local scale with more immediate impact than had been the case in Quiriguá. A 1944 democratic revolution had overthrown the U.S.- and United Fruit-friendly dictator Jorge Ubico (1931–1944). The 1945 election of Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951) created a rift between the Company and the state.Footnote 105 Under Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Árbenz (1951–1954), Guatemala enforced the “most aggressive nationalist initiative against United Fruit up to that moment” involving support for organized labor, land reform, and economic nationalism.Footnote 106 The Ten Years of Spring ended when the U.S., United Fruit, and Guatemalan conservatives supported a 1954 coup against Árbenz that inaugurated dictatorships, civil war, and eventual genocide.Footnote 107 Maya archaeology now featured the institutionally-funded projects of organizations like the Carnegie Institution of Washington.Footnote 108 In practical terms, stratigraphic excavation—rather than collecting alone—became standard, with an understanding that culture was shared, embodied in artifacts, and recognizable in terms of time and space.Footnote 109 In contrast to the limited results of the Quiriguá project, the Zaculeu report remains the standard reference for the site, and a key study for the archaeology of the Highlands more generally.Footnote 110 The project’s excessive reconstruction of pre-Hispanic architecture is less well regarded.Footnote 111
Located in the Huehuetenango department of Guatemala’s Western Highlands, Zaculeu was continuously inhabited from the Early Classic period onward. A well-known capital of the Mam Maya, its fifteenth-century conquest by the K’iche’ Maya and 1526 siege by Mexican, K’iche’, and Spanish forces under Gonzalo de Alvarado are both well-documented.Footnote 112 As in Quiriguá, the United Fruit Company was not the first organization to take an interest in the site. It had been studied by Guatemalan archaeologists since the 1920s.Footnote 113 What became the Zaculeu project was the brainchild of “middle-aged & youngish retired engineer-oilman-WallStreet Investor,” former Office of Strategic Services agent, and avocational archaeologist John M. Dimick.Footnote 114 In 1946, Dimick pitched then-United Fruit head Samuel Zemurray on “the idea of developing, for the benefit of the great number of tourists who will be coming to Guatemala, a ruin that is more accessible than those of the Peten forests.”Footnote 115 Dimick’s retrospective suggests that the Company was interested in “giving back” in the same way it had through building hospitals and schools, and with a tax break: “any donation for educational purposes such as archaeology would be paid for with what amounts to a ten cent dollar.”Footnote 116 With the support of Zemurray’s daughter, archaeologist Doris Zemurray Stone, and other Company executives, Dimick left with a substantial budget for the project.Footnote 117
For the United Fruit Company, the choice of Zaculeu was contingent on the logistical ease of the research and the potential for tourism development. For the Carnegie Institution, after three decades of experience in Guatemala, the site of Chutixtiox would have been preferable. Chairman of the CIW’s Division of Historical Research A. V. Kidder considered Zaculeu “not as compact and well preserved,” but the site was “far more accessible, both to tourists and Guatemaltecos. And being near an important city [Huehuetenango], its excavation and repair will be more appreciated in the Republic, which is one of Mr. Zemurray’s chief desires.”Footnote 118 Five days after this evaluation, Kidder met with Dimick and United Fruit officials to have “the lawyer to alter the solicitud to the government from Chutix Tiox to Z[aculeu].”Footnote 119 For UFCO, the Zaculeu project thus fulfilled multiple objectives: a tax break, tourism development, and, as Kidder’s comment suggests, a means of currying favor with the government in the changed political context of Guatemala after 1944.
The Zaculeu project was a United Fruit Company initiative, but the Carnegie Institution laid the groundwork. During the project, the Carnegie’s continued participation facilitated good relationships with the government and lent the research an air of scientific legitimacy. The choice of project personnel and collaborators suggests that the two organizations were far from strangers. Dimick had worked with the CIW and project archaeologist Stanley Boggs at Campana San Andrés, El Salvador, in 1941.Footnote 120 A. V. Kidder was appointed technical advisor at Dimick’s initiative or—perhaps more likely—Zemurray’s insistence.Footnote 121 Architect Aubrey Trik had previously been employed by the CIW; Carnegie archaeologist Edwin Shook spent about three weeks orienting Boggs’ successor, Richard Woodbury, and helping him begin the work; and Gustav Strömsvik, a veteran of CIW excavations in Chichén Itzá, Quiriguá, and Copán, supervised the Zaculeu ballcourt reconstruction.Footnote 122
Given tensions between the government of Guatemala and United Fruit, the Carnegie Institution’s high profile in the field did much to facilitate the project. Archaeologist Heinrich Berlin, employed by the Instituto de Antropología e Historia de Guatemala between 1949 and 1952, later claimed that “even during the most leftish days in Guatemala Carnegie’s integrity was never questioned.”Footnote 123 The CIW’s operations in Guatemala were initially backed by a contract signed in 1925, and—despite changes in government—renewed with little apparent friction in 1930, 1935, 1940, and 1946. In discussing the 1946 contract renewal with CIW President Vannevar Bush, Kidder described the Arévalo government as “extremely friendly and cooperative.”Footnote 124 A further testament to the CIW’s standing was that “when the Fruit Co. applied to the government for permission to do Zaculeu, the [Guatemalan] Minister of Education asked me if [the CIW] had any objection!”Footnote 125
To be sure, criticism was not absent. Writing in retrospect, Dimick blamed “political cronies of the extreme leftist president” for a local newspaper’s critique of Zaculeu’s reconstruction.Footnote 126 In contemporary correspondence, lead project archaeologist Richard Woodbury understood that the relations between United Fruit and the government vis-à-vis the project were contentious: “Local politics come first, and anti-yankee is often a good sound stand to take.”Footnote 127 During the excavations, the project leadership did its part to ingratiate itself with the authorities. For instance, after running across the departmental governor during an excursion, the Dimicks invited him, the mayor, and friends for “a buffet supper (preceded by drinks) at the ruins, by moonlight.”Footnote 128 Between these efforts and the CIW’s support, the project proceeded accordingly.
Daniel Murcia, a Honduran Ladino man who had previously worked with the Carnegie Institution in Copán and Dimick in El Salvador, served as “foreman, Caporal, and otherwise general handy man.”Footnote 129 In addition to mending pottery, Murcia coordinated with the archaeologists to direct workers in excavation and reconstruction. The emphasis on reconstruction meant an abundance of work for masons: during the first week of the 1947 field season, Woodbury described “25 masons at work putting white cement on Structure 1… also, half a dozen men digging in 3 different places.”Footnote 130 In correspondence, Woodbury recounted details of the site’s busy social life, involving tourists, scholars, United Fruit personnel, and Guatemalan officials, as well as his own ongoing analysis of the excavated materials. Unlike at Quiriguá, access to Company funding was not a concern and seeking support from other agencies was apparently unnecessary. Dimick “never worries about the possibility that we’re being extravagant after he sees the way the company flies their friends around and entertains them.”Footnote 131 UFCO proved willing to cover material shortfalls, as with the 343,600 pounds of lime it purchased, and took care of the logistics of transportation, as with the dump truck it brought from New York and the two thousand bags of white cement it imported from Yugoslavia.Footnote 132
The immediate conclusion of the project demonstrates the extent to which it functioned as a public relations exercise before the Guatemalan state, which also seems to have availed itself of the benefits. The site was turned over to the state at the completion of the excavations in 1949. In a formal ceremony, Doris Zemurray Stone presented Zaculeu “in the name of the United Fruit Company” to Director of Public Education Raúl Osegueda, who accepted and opened the site.Footnote 133 The project represented the first major foreign excavations conducted under the auspices of the recently founded Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia de Guatemala.Footnote 134
The publication history of Zaculeu contrasts markedly with the results of the Quiriguá project. The final report for Zaculeu was published in 1953 by the United Fruit Company and was dedicated to Samuel Zemurray.Footnote 135 The publication was well regarded, an “important collection of archaeological reporting: sober, sound, exhaustive, [and] well organized,” if somewhat lacking in interpretation.Footnote 136 The report’s circulation attests to the changed political conditions of the project. In trying to assess why one collaborator did not receive his copy of the report, Woodbury recalled that “someone had deleted all the names on the [distribution] list from Huehuetenango”; he considered it “doubtless one of Dimick’s aberrations, but I don’t know.”Footnote 137 Woodbury’s ambivalence is telling: it seems probable that, with the increasing government-United Fruit tensions of the Árbenz years, locally circulating what reviewers lauded as “two very handsomely bound and richly illustrated volumes” as a “testimonial to a unique undertaking by the United Fruit Company” risked causing conflict, rather than demonstrating the Company’s goodwill, as was intended when the project began.Footnote 138
As in Quiriguá, United Fruit Company interests determined the choice of Zaculeu for a research project, and, for that matter, the choice of archaeology as a means of improving the country’s public and governmental relations. In both cases, United States research institutions collaborated with company officials and workers to carry out the actual research. However, whereas Quiriguá’s excavation depended on a transnational labor force comprised mostly of West Indians and Indigenous banana plantation workers, Zaculeu saw the employment of Mam Maya residents of Huehuetenango. In a broad context of state indigenista policy, and in collaboration with archaeologists, the methods of physical anthropology became mechanisms of racialization.
Race and Labor at Zaculeu
Unlike Quiriguá, Zaculeu did not double as a United Fruit plantation or enclave. The land was owned by the Villatoro family, in whose hands the parcels remain.Footnote 139 Archaeologists thus did not draw on the Company’s labor pool for the project. The workers of Zaculeu were Mam Maya, living around the site or in the nearby Huehuetenango area.Footnote 140 Foreman Murcia began by hiring the farmers living closest to the site, and they were organized into crews and paid according to their positions—with little apparent reference to race.Footnote 141 Woodbury could not “quite remember what the wage scale is” but thought it “45 cents a day for unskilled labor and for masons it’s 85 or 90 cents…still something to marvel at—of course agitation among the workers on the big plantations (coffee and bananas) keeps everyone uncertain when a general upheaval will take place that will completely change existing rates.”Footnote 142 The terms of the comparison are telling; even without the banana plantation setting or Afrodescendant workers, work in archaeology was still comparable to plantation labor.Footnote 143
In contrast with Quiriguá, the racializing mechanisms visible in archaeological practice in Zaculeu resonate with broader trends in indigenista theory and practice, as administered by the United Fruit Company. Representations of workers typically racialized them as “native Indian workmen,” of value primarily for their bodies.Footnote 144 As Dimick wrote in his introduction to the project’s final report: “Much has been written about the skilful hands of the Indian. They are not strong hands and the palms are surprisingly tender. His real power is in his legs and back. There he conserves an energy that, when liberated, bewildered us. His surprisingly delicate hands are quick in mimicry, as in the case of imitating our careful digging, and he also develops his own studied cadence. Our archaeologists brought out the very best in a number of these men until by the end of our excavations they had become invaluable.”Footnote 145 Thanks to the patient instruction and “daily explanations” of the archaeologists, the masons could even be taught to use cement rather than the traditional adobe and lime mortar.Footnote 146 Dimick’s phrasing suggests that the workers’ capacities needed the expertise of an archaeologist, whether to be unleashed or as a model. The suggestion of an essential deficiency that can be addressed by agents of modernization—archaeologists, in this case—broadly resonates with the then-prevalent indigenista idea that Indigenous peoples should be incorporated into national society along state-directed modernizing, capitalist lines.Footnote 147
The capacities of racialized bodies were not simply objects of description after the fact. In conjunction with the archaeological excavation and reconstruction, project collaborators Charles Weer Goff, and, to a lesser extent, T. Dale Stewart employed a suite of “data practices [that] gave a measurable reality to race.”Footnote 148 A physician by training, Goff conducted an anthropometric study whose subjects included the workers of Zaculeu, the inmates of the Huehuetenango jail, and farm workers.Footnote 149 The stated objective of the “careful selection” of sixty-one “apparently healthy adult males” was to “supply a series for comparison with the builders of the Zaculeu pyramids and temples.”Footnote 150 Stewart, a groundbreaking physical anthropologist, conducted the analysis of the skeletal material from the numerous Zaculeu burials; incidentally, he was in the area conducting a separate anthropometric study sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the Smithsonian Institution.Footnote 151
As Stewart’s parallel project suggests, the bodily objectification of Indigenous subjects by an American scientific enterprise was not limited to Zaculeu. While Goff examined ancestral Mam Maya skulls for evidence of precolonial syphilis, the U.S. Public Health Service, in coordination with the government of Guatemala, intentionally exposed some 1,308 prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients to sexually-transmitted infections (including syphilis) to test the efficacy of preventative measures.Footnote 152 Lydia Crafts highlights this project’s sympathies with the government’s indigenista orientation, in terms of its efforts “to spur a national regeneration, a eugenic project shaped by patriarchal middle-class ladino (defined as non-Indigenous) norms.”Footnote 153 The anthropometric study of workers at Zaculeu likewise shared in the bodily objectification of Indigenous subjects in a context of indigenista state policy.
Like similar studies, Goff’s research presumed the existence of a discrete racial group—first defined by dress, language, and state identification papers, in this case—whose characteristics could then be defined through quantification and comparison.Footnote 154 In correspondence with Stewart, Goff described the sample population as “as pure as one could find…[and] quite pure Indian stock at that.”Footnote 155 To describe this population, Goff conducted a series of twenty-five measurements, made assorted medical observations, and took photographs. Dedicating the bulk of the analysis to describing the measurements and observations, the author does not specifically comment on the front-facing and profile photographs of forty unnamed subjects. The inclusion of type photos appears to have been taken for granted; they speak for themselves as evidence of the racial characteristics revealed through anthropometric study.Footnote 156 Still, their inclusion in the context of the broader Zaculeu study is telling. As Charlotte Williams argues, the Zaculeu project’s imaginative architectural reconstruction resulted in a neoclassical style more closely related to the modern expectations of civilized antiquity than to the archaeology of the pre-Hispanic site.Footnote 157 The reconstructed site, juxtaposed with the anthropometric photographs, reinforced a contrast between the glorious past and the primitive present.Footnote 158 This juxtaposition was literal: the second volume of the report consisted entirely of plates, featuring depictions of excavations, artifacts, human remains, and the anthropometric photographs together.
Backed by metric, quantitative, and visual evidence, the study concluded that “the male Indian” possessed “excellent robusticity, good posture and a constitution well adapted to a high rugged environment.”Footnote 159 The anthropometric study located the capacity for adequate labor, the same that Dimick highlighted in his introduction, in workers’ bodies. Workers’ acknowledged contribution to knowledge production came neither from their skilled labor nor their embodied expertise but from the objectification of their bodies—a process not specific to Zaculeu but one whose logic, in other circumstances, undergirded exploitative projects like those cited above. Anthropometric research at Zaculeu involved patterns of racialization that justified Mam Maya residents’ suitability for labor, in the context of the broader indigenista currents of the period.
In a more speculative vein, it is worth considering how the anthropometric study may have further served United Fruit Company goals by illustrating Maya cultural continuity in the service of tourism development. The question of the relationship between the builders of pre-Hispanic monuments and contemporary Indigenous communities had important political implications for scholars and the state.Footnote 160 The Company, too, took advantage of the rhetoric of continuity. The workers of Zaculeu were of particular interest for how their bodies might be used as proxies for understanding of the site’s pre-Hispanic past. However, neither Goff nor Stewart conducted more than superficial comparisons; the logic of continuity that enabled pre-Hispanic human remains to be compared with living Mam Maya bodies was more important than the actual outcomes of the comparison.Footnote 161 Advertising the anthropometric study of the “many modern descendants of the Zaculeans” in public-facing work underscored the continuity between the glorious Maya past brought to light at Zaculeu and the “picturesque primitive aesthetic” of Highland Maya communities in United Fruit’s tourism marketing materials.Footnote 162 Such an association harks back to older tropes of Indigenous cultural degradation in a novel context: both the state and the UFCO sought to publicize Guatemala’s Highland Maya cultures as objects of tourist interest during the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 163 As noted, the Zaculeu project was intended to develop tourism; the excavations served as a “living museum” visited by more than nine thousand visitors over the course of the project.Footnote 164 The inclusion of these studies with the results of archaeological research suggests an implicit argument about cultural continuity with degradation that resonates with imagery used by the Company to promote its burgeoning tourist business.
In Zaculeu, racialization took place less through administrative procedures and divisions of labor than the methods of physical anthropology, which produced descriptions of bodies fit for labor on the basis of essential racial characteristics in the commercial context of a firm considered “undoubtedly the most effective cultivator and exploiter of ethnic and racial divisions among its workers.”Footnote 165 At the same time, these mechanisms supported the imagery of a degraded present that contrasted with the glorious past embodied in the excavation of Zaculeu. This imagery itself relied on a logic of continuity that, too, arguably served the goals of the United Fruit Company in promoting tourism. As in Quiriguá, the United Fruit Company served as a conduit through which broader patterns of racialization were joined to the management of an archaeological research project.
Conclusions
Writing to Carnegie Institution of Washington President Robert S. Woodward in 1920, Sylvanus Morley was optimistic about future research plans: “This is not the first time, in my own work at least, that the Institution has benefited through the friendliness of a large American corporation, the assistance extended to me by the officials of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala being a case in point…giv[ing a] basis for the hope that the coming field season…will yield important results in the way of the discovery of new cities, monuments and hieroglyphic inscriptions.”Footnote 166
Yet the influence of such firms was not limited to knowledge production and logistical support. Corporate practice also conditioned the patterns of racialization that archaeologists used in dealing with workers. These patterns are visible in how archaeologists paid, organized, and represented workers. Such tendencies link projects considered very differently in the history of the discipline: one a transitional, quasi-antiquarian effort long supplanted by more recent research, and the other a modern project whose results remain the standard reference for the site in question. Considering race and labor along these lines draws archaeology into broader discussions of Latin American political economies even without considering how archaeologists’ ideas circulated among governments and experts.
Simply recognizing the entanglements of archaeology and industry or their ties to the broader contexts of U.S. imperialism in Latin America does not account for the specific ideas of race that archaeologists employed, or their effects. In Quiriguá, archaeologists’ approaches to race drew from the ideologies and methods of the United Fruit Company, replicating a plantation logic in the context of an archaeological field site. In Zaculeu, United Fruit funding translated approaches to race that drew on the indigenista logic of Indigenous deficiency and racial continuity. In both cases, these approaches justified the use of their respective labor forces as bodies fit for work—rather than stakeholders in the interpretation of the past, workers seeking to make the best of an unequal political-economic system, or any other role that might have suggested parity between archaeologists and workers. In this, archaeology partook of ideologies that were not specific to the discipline, but such discourses did not arrive unaided to the field. They were instantiated through relationships with the United Fruit Company. These relationships were developed and negotiated during fieldwork, even before the Company, archaeologists, and others appropriated the published results for their own ends. This emphasis shifts the focus from the circulation of ideas about the past to the context of fieldwork, in which these relationships were continually reforged.
Key to this renewal were the workers themselves. While not the focus of this study, I suggest that understanding archaeologists’ racialization mechanisms will prove useful for future efforts to interpret worker agency and organizing. In the cases I have discussed, archaeologists were the agents, and workers, members of the racialized groups. This distinction highlights the fact that “worker” was likely only one of many social roles that the people employed to do the work of excavation, and all had ways of identifying themselves that corresponded to their own communities and histories.Footnote 167 They may not have shared archaeologists’ ideas about the use, purpose, or importance of research.Footnote 168 Workers also likely had their own ways of resisting—like the man who came to Quiriguá in 1919 and simply “left as soon as he found out [Morley] was only paying the natives $1.15 a day”—and perhaps organizing.Footnote 169 In any case, workers’ interactions with archaeology were enabled, and constrained, by the broader political economies of racialized labor in which Mesoamerican archaeology operated.
In early twentieth-century Guatemala, firms like the United Fruit Company paved the way for archaeological research, supporting the broader strategy of U.S. imperialism. These industries influenced not just interpretation and logistics but conditioned the ideas of race that archaeologists employed while dealing with workers in the field. Assessing the relationships between corporate ideologies and archaeological practice in the field enables us to better understand the real-world impacts of scientific practice and, perhaps, how it might be done otherwise.
Acknowledgements
I thank Caroline Kinsley (Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona), Kathleen Dull (Fray Angélico Chávez Library, New Mexico Historical Museum), Daisy Njoku (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution), Adrian Johnson (Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado Boulder), Scout Noffke (Rauner Special Collections Library, Vassar College), and Shaun Hardy and Maggie Drain (Carnegie Institution for Science) for facilitating my access to archival materials, online and in person. A William S. Willis, Jr. Fellowship funded my research at the American Philosophical Society, and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies funded the completion of this manuscript. Drafts of this paper were presented at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine History of Anthropology Working Group and the Syracuse University Program on Latin American & the Caribbean. For the former, I thank co-convenor Nicholas Barron, discussants Christopher Heaney and Matthew Watson, and members of that group for their gracious and constructive feedback; for the latter, I thank Guido Pezzarossi for the invitation and resulting dialogue. I appreciate Charlotte Williams, Lynn Meskell, Laura Heath-Stout, Maia Dedrick, Rosemary Joyce, and Robinson Herrera providing their expert evaluations of this paper. Finally, assessments from Mark Moberg and anonymous reviewers did much to improve the argumentation and finesse the presentation of this work.
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