by Andrew Scherer (Brown University), Charles Golden (Brandeis University), Stephen Houston (Brown University), and James Doyle (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The most complex images often require multiple sets of eyes (and minds) to probe their creation, meaning, and afterlives. Lavished with care at their making, they may, if excavated or looted, embark on journeys to far times and places, beyond any possible imagining by the patrons who commissioned them. This four-part series—on discovery, Classic-era history, color use, and cosmology (Maya Lintel II; Maya Lintel III; Maya Lintel IV)—targets an enduring enigma in Maya archaeology: a set of two lintels, notable for their preservation and elaborate iconography, seen and photographed by a colorful adventurer, Dana Lamb, in 1950 (Lamb and Lamb 1951:332). The find was of sufficient interest to appear in Ian Graham’s memoir (Graham 2010:462–467), which commented tartly on Lamb’s elastic, even tenuous relation to fact: “[t]he tale [of their discovery] is, of course, ridiculous” (Graham 2010:463). Lamb compounded that absurdity with the map emblazoned on the endpapers of his book (Figure 1). The “Lost City Area” covers half of Peten, Guatemala, the northernmost slivers of the departments of Huehuetenango, Quiche, and the Alta Verapaz, and, with expansive generosity—why not throw them in too?—parts of Campeche, Chiapas, and Tabasco in Mexico.
Figure 1. The “Lost City Area” (Lamb and Lamb 1951:front endpaper).
Lamb’s photographs, which had been shared with Gordon Ekholm at the American Museum of Natural History, give some savor of the lintels and their condition at the time of discovery (Figures 2 to 4). The rough, load-bearing sections above and below the images (where such sections can be seen) make it certain that the carvings spanned doorways. They were lintels, not wall panels.
Figure 2. Laxtunich Lintel 1, top section, April 1950; the lintel has been lifted from a face-down position, its load-bearing surface still intact to the left (courtesy American Museum of Natural History).
Figure 3. Dana Lamb with Laxtunich Lintel 1, April 1950 (courtesy American Museum of Natural History).
Figure 4. Laxtunich Lintel 2, top section, April 1950; note the still intact, load-bearing portion to lower right and stacked stones from a collapsed vault or door jamb to upper right (courtesy American Museum of Natural History).
The later existence of these sculptures is tragic. They were sawn up, thinned to reduce their weight—the residue most likely discarded in situ—and taken by mule or tumpline from Lamb’s “Lost City,” which he had decided to call Laxtunich, ‘”Lasch-Tu-Nich’ (phonetic spelling), the Place of Carved Stones” (Lamb and Lamb 1951:332; presumably, the neologism derived, after some shredding of phonology, from Lacandon ra’ch, “scratch” [Hofling 2014:285–286]; cf. Ch’orti’ lajchi, “scratch” [Hull 2016:241]).
Their illicit journey from Laxtunich is murky at best. According to Graham (2010:453), a guard at Yaxchilan, Mexico, “had caught sight [in about 1963] of men with mules appearing out of the bush on the opposite [Guatemalan] bank of the river…The men then unloaded the mules’ cargo of sculptured stone panels, concealed them under jungle trash, and departed…the panels remained there for several days before men returned with a boat to take them.” Scholars have long known that the lintels contain clues to their original, general location. The presence of the Yaxchilan Emblem, a supreme title of rulers, and depictions of a later king of that kingdom, Chelew Chan K’inich, places them firmly in some part of Yaxchilan territory (Zender et al. 2016:36).
Were the “panels” seen by the guard from Yaxchilan or were they another set of carvings from Guatemalan territory? What Graham can confirm is that the lintels resurfaced in the collection of the late William P. Palmer III of Falmouth, Maine, or rather, after his death, within a storage facility in Zurich, Switzerland (Graham 2010:465–466). Grainy photographs show them trimmed of their butts and backs, with an occasional scale marked by a European-style, cross-barred “7” (Mayer 1984:98–99, pls. 203, 204). Palmer, who died in 1982, aged 49, was an active collector from about 1958 to 1973 (Palmer as collector). A graduate of the University of Maine, Palmer donated a trove of Mesoamerican material to the Hudson Museum at that institution (Palmer Hudson). [Note 1] The lintels clearly ended up elsewhere. Graham (2010:515n3) believes that Panama was a way-station on their eventual path to Europe, a circuitous route designed “to obscure their source” and, presumably, to facilitate their shipment to buyers abroad. According to Graham, a possible seller might have been the Mexican economist, collector, and dealer, Dr. Josué Sáenz, from whom Palmer appears to have bought a number of pieces. At that time, in the lead-up to the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, Sáenz was the President of the Mexican Olympic Committee, a highly visible position (Witherspoon 2008). He might have had fears of confiscation, electing instead to liquidate some of his investments in Pre-Columbian art. We cannot know but suspect Palmer had these (and other) Maya sculptures by about 1968 if not before.
After their appearance in those photographs, the murk deepened…until 2013 and 2015. Lamb’s carvings have since come to light. Both are now in private collections. The carving we label “Laxtunich Lintel 1,” seen again in 2015, was accessible to the extent that our team could undertake technical assays and detailed photography of its surface (the third in this series reports on that work). The other lintel, “Laxtunich Lintel 2,” was examined by Houston in 2013, if more cursorily. The re-emergence of these storied carvings occasions a fresh evaluation of their images and an inevitable attempt, given more recent fieldwork, to pin down Lamb’s journey to Laxtunich. These thoughts build on the Dana and Ginger Lamb Papers at the Sherman Library and Gardens (Sherman Library) and fieldwork by Golden and Scherer in the Sierra del Lacandόn region of Petén, Guatemala, and Chiapas, Mexico. A superb study has also appeared on the Lambs, who had fascinated, among other people, Franklin D. Roosevelt yet also managed to vex J. Edgar Hoover and his myrmidons (Huffman-Klinkowitz and Klinkowitz 2006:80–81, 83–85).
Dana and Ginger Lamb in Context
As the title suggests, the Lambs’ Quest for the Lost City (Lamb and Lamb 1951), the only primary source on the lintels, capitalized on the Maya-as-lost-civilization zeitgeist in which only the most brave and cunning adventurer-explorers could delve into the dark forests of the Maya lowlands. Certainly, the earliest detailed studies of the Maya were carried out by truly hardy chroniclers—Stephens, Charnay, Maudslay, and Maler, to name a few. These first explorers combined meticulous documentation with a healthy dose of grit to traverse the then-remote jungles of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. By mid-twentieth century, however, the lone intrepid explorer was largely extinct (the recently deceased Ian Graham being a notable exception). Maya studies was largely in the hands of institutionally supported scientific archaeological teams, such as those supported by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Pennsylvania. Although these early scientific expeditions advanced our understanding of the ancient Maya, they did little to satisfy public hunger for tales of exotic jungle adventure.
Enter Dana and Ginger Lamb. Almost two decades prior to the publication of Quest for the Lost City, and shortly after their marriage in 1933, the couple set out on a three-year journey in a homemade canoe from California to Panama. They chronicled this voyage in their first book, Enchanted Vagabonds, published in 1938 with the help of a bookseller named June Cleveland (Huffman-Klinkowitz and Klinkowitz 2006:24–25). After its release, they embarked on a successful public speaking tour. Enchanted Vagabonds drew on the long-standing public fascination with adventure-exploration. Yet, in their tale, the Lambs offered something new and appealing. Explorers of yesteryear were for the most part privileged men from the upper crust of European and American society. Dana and Ginger were youthful, middle-class, plucky newlyweds from California, 37 and 26 years old respectively, when Enchanted Vagabonds was first published.
In many respects, Quest for the Lost City, was Enchanted Vagabonds 2.0—a follow-up story of adventure but now in the remote and treacherous forests of southern Mexico, a place populated with “mysterious” natives (the Lacandon Maya) and lost ruins. More than a ten-year gap separates the publication of Enchanted Vagabonds and Quest for the Lost City, at least some of which was spent by the Lambs traveling in Mexico. Quest for the Lost City was finally published in 1951 and remains in print today, its current paperback cover boldly proclaiming “America’s most dangerous couple explores the jungles of Central America…An Adventure Travel Classic.” The book dramatically builds to a final conclusion, the discovery of an entire “lost city,” Laxtunich itself. Quest for the Lost City was followed by a film of the same name in 1954, released by Sol Lesser Productions (Quest for Lost City). Lesser fit the bill: he had guided and promoted the Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller and later served as American producer (and Academy Award winner) for Kon-Tiki, an account of Thor Heyerdahl’s voyage across the Pacific.
For the layperson, Quest for the Lost City is a gripping page-turner. However, anyone familiar with southern Mexico will realize that, even by the mid-twentieth century, the region travelled and described by the Lambs was not nearly as vast, remote, and unknown as they report. Nearly all scholars (and many a layperson, judging by recent Amazon reviews of Quest for the Lost City), deride the book as a fabrication and the Lambs as charlatans looking to turn a profit from a credulous American audience. This sense is only heightened by the 1955 follow-up film of the same title, in which the Dana and Ginger pass off well-known and traveled sites like Yaxchilan and Palenque as ruins lost deep in the jungle. By this point, too, the heading of their stationery says it all: “Dan and Ginger Lamb, Exploration—Motion Pictures” (AMNH Files, letter to Gordon Ekholm, dated July 6, 1950). Yet there is no doubt the Lambs (or, as we will see, at least Dana) did visit an archaeological site, his “Site 5,” that at the time (and to this day) remains unknown to scholars. His notes offer the only description we have of the site, and he and his companions took the only known in situ photographs of the remarkable Laxtunich carvings.
So what exactly were the Lambs up to in southern Mexico, and where is the so-called site of Laxtunich?
In Search of Laxtunich
Lamb’s own account of visiting the site is, as Graham observed, pure claptrap. It offers swarming bugs, an overwhelming thirst, barely resolved by slurping from bejuco de agua (“we drank too much and were sick”), aqueducts and artesian wells like “miniature ‘volcanoes’,” as well as, towards nightfall, “the frightening, swelling song of a hurricane” (Lamb and Lamb 1951:330–331). And a tree fall that had, after this “titanic, terrific, stupendous, slam-bang show…carried away our beautiful temple” in one final cataclysm (Lamb and Lamb 1951:334; to be sure, on its reverse, a photograph in the AMNH archive refers to a tree fall on the lintel building). All the “beautiful stone carvings had been shattered and tossed to the jungle floor,” and the Lambs, amazed, saw that were now “on an island surrounded by a muddy sea of water” (Lamb and Lamb 1951:335). Despite a bout of malaria—”Dan, I can’t breathe. I’m burning up!”—Ginger soldiered on, trying “to lend a hand” (Lamb and Lamb 1951:332–333). After manfully carving a canoe, Dana Lamb succeeded in paddling them to safety.
Dana’s field notebook, a personal letter he wrote to Ginger, and his hand-drawn maps tell a different story. Our presumption is that, in these records, Dana offers some semblance of accuracy. That he was a compulsive fabulist is reflected in his correspondence with Ekholm a short time after his visit to Laxtunich. Lamb seems to place the discovery sometime in June, at the latest in early May, a date contradicted by his notebook, which assigns the find to April 7 (AMNH archive, letter to Ekholm, July 6, 1950; “We got in yesterday [July 5] after over a month off in the unexplored area in Guatemala”). In a marked photo of Lintel 2, he claimed it has been “found at site #5 [Laxtunich] in Guatemala in June 1950” (AMNH archive). What stratagem lay behind this pointless deceit? Nor was Ginger even present at the discovery. Was the thrill of their narrative—always a marital adventure, a cheerful collaboration of paired souls—more important than any commitment to veracity? One gathers that Lamb tended to self-grandiosity and a compulsion to rework personal experience into high drama: each event would serve its role in the script of his life.
On April 2, 1950, Dana travelled to Agua Azul, a now-abandoned airstrip on the Chiapas side of the Usumacinta River, about 7 km upstream (southeast) from the Guatemalan community of Bethel. Dana received reports of “large ruins on the Guatemalan side of the Yaxchilan Ruins” and that there “is a boy who thinks he knows where they are” (Dana Lamb, Personal Journal, April 3, 1950). On April 4, Dana and a number of local guides headed downstream in a cayuco (a canoe carved from the trunk of a tree) past Yaxchilan to a point then known as Salvamento, an area that corresponds to the first bend in the Usumacinta River north of Yaxchilan (Canter 2007:7). Dana reports the distances by river as 8.5 leagues (the equivalent of 47.2 km) from Agua Azul to Yaxchilan and 3.5 leagues (19.4 km) from Yaxchilan to Salvamento, again by river. The actual distances are closer to 35 km and 16 km respectively, the point being that, while Dana is not a bad judge of distance (it is unclear what maps he had with him when he was writing his journal), he tends to overestimate the distances covered.
After that first day’s travel Dana and his companions established a beach camp on the Guatemalan side of the river, and the next day he reports that “we hiked down river [sic] opposite an arroyo called Enenete [Anaite] then cut a trail inland almost due north” (April 5). What follows is Dana’s description of that day’s journey, edited to remove his vivid commentary on the various accomplishments and shortcomings of his travel companions:
“We found a chicley [sic] trail after going thru heavy bamboo and undergrowth for about a mile. From here the trail lead up and down thru low hills for about two miles. . .the going was not easy in the heat…at noon when we stopped for lunch there was no water…after lunch we continued on. This trail used to be wide and well traveled but has not been used in many years. So we had to cut around the fallen trees and open trail most of the way…After traveling 6 leguas [sic] we stopped for a rest and Jose and Armando said they were going ahead to scout the trail. We waited for over an hour and then they returned with a pot full of muddy water. Instead of scouting trail they had gone off to a Lechugal about a mile away for water.”
Although we do not have personal experience with the inland journey from this point on the Usumacinta River, the route Dana reports is likely the same as that described by Ron Canter (2007:7): “on the Guatemalan shore, a ravine leads east up to a small plateau 80 m above the river. From there it is a relatively easy climb NE out of the river gorge.” On his map, Canter notes the existence of a nineteenth-century trail running between La Pasadita and Centro Campesino, the area across from Yaxchilan that was home to an invader community in the first decade of this century (Figure 5). Teobert Maler (1903:104–105) notes the existence of “forest trails” connecting Tenosique to the Arroyo Yaxchilan (a stream that passes about 4.5 km to the southeast of the site of Yaxchilan on the Guatemalan side of the Usumacinta River). Indeed, our own reconnaissance attests to the existence of many overgrown logging trails running between the area of Yaxchilan and north and northeast towards La Pasadita. In 1998, Golden (et al. 1999) and a group of colleagues made the trip from Yaxchilan to La Pasadita along just such a route.
Figure 5. Excerpt of Ron Canter’s Río Usumacinta Navigation Survey (Canter).
Scherer and Omar Alcover undertook a similar journey in 2014, reaching and departing from La Pasadita via two separate logging trails. Both paths were relatively clear at the time, having been re-opened by settlers during the illegal invasion at Centro Campesino in the first decade of the new millennium (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Southern Sierra del Lacandόn National Park showing likely area of Laxtunich in Guatemala. The red path indicates trails used by Scherer and Alcover in 2014 trip between Centro Campesino and La Pasadita. The purple path represents the least-cost route between Salvamento and El Tunel, the hypothetical path walked by Dana Lamb (compare with Figure 8). “W” denotes aguadas. Partly spoked dircle is a cenote at El Tunel. Chevron is a point along the arroyo that traverses the region, illustrated in Figure 5.
Moreover, Scherer and Alcover traveled with guides who had decades of experience in the region, and thus were able to move with relative dispatch on their journey. They traveled at brisk clip, if with heavy packs, along a route that took them 22 km in 8 to 9 hours from Centro Campesino to La Pasadita (Figure 7). From our experience, 20 km is a generous maximum estimate for any distance covered by Dana and his companions while cutting trails.
Figure 7. Walking a recently opened logging trail south of La Pasadita, Guatemala, 2014, taken near the aguadas in Figure 6 (photograph by A. Scherer).
Of the two trails travelled by Scherer and Alcover in 2014, the one closest to the Usumacinta River is about 6.75 km northeast of the point from which Dana likely left that body of water. Dana’s own hand-drawn map suggests they moved in a general northward direction (it is unknown, although likely, that he carried a compass, Figures 8 and 9). From Dana’s description, he and his companions travelled about four to five km (three miles) north or northwest before lunchtime. He then suggests they travelled 6 leagues, the equivalent of 18 miles or 33 km, before their next rest after lunch, when two of his companions went ahead to scout the trail and returned with the muddy water. A frustrated Dana writes in his journal, “I was anxious to go on ahead and get to the ruins before dark but Jose said he was not sure of the trail and that we could not make it before dark. Reluctantly we hit the side trail to the Lechugal & slung our hamocks [sic]” (April 5).
Figure 8. Dana Lamb’s map of trails leading from Salvamento, Guatemala (image from Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, courtesy Sherman Library and Gardens).
Figure 9. Dana Lamb’s notation of his “Site 5” (Laxtunich), with notation “Pictures of carved stones were made here” (image from Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, courtesy Sherman Library and Gardens).
Dana is almost certainly mistaken about the 33 km that he and his companions covered between lunchtime and their evening stop at the watering hole. To put this scale in perspective, Piedras Negras is just a bit more than 40 km in a straight line north of Yaxchilan. A starting point around Salvamento and the Arroyo Anaite, 33 km to the north or northwest would simply funnel them into the narrow valley approaching Piedras Negras, while 30 km in any other direction east or northeast would require crossing the arduous and precipitous hills of the Sierra del Lacandón. Dana would surely have noted this in his journal.
Since they were re-cutting an overgrown trail, a more reasonable estimate is that Dana and his companions walked between 6 to 10 km total by mid-afternoon, placing them in all probability somewhere along one of the very same overgrown trails south of La Pasadita hiked by Scherer and Alcover in 2014. According to Lamb’s own map (which has no scale) the water source is at a latitude just north of the Laguna Santa Clara in Chiapas, a distance that would be about 13 km due north. Again, that is likely incorrect in view of the time needed to move such a distance over an overgrown path. On their own return journey from La Pasadita, Scherer and Alcover identified an exceptionally muddy aguada along one of the old logging trails, about 7.5 km in a direct line from the Usumacinta River (longer if following the overgrown trails). This is a potential, although by no means certain, candidate for the watering hole visited by Dana and his companions.
Dana and his companion returned to the trail the next day and, according to him, “hiked three leguas (12 mi) to a dry arroyo then cut a trail about one mile due W. to the ruins” (April 6). Dana then writes and crosses-out: “After we had finished our. After a supper of beans and rice we hit the hamocks [sic].” He finally settles on: “On the Way into the ruins Arnold shot a small deer and we had a late supper of cooked venison [sic]. There is no water in this area so we used Agua de Bejuca [sic]” (April 6). Again, it is highly implausible that Dana and his companions hiked 12–13 miles (19-–21 km) on the second day of their journey. All known logging trails in this area follow a north or northwesterly path. Had they crossed beyond the known northern limits of the Yaxchilan kingdom (Tecolote, La Pasadita, etc.), the party would have slogged through the bajo around the Laguna La Pasadita, and into the formidably rugged terrain to the north. An eastward path would have kept them within the kingdom and brought them into the vicinity of Oso Negro. But, again, the old logging paths they appear to have been traveling do not cut an easterly route. More likely, Dana and his companions travelled 10 km or less that second day.
An important clue to Laxtunich’s location is the dry arroyo recorded by Dana. Although we do not know its precise route over the landscape, Scherer and Alcover twice crossed an arroyo that drains into the Laguna La Pasadita (Figure 10, see Figure 6 for its location along one of the trails). This arroyo passes through the site of Tixan, where it was dammed in ancient times. Similarly, Golden and colleagues camped near an arroyo in this same vicinity in March of 1998, when it held a thin trickle of water. This is likely the same arroyo that flows through the site of El Tunel, apparently passing through a cave (hence the name of the site, Muñoz and Román 2004:20). When Scherer and Alcover crossed the arroyo near Tixan in 2014, it carried little water, although volume increased when they encountered it a second time near its confluence with the Laguna La Pasadita. Dana notes no other arroyos in his journal. If we assume a generally northward route of travel, the arroyo near La Pasadita, Tixan, and El Tunel would have been the first such waterway encountered by the Lamb party. That it was dry offers no surprise in that they were traveling at the very end of the dry season. In contrast, Scherer and Alcover observed the arroyo at the height of the rainy season, and even then it held little water.
Figure 10. Dam on a partially dry arroyo near Tixan, Guatemala (photograph by A. Scherer).
After a night camping near the ruins, Dana and his companions travelled to “Site 5,” where they spent the entire day exploring. As Dana describes in his journal, in an entry dated April 7:
“At one time this place was a large city. Now all of it is in ruins except one temple which is partly destroyed. There are two beautifully carved temple stones here. The best I have ever seen. They measure about four feet wide and six feet long but are broken in half. We spent all day exploring around and moving the stones so we could get pictures of them. At noon we had more venison and then worked at the Temple. This ruin is completely unknown so we decided to name it the Place of the Carved Stones, in Maya it is Lashch Tu Nich.”
Dana’s descriptions of the monuments accord well with the photographs that were taken at the site (Figures 2–4). Both lintels are in situ, both broken medially, each fallen from the doorway of a collapsed vaulted structure. Dana also drew a sketch of the site center of Laxtunich, though it is exceptionally vague in its detail, showing a series of plazas and ruined buildings (Figure 11). He marks the two lintels as “alter [sic] stones,” indicating they were found in front of the same structure. Another useful feature of Dana’s map is the presence of a “Dry Sonote” [sic] in the upper left corner of the map, a feature that will be key to identifying the site center of Laxtunich in the future.
Figure 11. Dana Lamb’s sketch map of Laxtunich (image from Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, courtesy Sherman Library and Gardens).
On April 8, Dana and his companions made their return trip, reaching the Usumacinta River in a single day’s journey. Because Dana and his companions were backtracking on a now-open trail, it is reasonable to suggest they travelled about 15 km or so that day. By April 25, Dana was back in Tenosique where he penned a letter to Ginger (who at the time, and directly contrary to the published account, was in the United States). Here he summarizes the trip: “Enrique Nevelo, Manuel and I went down the Usumacenta [sic] to a place below Yaxchilan then headed deep into Guatemala. We found a beautiful little ruin with some of the finest stone carving I have ever seen. It was a rough trip as there is no water in this area and we had to live off of Agua de Bejuco.”
According to the same letter, Dana made a series of other visits to sites in the area over the next two weeks, including a stop at Yaxchilan on the return from Laxtunich as well as trips to Bonampak and what is likely Lacanja. Photographs of these visits appear in Quest for the Lost City. He concluded his journey at El Cedro, where he took a plane back to Tenosique. Ginger appears to have flown down in early May, and they spent the next month or so again traveling in southern Mexico, presumably shooting additional photos and video for Quest for the Lost City, although with no evidence they returned to the unknown site in Guatemala.
Where is Laxtunich?
Matching Dana’s description of his travels and his maps with our own experience in the region, we believe it highly likely that Laxtunich lies somewhere in the vicinity of La Pasadita and a cluster of poorly explored sites that includes El Tunel, Capukal, and Tixan. It is far less plausible that Laxtunich corresponds to La Pasadita or its twin, Tecolote, located a few kilometers to the west. Tecolote has many collapsed vaulted structures, but its most remarkable feature is a single well-preserved standing structure with fragmentary murals (Scherer and Golden 2009) that Dana would have seen and recorded in his notes. Moreover, there is no cenote at Tecolote nor is it near an arroyo. Similarly, La Pasadita does not have a cenote and its principal structure was still standing in 1950, likely with its own carved lintels and murals still in place. If Dana had visited La Pasadita we can assume he would have made note of such striking images.
Capukal and El Tunel were first visited by archaeologists in 2004 during a brief reconnaissance trip by René Muñoz and Edwin Román (2005; Golden et al. 2005). El Tunel was revisited in 2005 by Juan Carlos Meléndez and Scherer who also managed to reconnoiter the site of Tixan (Meléndez and Scherer 2005; Vasquéz et al. 2006). The archaeologists discerned an abundance of settlement at each of these sites but, owing to a lack of time on both visits, they were unable to identify or pinpoint their epicenters. In that regards it is important to keep in mind that Dana reports only a single monumental structure that was already partially in ruins during his visit in 1950. Thus, even if archaeologists had reached the principal structure of Laxtunich in 2004 or 2005, it is entirely possible they may have overlooked the structure, assuming that by that time its vault was fully collapsed.
Of these named sites, Capukal is the least credible as Dana’s Laxtunich. Muñoz and Román note that the buildings at Capukal disperse into a pattern reminiscent of Fideo, a known Late Preclassic site to the northwest. Further, the only ceramic observed on the surface during reconnaissance at Capukal dated to the Early Classic period (Muñoz and Román 2005:20). In contrast, Tixan and El Tunel possess architecture more closely reminiscent of known secondary centers of Late Classic period Yaxchilan. Tixan was only briefly visited by Meléndez and Scherer in 2005 and they were never able to locate its political and architectural center, if indeed it has one. It exhibits an area of extensive settlement, and further survey is needed to determine to what degree settlement may be more or less contiguous between the areas currently identified as La Pasadita, El Tunel, and Tixan.
El Tunel, on the other hand, was more thoroughly surveyed by both Muñoz and Román and then by Meléndez and Scherer. Meléndez and Scherer (2005:62) observed the careful use of both large block and smaller flat stone similar to details observed in buildings at Tecolote and La Pasadita. These features characterize the well-preserved constructions of the Late Classic period in the kingdom of Yaxchilan (Figure 12). Moreover, defensive walls have been identified in the vicinity of El Tunel, similar to those found at Tecolote and La Pasadita (Muñoz and Román 2004:19).
Figure 12. Preserved wall on a structure at El Tunel; Juan Carlos Meléndez provides human scale (photograph by A. Scherer).
Even more compelling, Muñoz and Román detected the presence of at least one collapsed vaulted structure at El Tunel with the remains of a looted crypt (Muñoz and Román 2004:19). Vaulted buildings with such crypts have also been identified at Tecolote and La Pasadita, and such patterns similarly echo the sub-floor crypts found in palace structures at Yaxchilan and Bonampak (Miller and Brittenham 2013:24, fig. 33). The collapsed vaulted structure found by Muñoz and Román should be considered a possible contender for the source of the Laxtunich lintels, though they did not observe any monument carcasses during their investigations. Recall that, as noted above, the name El Tunel is in reference to an arroyo that flows near the site. Finally, during their reconnaissance of the site, Meléndez and Scherer observed a dry cenote at El Tunel, although they failed to take detailed notes regarding its relationship to other structures at the site (see its location on Figure 6).
A least-cost path plotted from several starting points in Guatemala opposite the Arroyo Anaite to El Tunel creates a path similar in appearance to Lamb’s sketch map, and seems to cross at or near similar landmarks, including well-used trails (compare Figures 6 and 8). Moreover, this modeled path crosses the real path marked by Scherer and Alcover. near where they encountered two water-holes (aguadas), perhaps the source of Lamb’s “muddy water.” If El Tunel is indeed Laxtunich, and the computer-modeled path is anything like that followed by Lamb and his companions, the actual distance traveled from river to site (barring wayward turns) would be in the vicinity of 13 km (~ 8 mi).
Envoi
In short, all evidence indicates the site of Laxtunich is located somewhere to the east of Tecolote, to the west of Oso Negro, and in the general vicinity of La Pasadita, El Tunel, Tixan, and Capukal. This is an area of generally dense settlement where much of the Late Classic period architecture conforms to that of the greater Yaxchilan kingdom. Of these, in our judgment, El Tunel is the best contender as the source of the Laxtunich lintels. It has architecture in Late Classic period Yaxchilan style, it possesses at least one collapsed vaulted structure with a looted crypt, has defensive walls, a dry cenote, and is located near an arroyo—all features of Laxtunich noted in Dana’s journal. The chances are high that slabs of sliced limestone are still there, left by looters in the 1960s. It is a shame indeed that Lamb did not follow through, as he had promised to Gordon Ekholm in 1951, on a more scholarly publication for the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s “Notes in Middle America” series (sic, “Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology.” AMNH archives, letter dated Jan. 25, 1951). The recollections might have been sharper, the details more accurate. But the pledge to Ekholm was probably yet another deception. A factually grounded essay would have undermined the tall tales in his book.
Quest for the Lost City and the two Laxtunich lintels persist as part of a frustrating yet fortunate chapter in Maya studies. The adventures reported by Dana and Ginger are, we now know, fabrications meant to sell a book. They do little to advance our understanding of the ancient Maya. Yet the true, unreported story—of a foreign visitor who spent a few days in the jungle in the company of local guides—is not unlike how we ourselves “discover” new archaeological sites (though such tales hardly make for fascinating storytelling). The Laxtunich lintels are masterworks of Maya art, torn from their source and rarely seen by scholars, much less appreciated by the greater public. Yet Dana’s photographs exist. He drew us maps that give us a general sense of the site’s location and, most important, took detailed notes of his travels to the site. From these clues, we can be reasonably secure in knowing not only the country of origin (Guatemala) but even the 20 km2 area of the Sierra del Lacandόn National Park that likely produced the lintels. Future survey in the region, as aided by remote sensing and the search for thinned remnants, will doubtless transform Lamb’s “lost city” into one that is found.
Acknowledgments Some of the ideas presented in this series of blogs were first presented at the Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, where Houston held an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship in 2014–2015 (Houston and Urton 2015), and at the Wayeb Meetings in Moscow (Houston et al. 2016). The Lamb archive at the Sherman Library and Gardens, Corona del Mar, California, was most generous with access, as was Dr. Charles Spencer, Sumru Arincali, Barry Landua, and Kristin Mable at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), New York. Mary Miller first drew our attention to the Lamb-Ekholm correspondence at the AMNH. Ron Canter’s map of the Usumacinta was most helpful, as was Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, who supplied crucial pieces of information from her collection of Lambiana. Michael Coe provided recollections of that Mayanist “Howard Hughes,” William Palmer III.
Note 1. William Pendleton Palmer III (1932–1982) was an heir to a Cleveland, Ohio, steel and mining fortune. His grandfather, William Pendleton Palmer (1861–1927), had amassed that wealth by working his way up from an apprenticeship to Presidency of the American Steel and Wire Company; along the way, he also served as a Director of the Cleveland Trust Co., H. C. Frick Coke Co., and the Bank of Commerce (WPP), with substantial investments in the Hanna Mining Company of Cleveland (Hanna and Palmer and Hanna). A member of the American Antiquarian Society from 1914 on, and President of the Western Reserve Historical Society from 1913 until his death, the Founder had collected a quantity of Civil War manuscripts and Lincoln memorabilia, indeed, on all aspects of antebellum life, for eventual donation to the Society, “Cleveland’s oldest cultural institution” (Western Reserve and Collection). The Founder would not have known his namesake—he died five years before Palmer III was born. But his acquisitive urges and antiquarian interests had some impact. For a time, Palmer III was one of the most energetic collectors of Maya pieces in the world. Our only account of him, “a bit like Howard Hughes, but on a less extravagant scale, and far more generous,” comes from Michael Coe (personal communication, Aug. 23, 2017; quotation from Coe 2006:199), who met Palmer while preparing “The Maya Scribe and His World” exhibit for the Grolier Club in New York City (April 20 to June 5, 1971). Learning that the collector had a large number of Classic Maya pots, Coe was flown on Palmer’s private plane, piloted by a retired Air Force colonel, to Falmouth, Maine, where Palmer lived. (Palmer was, according to Coe and Graham, the then-owner of Bar Harbor Airlines.) Coe remembers two totem poles from the Northwest Coast lying prone, and somewhat forlorn, outside the main residence. The cellar of a second building was given over to racks of magazines and newspapers curated by an older man. When asked about this surprising hoard, “a quarter century’s worth of old numbers of the New York Times, Newsweek, and other newspapers and journals,” Palmer replied, “I just want to look things up when I feel like it” (Coe 2006:199). Coe did not see the Laxtunich lintels, which might already have been in Switzerland.
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