Between 1930 and 1962, the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) conducted two major archaeological projects in Guatemala, first at the site of Piedras Negras and then at Tikal. In doing so, these US scholars waded into a period of international politics that began just before the articulation of the Good Neighbor Policy and that climaxed with a CIA-supported coup that toppled Guatemala’s democratically elected regime in 1954. Though these archaeologists’ international work would have been impossible without their connections to politicians and corporate leaders from their own country, they were ambivalent agents of US imperialism.
Drawing on dozens of unpublished letters sourced in multiple archives and spanning four decades, this article highlights the archaeologists’ investment in a distinctive professional culture derived from deeply rooted social networks and an identity shared with their nineteenth-century predecessors. At the heart of this identity was a sense of collective entitlement to uncover, study, and control Central American antiquities, notwithstanding the legal rights of “native” governments. The archaeologists benefited from the military and economic clout of the US, and they often expressed ideologies that were consistent with contemporaneous trends in US expansionism. But their behavior during any given research project suggests an even stronger commitment to shared professional values that were often out of sync with the forces driving US foreign policy.
The Piedras Negras project took place between 1931 and 1939. It was planned during the presidency of Lázaro Chacón González and executed during the thirteen-year dictatorship of Jorge Ubico (1931–1944). Ubico followed his predecessors in adopting policies that were beneficial to the United Fruit Company (UFCO), and he forged close ties with the US military establishment during the Good Neighbor Policy era (Greib Reference Greib1979, 66–81). The Penn archaeologists attempted to return to Guatemala in 1948, during a very different period of the nation’s politics. Ubico’s forced resignation in 1944 set the stage for the country’s October Revolution. The succeeding period, often referred to as the “Ten Years of Spring,” saw the democratically elected presidencies of Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz.
According to what has become a “classic” Cold War narrative, land reform and other revolutionary policies implemented during this period ran afoul of the interests of UFCO and other major US firms. Close business ties between the fruit company and members of the Eisenhower administration dovetailed with increasingly aggressive Cold War policy, leading the US to support a coup that toppled Árbenz in 1954 (Gleijeses Reference Gleijeses1992; Schlessinger and Kinzer Reference Schlesinger and Kinzer2005). The Penn Tikal project was formally inaugurated in 1956, during the presidency of Carlos Castillo Armas, one of the leaders of the coup. As Lynn Meskell (Reference Meskell2023) observed, this timing seems to link the project to larger processes of US military and capitalist expansion during the Cold War.
More recent historical scholarship has sought to add nuance to this “classic” Cold War narrative, which tends to reduce the Arévalo and Árbenz years to an exceptional democratic experiment that was cut short when it ran afoul of US commercial and strategic interests. For example, the processes that led to the overthrow of Árbenz have been shown as reflecting internal political conflicts that unfolded independently of US pressure or demands (Smith Reference Smith, Smith and Adams2011). These internal divisions also complicate the collective memory of the revolution and its aftermath (Adams and Bastos Reference Adams and Bastos2003, 152–158). As Vrana and Gibbings (Reference Vrana, Gibbings, Vrana and Gibbings2020) note, the traditions of popular mobilization and reform associated with the Arévalo and Árbenz governments were not bounded within the Ten Years of Spring. They had precedents during earlier liberal dictatorships and found repeated expressions in the turbulent decades that followed the 1954 coup.
These critiques of the historiography of Cold War politics have a parallel expression in recent intellectual histories of the same period, which seek to decenter “dominant” paradigms of Western science and development discourse. As Sarah Foss (Reference Foss2022) has noted in a book on indigenous development in revolutionary and post-1954 Guatemala, forms of agency exercised by local stakeholders complicate the interpretation of “development” as the top-down imposition of expert knowledge in the furtherance of First World policy agendas (see also Carey and Crafts Reference Carey, Crafts, Armstrong-Fumero and Fallaw2023). This argument mirrors trends in histories of archaeology—including at the site of Piedras Negras—which have sought to elucidate the often-invisible role of locally hired laborers in defining the logistical and epistemological contexts of US-funded excavations (see Díaz and Williams Reference Díaz and Williams2024).
This article draws a third, parallel critique by focusing on how the professional culture of US archaeologists also belies reduction to an expression of the Good Neighbor Policy, Cold War bipolarity, or other specific iterations of US imperialism. From the archaeologists’ perspective, the principal “problem” of Guatemalan politics was the legal restrictions on the collection and export of antiquities, which had been placed decades before the October Revolution. These restrictions were difficult to reconcile with a professional ethos that lionized the achievements of the archaeologists’ nineteenth-century predecessors and that treated Anglo-American scholars as uniquely entitled to control Latin American antiquities. In the 1930s, the archaeologists navigated these changing realities with practices that ranged from begrudging adherence to outright bribery and theft. Despite the emergence of new Cold War dynamics after World War II, they remained confident that the lessons learned from working with the Ubico dictatorship would apply to the Arévalo and Árbenz governments. In both cases, the archaeologists’ behavior “in the field” controverted the central thrust of US foreign policy.
This dynamic between the desire to control antiquities and changes in national laws has historical parallels elsewhere in Latin America. In the nineteenth century, archaeologists from the United States and Europe had the ability to fund projects that would be prohibitive for most Latin American governments and brought academic prestige to countries that offered few options for training in fields like archaeology. But those same activities could be perceived as a threat to national sovereignty, particularly given the centrality of the pre-Hispanic past to many postcolonial nationalisms. Peru, from which foreign researchers had exported thousands of sets of human remains since the mid-nineteenth century, is a classic example of these tensions. In the 1910s, leaders of Peru’s Historical Institute (Instituto Histórico del Perú) navigated a political path between promoting their country’s archaeological heritage internationally and addressing local outrage over the collecting rights that had been granted to institutions like Yale University (Hall Reference Hall2017, 147–148). This balancing act was complicated by the often-precarious careers of many Peruvian scholars, like the anthropologist Julio César Tello. Christopher Heaney (Reference Heaney2023) notes that Tello, as a scholar of Indigenous descent, faced limited funds and ethnic discrimination at home. However, he leveraged his relationship with different foreign scholars for legitimacy and financial support even as he sought to promote a nationalist and explicitly anti-racist discourse on Peruvian indigeneity.
Parallel experiences in Mexico shaped many of the assumptions that US archeologists brought to their negotiations with Guatemalan politicians and intellectuals in the 1930s. The transition from the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) to the postrevolutionary era was central to these experiences. The International School for American Archaeology and Ethnology, founded by representatives of several US and European universities at the very end of the Porfiriato, played a role in the training of a generation of Mexican archaeologists like Manuel Gamio. However, the school’s embrace of the brief counterrevolutionary presidency of Victoriano Huerta proved politically disastrous and complicated future negotiations between Yankee archaeologists and the revolutionary government (De la Peña Reference De la Peña and Rutsch1996). Despite his close association with Franz Boas and other founders of the defunct International School, Manuel Gamio rose to become a dominant figure in Mexico’s anthropological institutions, as well as an important contact for US scholars seeking to navigate the complicated terrain of national antiquities law (see Armstrong-Fumero Reference Armstrong-Fumero2010). As I will show, US archaeologists sought to cultivate similarly enduring relationships with Guatemalan intellectuals who could provide the kinds of support that Tello provided in Perú and Gamio provided in Mexico.
In the 1920s and 1930s, several internal factors made Guatemala a particularly attractive prospect for US archaeologists. In comparison to Mexico or Perú, Guatemala had seen much more limited development of state-sponsored archaeology in the nineteenth century. Noting that Guatemala’s first public museum of archaeology did not open until 1931, Marta Elena Casaus Arzú (Reference Casaus Arzú2012) argued that nineteenth-century Guatemalan elites were relatively unwilling to accept the indigenous past as a basis for modern national identity, and they treated archaeology as the purview of US travelers and German immigrant intellectuals like Karl Sapper and Hermann Berendt (see also González-Izas Reference González-Izas2014). Oswaldo Chinchilla (Reference Chinchilla2016) has countered by observing that the passage of several laws for the protection of antiquities suggests that archaeological nationalism had deeper roots in Guatemala. Instead, he argues that the late foundation of a national museum reflected institutional precarity rather than a lack of national will to preserve the pre-Hispanic past.
In either case, US archaeologists seem to have interpreted the relatively late consolidation of archaeological institutions in Guatemala as granting them more unfettered access to antiquities. Furthermore, the 1930s seemed like a propitious time to turn Guatemala into the “turf” of US scholars. As Matilde González-Izas (Reference González-Izas2014, 215–216) has observed, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the clout of immigrant German agricultural entrepreneurs like Sapper and Berendt was being eclipsed by that of US capitalists. US markets for Guatemalan agricultural products were also displacing those in Germany, with which the immigrant entrepreneurs and scientists had been closely affiliated (Greib Reference Greib1979, 145–149). Though German scholars and scholarship would continue to influence the intellectual life of Guatemala (Adams Reference Adams, Smith and Adams2011, 29–31; Casaus Arzú Reference Casaus Arzú2012), the growing economic power of UFCO created a ripe environment for academic interventions from the US.
The hope that US researchers could enjoy relatively unfettered access to Guatemala’s archaeological sites embodied a deep-seated professional nostalgia for the “good old days” of the mid-nineteenth century. The writings of John Lloyd Stephens, the travel author often referred to as the “father” of Mayanist archaeology, embody this collective sense of entitlement. They also offer insight into the styles of writing and reasoning through which US archaeologists articulated their own identity with “the field.” Stephens first arrived in Central America in the late 1830s as a US consul charged with contacting the government of the soon-to-collapse Central American Confederation. He famously ended the diplomatic mission with a pithy communiqué: “After diligent search, no government found” (Stephens [Reference Stephens1841] 1969, 127), before continuing the antiquarian trek that was publicized in the wildly popular and influential Incidents of Travel series. Given the perceived absence of a Central American state, Stephens’s access to ruins was negotiated on an ad hoc basis with a diverse group of local municipal officers, priests, landowners, and military leaders.
Stephens’s writings found extensive popularity through the 1840s and 1850s, when his romanticized descriptions of exotic ruins delighted the same Anglo-American publics that witnessed their nation’s aggressive territorial expansion into Mexico. Writing in 1953, the Spanish Mexican historian Juan Antonio Ortega y Medina (Reference Antonio, González Ortiz and Mayer2015, 508) referred to Stephens’s popular oeuvre as an “archaeological Monroeism”—an imperial project of ethical self-crafting that entailed two key rhetorical gestures. First, he noted that Stephens argued that European scholars should leave the study of pre-Hispanic archaeology to New World intellectuals who more readily appreciated “their” own antiquity (Ortega y Medina Reference Antonio, González Ortiz and Mayer2015, 525–526). Second, Stephens positioned Anglo-American scholars as worthier interpreters of Maya antiquities than the “ignorant” and religiously “fanatical” residents of the republics south of their borders (Ortega y Medina Reference Antonio, González Ortiz and Mayer2015, 532–535).
Canonized as the “father” of Mayanist archaeology, Stephens was essential reading for scholars trained in the early twentieth century (Tozzer Reference Tozzer1941; Von Hagen Reference Von Hagen1947). These scholars traced Stephens’s footsteps literally insofar as they reproduced his various journeys. But they also replicated his travels affectively in the ways that they constituted their own identity as intellectual and moral descendants of the discipline’s “father.” Stephens’s descriptions of travel through Central America were emulated in the prose style of many archaeologists through much of the period (Armstrong-Fumero Reference Armstrong-Fumero, Armstrong-Fumero and Fallaw2023). Stephens’s flippant attitude toward national governments also found parallels in later archaeologists’ dismissals of formal state institutions in Central America.
Throughout this article, I cite numerous letters in which US scholars imagine an idealized “field” in which they could feel empowered to explore ruins and export antiquities without “undue” government intervention. The ways archaeologists sought to reassert this imagined privilege complicated their relationship to both Guatemalan laws and the stated goals of the US foreign policy. In the 1930s, when the US government touted the role of foreign aid and Pan-American organizations in fomenting the rule of law throughout the region, many archaeologists showed a clear preference for more informal and personalistic means of doing business, including hiring professional looters and bribing Guatemalan officials. As Cold War tensions heightened in the 1950s, the archaeologists tried to remain aloof with respect to state-coordinated media panics about “red” Guatemala (see Kinzer and Schlessinger Reference Schlesinger and Kinzer2005), even as these complicated their first attempts to fundraise for research at Tikal.
In the following sections, I trace the evolution of the archaeologists’ distinct modus operandi through three moments of UPenn’s engagement with Guatemala. The first is the excavation of Piedras Negras in the 1930s, which marked an incomplete transition from Penn’s reliance on illegal excavators to a more formal system of legally binding agreements with the Guatemalan government. A second major body of correspondence was built around the 1945 repatriation of monuments from Piedras Negras that had been loaned to the Penn Museum by the Guatemalan government. Through this, they cemented a positive working relationship with the revolutionary government of Juan José Arévalo.
These successful transactions prompted the archaeologists to attempt to raise funds and secure permissions to excavate Tikal in 1948. However, they soon learned that the goodwill they had built with the Arévalo government was of little relevance to the US corporate interests whose patronage they sought. The Tikal project would not come to fruition until 1956, after the overthrow of Árbenz and the reversal of his policies created a more comfortable environment for the museum’s corporate backers. Still, throughout this process, the archaeologists seemed to assume that there were fundamental continuities in their means of working with Central American governments, blurring the boundaries between Cold War research and its historical predecessors.
Piedras Negras, 1930–1939
The Piedras Negras project was an extension of the period of Mayanist archaeology that is often referred to as the Carnegie age. From the early 1920s to the end of World War II, scholars associated with the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) staged large-scale projects at Maya sites in Mexico and Central America. The core of the Carnegie Mayanists was a group of archaeologists tied to Harvard University, most notably Alfred Kidder and Sylvanus Morley. Tracing the careers of the CIW’s directors, Quetzil Castañeda (Reference Castañeda, Gleach and Darnell2005) has argued that the institution embodied a novel model of nonuniversity research working in the interests of US foreign policy. However, a closer look at the archaeologists’ personal correspondence shows that they managed to define spaces of autonomy and social continuity within the institution, most notably by repeatedly refusing office space in Washington, DC, in favor of a headquarters adjacent to Harvard’s campus.Footnote 1 This autonomy was directly challenged by the CIW leadership, who had mixed success in steering a costly and disciplinarily narrow archaeological agenda that was being defined from Cambridge (see Armstrong-Fumero Reference Armstrong-Fumero, Armstrong-Fumero and Fallaw2023).
Within their space of autonomy, the archaeologists shared several experiences and ideological proclivities. Most had come of age during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, and their early perspective on Mexico and Central America was shaped by the project of regional hegemony that developed around the creation of the Panama Canal. During World War I, Morley and other members of the group engaged in espionage work for US Naval Intelligence (Harris and Sadler Reference Harris and Sadler2009). They also drew extensive logistical and occasional financial support from the UFCO during the period of its greatest expansion in Central America.
Despite their nationalism and collusion with US corporate interests, Morley and his peers showed considerable pragmatism in dealing with Latin American governments. Morley’s letters and diary entries from the period between the world wars reveal a personal vision that tracks closely with Wilsonian internationalism (Armstrong-Fumero Reference Armstrong-Fumero, Armstrong-Fumero and Fallaw2023, 56). That is, he held an understanding of international law through which national regimes could be recognized only if they possessed “constitutional” legitimacy and a commitment to the personal security and property rights of US capitalists. However, this vision did not keep Morley from collaborating with the kind of left-leaning nationalist governments that were perceived as a threat to US business interests. This is most notable in the personal friendship that he struck up with the Yucatecan governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto, whom he initially characterized as “very red, socialistic, if not bolshevistic.”Footnote 2
By the time Penn began its plans for the Piedras Negras expedition, the CIW archaeologists were eager to share insights derived from these experiences with allied scholars at other institutions. George Byron Gordon, who directed the Penn Museum in the late 1920s, was a Harvard graduate with numerous social ties to the CIW group. In 1894, he directed a Harvard-sponsored excavation at the Honduran site of Copán and sites along the Caribbean coast of Central America, all of which would be revisited by Morley in the early 1900s (Harrison Reference Harrison1927). Not surprisingly, Copán was the first major site visited by John Lloyd Stephens in the late 1830s, and it was the subject of some of the most memorable descriptions in the Incidents of Travel series.
This relationship between CIW archaeologists and their peers at UPenn continued to strengthen through the 1940s, as the Carnegie veterans sought to promote other US institutions that could offer long-term continuity to their research agendas. Archaeology’s place at the CIW became tenuous in 1938, when the antihumanistic engineer Vannevar Bush was named its director. Though Kidder continued to lead Carnegie projects in Guatemala for over a decade after, the late 1930s and 1940s saw him making consistent efforts to pass the torch of Mayanist research to other institutions (Shook Reference Shook1990).
Given that Penn hoped to fill its museum galleries with monuments purchased or offered in long-term loan by the Guatemalan government, the Carnegie connection was something of a mixed blessing. In a letter to the Penn Museum director Horace Jayne, the archaeologist Alden Mason noted, “The Carnegie Institution has ‘gummed the game’ for other institutions in these countries by making agreements whereby they keep only ‘minor duplicates [of archaeological finds].’”Footnote 3 Mason was not alone in this opinion. In 1928, Morley’s superiors at the CIW expressed concern that his “crowing” about the no-collection policy before several Latin American governments was alienating scholars at their peer institutions in the United States.Footnote 4
As I show here, the game of collecting had been “gummed up” by laws passed in Latin American countries before Morley’s crowing about CIW policy. In Mexico, laws that curbed the activities of US and European archaeologists were first seriously enforced during the later years of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, most famously by Inspector of Monuments Leopoldo Batres (Grindle Reference Grindle2023; Achim Reference Achim2017). These provided a model for similar laws that were passed in Guatemala by 1922 (Chinchilla Reference Chinchilla2016), which, by 1930, the Penn Museum had been flouting for nearly a decade.
Since at least the 1910s, the museum’s director Gordon had purchased antiquities from Robert Burkitt, an eccentric former classmate at Harvard who resided in Guatemala. Purchases continued through the 1920s and 1930s, and Burkitt’s letters to the museum are full of shameless references to his “plunder” and accounts of harrowing encounters with Guatemalan authorities.Footnote 5 Horace Jayne was cool to Burkitt when he replaced Gordon as museum director in 1928. But as the museum prepared for the significant investment of time and resources in the Piedras Negras project, he wrote to the wily antiquities dealer, stating in a letter that he was “anxious in every way to have you continue this valuable work for the Museum and that you may count on our support heretofore.”Footnote 6
In reaching out to Burkitt, Jayne may have been hedging his bets against the uncertainty of formal negotiations with the Guatemalan government. In contrast, the Penn archaeologist Alden Mason and his student Linton Satterthwaite seemed more inclined to draw on the best practices of the CIW. In his own letters to Mason, Morley had been blunt in his assessment that Burkitt was a liability for future relationships with the Guatemalan government and should be sidelined.Footnote 7
Ironically, Morley seems to have created his own headaches for Mason and the Penn Museum’s people through his spotty knowledge of different antiquities laws. As far as he had been aware during his own research at Uaxactún, Guatemalan law permitted the practice of partage, or the equal division of archaeological spoils between foreign researchers and the national government (Black Reference Black1990; Chinchilla Reference Chinchilla2012). This was confirmed by a copy of a 1922 decree that had been sent to Penn by Adrián Recinos, the historian and translator of the Popol Vuj who was then Guatemala’s ambassador to the United States. However, a superseding 1925 decree that was unknown to Morley—and, apparently, to Ambassador Recinos himself—stipulated that foreign researchers could only remove “minor” artifacts that were duplicated in the national collections.
As Oswaldo Chinchilla (Reference Chinchilla2016) has observed, the 1925 law reflected both the growing political influence of an important group of Guatemalan intellectuals and a more assertive national policy toward foreign researchers. The law was promoted by José Antonio Villacorta Calderón, a lawyer and historian who held several bureaucratic and political posts over a career spanning several decades (Dardón Reference Dardón2014). Along with Adrián Recinos, he was a founding member of Guatemala’s Society for Geography and History and of the national museum established in 1930. Villacorta Calderón and his son Carlos would be important gatekeepers for Guatemalan archaeology until the Revolution of 1944 (Chinchilla Reference Chinchilla2016, 69).
Though news of the 1925 law disappointed the Penn archaeologists, its strict enforcement during the Ubico era followed a pattern that their peers had encountered in Mexico decades earlier. Like Jorge Ubico, Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz was a powerful autocrat whose policies were regarded as friendlier to foreign capitalists than were those of the revolutionary government that succeeded him. Nevertheless, the nationalistic performances that helped legitimate Díaz’s rule gave urgency to the protection of national antiquities during his tenure (Palacios Reference Palacios2014). Like their predecessors had in late Porfirian Mexico, US archaeologists in Ubico’s Guatemala experienced a disconnect between economic policies that were perceived as friendly to foreign capitalists and archaeological nationalism that placed unprecedented limits on their own activities.
Mason’s response to this changing legal environment demonstrates an attitude toward Central American states that bears historical echoes of John Lloyd Stephens. In a letter to Jayne, he noted that “all decrees exist mostly on paper here and are obeyed only when popular opinion compels. Unfortunately, they have a chauvenistic [sic] complex about their monuments here. No one takes any interest in them until a foreigner does, and then they rise to their defense. No matter how fair and sensible a proposal I make, if the newspapers get word of it they will make a stink about it and then it will all be off.”Footnote 8 This blithe dismissal of the national heritage law was also pervasive among Carnegie archaeologists, notwithstanding their willingness to sign formal contracts with Central American governments. In a 1930 letter, Morley assured Mason that any protests that emerged once the contract with UPenn was publicized would be short-lived. He noted: “I think as Jayne does that once the material actually gets here they will never attempt to take it back.”Footnote 9
Faced with stricter antiquities laws than they had anticipated, the archaeologists sought wiggle room by cultivating relationships with well-placed Guatemalan intellectuals and officials. The correspondence between Mason, Morley, and Jayne indicates that Ambassador Adrián Recinos provided advocacy through his own back channels. Their letters refer to the ambassador as having a “broad-minded” and “cosmopolitan” vision,Footnote 10 implying that the archaeologists saw him as being more flexible in dealing with foreign researchers than many of his compatriots.
Ironically, the Penn archaeologists also chose to navigate Guatemala’s increasingly assertive antiquities laws by participating in the very informal practices that US politicians derided in Latin American governments. During the height of negotiations in 1930, Mason informed Jayne that “everyone takes graft here from the President down.” Here, the unscrupulous Burkitt once again proved his usefulness to the museum. He told Mason that two leading members of the Society for Geography and History who were sympathetic to the project could become active advocates for Penn with a payment of $250 each (around US$3,000 today). An additional payment of $10,000 to a “higher up” would likely secure the deal. Burkitt also suggested that the newspapers could be paid to ignore the arrangement entirely for “surprisingly little.”Footnote 11
Mason hesitated to engage in large-scale graft without a direct appropriation from the museum and informed Jayne of a range of academic scholarships, salaried jobs, and gifts of books that he was currently using to work the system. These offers of gifts and professional opportunities were consistent with the informal favors that had cemented his relationship with Ambassador Recinos, whom he helped to secure a position in a prestigious American dental school for the son of a prominent Guatemalan family.Footnote 12 In the end, however, Mason also seems to have been open to crasser forms of persuasion. He requested the immediate transfer of $500 so that he could begin to “butter some fingers” in anticipation of negotiations.Footnote 13 Jayne was receptive to the idea of bribery and responded to Mason that “bakhshish may help out materially.”Footnote 14 It is not clear whether this Orientalizing word choice was an oblique reference to Penn’s experience in the excavation of Ur almost a decade earlier (see Gillot Reference Gillot2011) or simply a blanket characterization of working in “backward” countries.
It is difficult to assess the scale of bribery involved in Penn’s research at Piedras Negras, but a letter that Mason wrote to Alfred Kidder in 1945 suggests that thousands of dollars had been paid to Guatemalan officials in the 1930s.Footnote 15 At times, this preference for working through informal channels clashed directly with attempts by Guatemalan officials to formalize the management of the nation’s archaeological sites. Guatemalan law required that a representative of the Secretariat of Education be present at all excavations to observe foreign archaeologists. In 1932, Carlos Villacorta wrote to Alden Mason to request that, besides paying for the expenses of their assigned inspector, the Piedras Negras project make an additional contribution to help stabilize the cash-starved unit of the secretariat in charge of archaeological sites.Footnote 16 Citing the precarity of the US museums during the Great Depression, Mason declined and convinced Recinos to intervene on his behalf.Footnote 17 Apparently, the Penn archaeologists could justify spending scarce Depression-era funds on bribing officials and financing Burkitt’s clandestine excavations, but not on stabilizing Guatemala’s own heritage bureaucracy.
Mason’s disdain for Guatemala’s formal institutions often drew on well-worn tropes of Anglo-American travel writing. In April 1930, as the negotiations for the Piedras Negras project were completed, he wrote to Jayne regarding his first meeting with Jorge Ubico’s predecessor, President Lázaro Chacón González: “As I had been warned, I don’t think the president knew what I was talking about—he was a muleteer until he became a general.”Footnote 18
Mason’s quip about the president’s previous career is odd, and telling, for several reasons. Though not a graduate of the National Polytechnic School that produced most of Guatemala’s officer corps, Chacón González had a long military career before earning the rank of general (Sabino Reference Sabino2018, 71–72). However it was that Mason came to believe that the general had been a “muleteer,” this biographical tidbit would have fit a narrative trope inherited from John Lloyd Stephens. In his Incidents of Travel, Stephens ([Reference Stephens1841] 1969, 225) had described Rafael Carrera, the young caudillo who would rise to power as the dominant political figure of mid-nineteenth-century Guatemala as a swineherd who had once been “as free as one of his pigs from any dreams of future greatness.” Like Stephens had a century earlier, Alden Mason saw the leader of the country whose ruins he coveted as an ignorant and unqualified wrangler of livestock who was thrust into power by the chaos of backward nations.
In the end, factors within Guatemala would force the archaeologists to adhere more closely to the formal contract than they had initially hoped. President Chacón González was forced to resign after a stroke in December 1930, and a brief period of instability culminated with the rise of Jorge Ubico. Ubico made the scrupulous enforcement of laws a cornerstone of his political identity, and his long rule likely contributed to the formalization of national archaeological institutions (Chinchilla Reference Chinchilla2016). Clandestine shipments of antiquities to Philadelphia finally stopped after 1936, after an increasingly paranoid Burkitt wrote to Jayne, complaining that Penn’s Piedras Negras project would attract unwanted attention to his own activities.Footnote 19
This would not be the last limit placed on the Penn Museum’s activities during the Ubico presidency. By the late 1930s, two collections of Piedras Negras monuments existed in museums: The stelae and altars that had been shipped to Guatemala City and those that were held on a ten-year loan in Philadelphia. The Penn archaeologists hoped to “reunite” both sets of monuments at the Golden Gate International Exhibition in 1939 in San Francisco. They asked Ambassador Recinos to make a case to the Secretariat of Education and to President Ubico himself.Footnote 20 In his letter to the president, Recinos expressed excitement about the prospect of displaying the entirety of the Piedras Negras monuments abroad and noted the potential of such a spectacular exhibit to attract international tourists to Guatemala.Footnote 21 Two weeks later, the ambassador received a response from Ubico’s secretary stating that the president had conferred with members of the Secretariat of Education and decided not to permit the loan of any more monuments. Besides the potential for damage, the secretary cited the clause of the 1925 antiquities law that prohibited the exportation of “unique” archaeological objects.Footnote 22
The brief letter in which Recinos offered Mason his regrets over the failed project doesn’t offer much interpretation of the president’s reasoning.Footnote 23 Given that numerous monuments were already on loan in the United States, this appears to have been a stricter interpretation of the antiquities law than had been applied eight years earlier. It is possible that members of the Secretariat of Education were reacting to Mason’s earlier refusal to help fund their institution—or there may have been a larger geopolitical motive. In the spring and summer of 1938, President Ubico was attempting to mobilize anticolonial nationalism across the region to leverage US support for Guatemala’s territorial claims to the British colony of Belize (Greib Reference Greib1979, 221–225). Lending what was then the largest archaeological collection in the country to a foreign power may have seemed incompatible with that campaign. In either case, Guatemala’s national institutions unequivocally established the limits of US scholars’ ability to exercise the kind of control over Central American antiquities that the “father” of their discipline had enjoyed a century earlier.
Repatriating stelae and the October Revolution, 1940–1945
The original contract signed between UPenn and the Guatemalan government stipulated that the monuments displayed at the university museum would be on loan for ten years, and the contract expired at some point between 1940 and 1941.Footnote 24 Turning once again to Adrián Recinos, the museum successfully petitioned the Ubico government for an extension of the loan until 1943.Footnote 25 This was extended for two further years by the difficulties of securing maritime passage during World War II. But by December of 1945, the museum faced a formal request for the repatriation of the monuments.Footnote 26
By this time, the museum faced a different environment in Guatemala. President Ubico had been forced from office in July 1944. Two weeks after that, Sylvanus Morley wrote to Adrián Recinos, hoping that his friend would “remain in [his] eminent life as ambassador, rather than the life that will surely be a thousand times more political if you return to Guatemala.”Footnote 27 But Recinos seems to have already made up his mind. He returned home later that year to run an unsuccessful presidential campaign against Juan José Arévalo. As Alden Mason observed in a June 1945 letter to his UPenn colleagues, Recinos was subsequently expelled from the country as persona non grata to the new government. José and Carlos Villacorta, along with most of the leadership of the Society for Geography and History and the National Museum, had also been removed from their posts.Footnote 28
Still, from correspondence written in 1945, there is little reason to believe that US archaeologists viewed the October Revolution as radically different from the various turbulent elections and military coups they had seen in the region. This is particularly evident in the completion of Alfred Kidder’s final projects for the CIW. In a letter to CIW’s president Vannevar Bush, Kidder noted:
I am afraid that we shall have to abandon the proposed work in Honduras, because I understand from the Fruit Company that a revolution is impending in that country and the area in which we had planned to excavate is that in which most Hondurian troubles originate…. I think that Bryan and I will have no difficulty in carrying out what we want to do in Guatemala. I shall also have the opportunity to meet the new Presidents and Secretaries of Education of Guatemala and Salvador. These officials have been installed as [a] result of recent revolutions. I wish these damned people would stay put!Footnote 29
Notwithstanding Kidder’s frustration with Central American politics, the CIW did successfully complete its planned work in Guatemala during the Arévalo years, including significant excavations at Nebaj and Kaminaljuyú. Though the Carnegie contract with the Guatemalan government ended after Kidder’s departure, his successor attributed this to the phasing out of archaeology and made no reference to the national political situation (Kidder and Pollock Reference Kidder and Pollock2005, 150). In fact, Kidder’s references to the Arévalo government suggest a solid working relationship. In 1947, the CIW’s representative was part of an official committee responsible for planning and installing exhibits in a new anthropological museum in Guatemala City (Kidder Reference Kidder and Pollock2005, 139). In 1948 and again in 1949, Kidder expressed his gratitude to President Arévalo’s Department of Public Works for contributing laborers, free of cost, for an emergency project to document parts of the site of Kaminaljuyú (Kidder and Pollock Reference Kidder and Pollock2005, 141–143).
The good feelings seem to have been reciprocated by the Arévalo administration. Adrián Recinos was back in Guatemala in 1948, returned from exile but living as a private citizen. That September, he wrote to colleagues of the recently deceased Sylvanus Morley to coordinate the design of the memorial monument that the Arévalo government planned to dedicate to the CIW researcher at the site of Quiriguá. Recinos also requested photographic portraits of Morley that could be displayed in the National Museum and the headquarters of the Society for Geography and History of Guatemala (Sociedad de Geográfica e Historia de Guatemala), which would then have been under new leadership.Footnote 30
The CIW’s positive relationship with the Arévalo administration also benefited UPenn. On Mason’s advice, Kidder was made the university’s representative during negotiations over the monuments in the museum’s Mesoamerican gallery.Footnote 31 By then, the Penn archaeologists knew that the repatriation of most of the monuments to Guatemala was inevitable. However, they hoped to take advantage of a clause in the 1925 law that permitted the export of “minor” objects or “duplicates” of greater works to keep a small sample on indefinite loan. Kidder’s charm offensive seems to have been effective. The museum secured the indefinite loan of two of the Piedras Negras monuments, which remain in its Mesoamerican gallery to this day. As an overture to future collaborations, the museum offered Guatemala’s National Museum a reciprocal ten-year loan of gold objects excavated from Panama. In a letter to Kidder, Mason noted that Penn was sending a larger and more impressive selection of gold artifacts than the Guatemalans had initially requested, to “knock their eyes out.”Footnote 32
These gestures were not lost on the directorate of Guatemala’s new National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which had been reorganized in 1946 after the political sidelining of Recinos, Villacorta Calderón, and other intellectuals associated with the Ubico regime (Chinchilla Reference Chinchilla2012, 61). The brief press release by the museum’s new directors is notable for its graciousness. The report attributed the protracted delay in returning the objects to the scarcity of maritime transport during the war, and it even praised the care with which the “archaeological gems” were packed and shipped, notwithstanding the fact that at least one of the monuments that had been loaned to Penn would have had visible damage near its base.Footnote 33 By all appearances, Kidder and the Penn archaeologists had secured the goodwill of the cohort of heritage gatekeepers who emerged in the aftermath of the October Revolution.
Tikal before and after the coup
The successful return of the Piedras Negras monuments encouraged the Penn archaeologists to propose a project in Tikal in 1948. Letters exchanged between 1948 and 1949, when this proposal seemed viable, complicate the official narrative of events that was published over a decade later. In a 1964 monographic history of the Penn Museum, the board’s president Percy Madeira noted that he himself had proposed a Tikal project. At the time, he counted on support from the engineer John Dimick, who had collaborated with the United Fruit Company to restore the highland Maya site of Zacaleu. Before his sudden death in September 1948, they also counted on support from Sylvanus Morley, who had contemplated a project at Tikal since his days with the CIW (Meskell Reference Meskell2023, 2). But, as Madeira noted in 1964, “about this time, a Communist government came to power in Guatemala, and the plan was held in abeyance.” It was only revived, he noted, “when President Castillo Armas supplanted the reds” (Madeira Reference Madeira1964, 66).
Madeira’s use of the vague phrase “about this time,” like his characterization of the Arévalo and Árbenz regimes as “red,” glosses over a more complicated series of factors that thwarted the initial Penn expedition to Tikal. By the pragmatic standards of archaeological diplomacy, Madeira would have had every reason to expect success in 1948. As I noted earlier, the CIW had no difficulty working in revolutionary Guatemala through Kidder’s final projects. Writing among themselves, the archaeologists also seem to have skirted the shrill accusations of “communism” that US newspapers were hurling at the Arévalo and Árbenz governments. Correspondence between the Penn and CIW archaeologists at the beginning of the 1950s mirrors some of the ambiguities that the historian Thomas Leonard (Reference Leonard1990) described in US foreign policy at the transition between the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Although the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department expressed concern over the growing regional influence of individual communists associated with the Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, they remained skeptical of the “red” character of the Arévalo and Árbenz administrations (Leonard Reference Leonard1990, 178).
So, if Percy Madeira and the other archaeologists had any perception of a “red” takeover of Guatemala at the end of the 1940s, it was unlikely to come either from their own contacts in the country or the US State Department. Their potential corporate sponsors, however, were another matter. Financed by UFCO and other aggrieved transnational firms, a coordinated media campaign against the Arévalo and Árbenz governments anticipated the more aggressive Guatemala policy that would be assumed by the incoming Eisenhower administration (Schlesinger and Kinzer Reference Schlesinger and Kinzer2005, 84–87). New York Times reporting on Guatemala became more alarmist in 1950, publishing articles openly accusing the Árbenz administration of communist infiltration by April of that year.Footnote 34 But even in 1948, while Madeira and the archaeologists were in full fundraising mode, the Times reported on the national ban on Catholic radio, and supposedly extensive communist infiltration of student and labor groups in the country.Footnote 35 Closer to home for the Penn archaeologists, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported extensively on Guatemala’s 1948 conflict with Great Britain over territorial claims to Belize and included press reports of radicalized workers demanding that President Arévalo take steps against “anti-Communist” foreigners.Footnote 36 While this early red panic doesn’t seem to have been any more credible to the Penn archaeologists than it was to Truman’s foreign policy advisers, it resonated with the various moneyed interests to which the former reached out for funds.
As Lynn Meskell (Reference Meskell2023, 4) notes, the unwillingness of United Fruit, Wrigley, and other US corporations to fund the Tikal expedition during the Arévalo and Árbenz years was a principal technical factor that prevented Penn from organizing its project in 1948. But the persistence of the archaeologists in spite of repeated roadblocks underscores the degree to which they distinguished their own interests in Guatemala from those of the aggrieved industrialists. In fact, their correspondence seems to draw a contrast between the receptiveness of their Guatemalan interlocutors and the recalcitrance of potential US donors. In early October 1948, the museum’s director Froelich Rainey wrote to Edwin Shook, the proposed director of the planned Tikal project, asking him to temper his enthusiasm until funding could be secured from UFCO. He noted that “Linton [Satterthwaite] is somewhat concerned that you may have got the Guatemalans excited about this before we have any assurance of the funds.”Footnote 37 At the time, he, Madeira, and Mason were busy preparing a brochure to entice United Fruit, Wrigley, and Pan Am, and they were approaching a number of wealthy “Pittsburghers” associated with Gulf Refining Company.Footnote 38
At some points during their fundraising efforts, the archaeologists seem to have simply played dumb regarding the supposed anti-Americanism of the Guatemalan government. In late December 1948, months after the archaeologists had been aware of tensions between UFCO and the Arévalo government, Madeira claimed that he “did not know … that the Guatemalan government [was] making trouble for American corporations” in a letter to the wife of a potential donor.Footnote 39 The efforts were fruitless, and the project was shelved before 1950. Nevertheless, Percy Madeira planned a personal visit to Tikal in early 1953, during the final year of what he would recall a decade later as the “red” Árbenz government.Footnote 40
The Penn Tikal project finally came to fruition during the presidency of Carlos Castillo Armas, who led the “liberation” forces that toppled Árbenz in 1954. As with their original response to the October Revolution, there is little evidence that the archaeologists perceived the Castillo Armas regime as a significant departure from previous political “turnovers” in the region. The Penn archaeologists lauded him as an “enthusiastic” supporter of the Tikal project (Meskell Reference Meskell2023, 2), and Rainey remembered him as a “very good friend of ours.”Footnote 41 This “friendship” reflected a confluence of political and business interests that, as Meskell points out, coalesced in 1956. One of the remarkable aspects of the Tikal project was the sheer scale of fundraising it entailed, with private donations outstripping the museum’s initial appropriation by a factor of a hundred to one (Meskell Reference Meskell2023). In reversing the policies that had irked United Fruit and other corporations, Castillo Armas certainly created a national environment that loosened the purse strings of donors that had become skittish about Guatemala during the Ten Years of Spring.
But, contrary to the narrative in Percy Madeira’s retrospective history, it’s unclear whether the new president’s anticommunist bona fides were as significant for the archaeologists as they were for the Eisenhower administration or other parts of the American public. Immediately after the 1954 coup, the archaeologists made sparing use of reference to “reds” or “communists” in the defunct Árbenz government. When Rainey detailed the frustrated plans of 1948 to the new US ambassador to Guatemala in 1955, he referred simply to “an act of the Guatemalan government [that] discouraged the oil companies [from providing funding] and our plans collapsed.”Footnote 42
Other correspondence suggests that Rainey and his colleagues believed that they were witnessing the same pattern of political “turnover” that had existed in the 1930s. An undated memo addressed to Rainey in 1955 or 1956 expressed concerns regarding the handling of the museum’s contract with the Castillo Armas government, noting that its publication in the National Gazette would make it “available to political anti-Gringos who must be presumed to still exist.”Footnote 43 In essence, they feared the same kind of national political environment that had led Jayne and Mason to consider bribing Guatemalan journalists in 1930. From their offices in Philadelphia, the archaeologists seem to have understood that the local implications of their new contract with the Guatemalan government were along similar lines to the one they had established nearly two decades earlier for the excavation of Piedras Negras.
Among the Penn-affiliated archaeologists, John Dimick seems to have appropriated anticommunist language early on. However, the examples that I have found in the archives are all in letters addressing journalists and potential funders, not fellow archaeologists. Writing to a journalist who hoped to participate in the excavation in 1955, he blamed the collapse of the university’s first Tikal proposal to Guatemala having fallen into the hands of “Communists and fellow travelers.”Footnote 44 A letter that he drafted to appeal to the Rockefeller Foundation likewise stated that Guatemala was “lean[ing] distinctly towards Communism” at the dawn of the 1950s.Footnote 45 While rare in correspondence between the archaeologists themselves, this kind of red-baiting clearly resonated with their potential funders. The UFCO’s lobbyist Spruille Braden, one of the engineers of the anti-Árbenz press campaign, expressed his hope to aid Dimick in fundraising. He was eager to do so to “help this sister republic emerge successfully from Communist control.”Footnote 46
The staunch Cold War bipolarism of some of Dimick’s correspondence presents a contrast to the pervasive institutional culture of the Penn Museum and to the correspondence of most of the archaeologists who had worked in Guatemala since the days of the Piedras Negras project. Though the University of Pennsylvania was by no means a leftist institution, its directors stayed relatively aloof with respect to the anticommunist panic that had enveloped the Keystone State (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1999, 132–137). Even during the Eisenhower administration and the height of McCarthyism, Penn archaeologists felt free to critique the national climate of paranoia. A 1954 letter from Linton Satterthwaite to the Anglo-Belizean civil servant A. Hamilton Anderson stated: “You understand, I hope, that there are a great many of us who are disgusted with the executive witch-hunting goings-on, as well as the McCarthy business. It is a disease, and you find the most unexpected cases of it, like smallpox. I understand there was once a similar period in England, when there was a subversive Frenchman under every bed.”Footnote 47 Written less than two weeks before Castillo Armas and his forces crossed the Honduran border into Guatemala, Satterthwaite’s bitter sentiment invites us to speculate about the private conversations that took place behind the archaeologists’ few references to “red” Guatemala.
Conclusion
Linton Satterthwaite’s candid criticism of US anticommunism encapsulates the exasperation of many of his fellow archaeologists. Like Alfred Kidder in 1945, and his Penn colleagues just a few years earlier, he hoped to simply “get on with” the work of excavation despite the political turmoil that they believed to be endemic to Central America. This cavalier attitude toward contemporary politics presents a stark contrast to the experience of the social anthropologists who sometimes collaborated with them.
The influential ethnographer Robert Redfield had been added to the CIW project in Yucatán as part of the institution’s attempt to diversify the research agenda of the archaeologists. A self-professed odd man out among the archaeologists, he found that his work on modernization in the region faced additional scrutiny from his peers. Citing concerns that any critique of Mexican education and development policy would cause political headaches for the whole group, Alfred Kidder insisted on reviewing Redfield’s work before publication (Armstrong-Fumero Reference Armstrong-Fumero, Armstrong-Fumero and Fallaw2023).
These “political” concerns about studies of living indigenous people followed Redfield into his post-CIW career. When he and his student Sol Tax collaborated in founding centers for research in indigenous communities in Ubico’s Guatemala, they were warned of the danger of allowing these to become stages for political controversy. As González Ponciano (Reference González Ponciano, Vrana and Gibbings2020, 110) has noted, these warnings reflected the prominence of anti-Ubico scholars like Manuel Galich in Guatemala’s indigenista circles, including individuals who would join the anthropologist Antonio Goubaud Cabrera to play key roles in education and health policy during the Arévalo and Árbenz administrations (Adams Reference Adams, Smith and Adams2011). Associated with the legacy of the revolution and the perceived threat of communism, much of this institutional infrastructure for applied anthropological research was defunded or eliminated outright following the 1954 coup (Foss Reference Foss, Gibbings and Vrana2020, Reference Foss2022; Taracena Reference Taracena and Monzón2019). It’s difficult to think of a greater contrast between the shifting fortunes of social anthropology in twentieth-century Guatemala and the kind of continuity that the archaeologists managed to establish across the Ubico, Arévalo, Árbenz, and Castillo Armas governments.
Historically, this difference led generations of archaeologists to frame their own subject of study as existing outside of contemporaneous changes in national and international politics. Redfield, Tax, and Goubaud Carrera all worked with living peoples who provided narrative and behavioral “data” that were inextricable from the immediacies of commerce and power. But the “stuff” of archaeology consisted of durable goods that were subject to the same kind of pragmatic negotiation as mineral or agricultural wealth. If these negotiations proved impossible at a given moment, archaeologists had simply to wait for changes in the fortunes of local political leaders.
Morley, Mason, Kidder, Satterthwaite, and their various collaborators certainly had opinions about contemporary politics. But when they engaged in fundraising and seeking permits from national governments, these opinions were sublimated to a shared professional identity defined by the entitlement to discover, collect, and control objects. This was collective ethics that placed the desire for objects above not only the laws of Guatemala but also the political ideologies that were transforming foreign policy in their home country.
This collective sense of entitlement certainly contributed to the range of class, racial, and national hierarchies that are being addressed by the discipline’s contemporary experiments in community engagement (McAnany Reference McAnany2016). But it also complicates histories of archaeology that focus on the politics of the moment over continuities in professional culture, whether those politics be the policy commitments of the early CIW leadership or the emergence of Cold War geopolitics in the 1950s. The professional cultures of sciences like archaeology are often defined by the kind of multigenerational social networks that reproduce shared beliefs and ethical commitments over time. In the case of the CIW and UPenn archaeologists, these networks tended to instantiate a dynamic of entitlement and pragmatism derived from the “good old days” of the mid-nineteenth century amid the changing politics of the twentieth century.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the staff of the archives consulted in this work, who graciously offered their assistance and insights. I am especially indebted to Alessandro Pezzati at the Penn Museum archives for sharing his profound knowledge of that collection and the characters whose histories it records. This article is also dedicated to the memory of Elin Danien, who helped bring to light some of the histories pertinent to Robert Burkitt, and who played a profound and impactful role at the beginning of my academic journey.
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