Rosalila was chosen as the centerpiece because it dramatically illustratesĪbundant natural light brightens the museum interior. Carved skulls, representing sacrificial victims, which surrounded the stairway panel added to the effect.īarbara Fash, who could probably put Humpty-Dumpty together again if she set her mind to it, oversaw construction of the museum exhibits, which include six complete building façades and pieces of sculpture from 19 others. The local workers dropped what they were doing-they were terrified," she says. The wind, lightning, rain, and thunder were so loud that you couldn't talk. "When we reassembled it," says Barbara Fash, "all of a sudden a huge storm blew up. Originally set up on a temple stairway, the panel had been torn apart 1,100 years before, probably to get at the offering of jade, incense burners, and spiny oyster shells behind it. Barbara Fash, colleague Karl Taube, and local workers were reconstructing a sculpted panel of the Central Mexican storm god, to whom the kings of Copán swore fealty. During preparations for one of the museum exhibits, an ancient god seemed to awaken from a long slumber. Respect for the ancient culture is widespread. As an anthropologist, you hate to see that," he says, "but it's the price you pay in this business." Indeed, the stated goals of the museum are to conserve the sculpture, to educate, to enhance national identity, and to provide a tourist destination at the fragile site.Īccording to Fash, some Maya traditions are still observed in Copán. The village of Copán, with a population of 4,000, now gets 100,000 tourists a year and as a result some traditional aspects of the community have been lost. "On the plus side," he says, "the project has sustained 200 people for 15 years." On the other hand, "tourism has quadrupled in the last decade. The artisans grind up a light green volcanic tuff, from which the originals were also carved, to color their cement casts.īut Fash has mixed feelings about the overall impact that the dig has had on village life in Copán.ĭavid Stuart's line drawing of four glyphs shows the intricacy of Mayan writing. "Local artisans can replicate originals, sometimes better than they now exist, by working from drawings and photographs of the sculptures before they started to wear," notes Fash. What can't be restored can at least be recreated-that will be the legacy of the early archaeological expeditions. Carved in two different scripts, the wall is the Mayan equivalent of the Rosetta stone. A single 1934 earthquake reduced four buildings on the Copán acropolis to rubble, and broke theĪ wall from Temple 26, with casts (in white) of original stones taken to Harvard's Peabody Museum in the 1930s. Tainted water and reduced areas of productive land led to increasing dependence on vassal towns, which broke off their relationship with the Copán kingdom precisely when they were most needed." The city was toppled by tremors in antiquity, after the kingdom had collapsed. "As the city prospered, its population grew to 20,000, outstripping local resources. 400 in the midst of the area's most fertile farmlands," he explains. "Furthermore," says Bill Fash, "the city is cursed to be in the center of an earthquake zone. Abundant ground moisture-which both pine trees and coconut palms, growing side by side, find congenial-causes the sculptures to decay at the base. Some of the original sculptures carved at Copán have already deteriorated badly. Funding for the exhibits came from the nonprofit Copán Association (founded by Agurcia and Fash), the IHAH, and USAID. He visited the site nine separate times, asking on the first of those occasions, "Is there anything I can do?" Eventually, Callejas and his successor, Carlos Roberto Reina, allocated $1 million to pay for construction of the 44,000-square-foot museum, built in two levels to a height of 52 feet. Former Honduran president Rafael Leonardo Callejas, his interest sparked by an article about Copán in National Geographic (coauthored by Bill Fash and Agurcia), made the museum possible. Barbara Fash oversees the painting of Rosalila, in colors faithful to the original.īarbara (Wascher) Fash, a research associate at the Peabody while in Cambridge, and artist and sculpture coordinator for CAAP while in Honduras, came up with a happier solution: a museum with Rosalila at its center.
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