Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography Robert D. Aguirre (bio) Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography, by Ian Graham; pp. 323. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002, $39.95. That Alfred Percival Maudslay (1850-1931) has fallen into obscurity is a significant loss for Victorianists. Widely considered the founder of modern archaeology in Central America, Maudslay left behind an impressive body of work. His brilliant glass-negative photographs of Mayan architecture capture not only the monumentality of the structures themselves but also the archaeological techniques Victorian explorers brought to bear on them; as works of art in their own right, these photographs withstand comparison with the images of France Frith, Claude Désiré Charnay, and other notable expeditionary photographers. Maudslay's meticulous plaster casts of monuments, some four hundred of which are housed in the British Museum, testify to the Victorians' obsession with recording and archiving the past; in the face of wide-scale looting that has imperiled the historical record, scholars have turned to Maudslay's casts to decipher the secrets of Mayan writing and culture. Maudslay also translated an important account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico (Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España [1908-16]), cowrote with his wife, Anne Cary Maudslay, an interesting travel narrative (A Glimpse at Guatemala [1899]), and assembled an extraordinary collection of Mayan artifacts, some of which are on permanent exhibit in the British Museum's Mexican Gallery, which opened in 1994. Thanks to the efforts of Ian Graham, the outline—as well as many compelling new details—of Maudslay's life are now available in this biography, the first ever written about Maudslay. Graham is well qualified for the task. The recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" for his own work on Mesoamerican archaeology, a field he has labored in for over forty years, Graham is also a leading student of its history. He has maintained a special interest in documenting the British contribution to this field, which dates from the 1820s and the opening of Latin America to foreign travelers, and has written incisive shorter studies of nineteenth-century figures such as William Bullock, Juan Galindo, and Edward King (Viscount Kingsborough). Graham's immersion in the relevant history is manifest on every page, yet it rarely impedes the flow of the narrative, which takes us from Maudslay's upbringing as the son of the well-known engineer Henry Maudslay, to his student days at Cambridge, his service in the South Seas as a junior official in the Colonial Office, and finally his researches in Guatemala—which he visited for the first time in 1872, when the back reaches of that country were little known to most Europeans. As the book's title suggests, Graham's true subject is not so much Maudslay himself—whose inner life, despite Graham's careful research, remains elusive—but his contributions to the study of the Maya. Graham consults a wide range of archival sources to detail these contributions and draws on his own expertise as an archaeologist to guide the reader through the jungles and buried cities Maudslay explored during his several visits to Central America. Graham's explanation of technologies such as plaster casting and the use of glass-plate negatives serves to place Maudslay among those Victorians who employed the devices of modernity to capture and mediate the work of cultures distant in time and place from nineteenth-century Britain. The attention to these technologies, in addition to establishing the claim that Maudslay marks the transition from an amateur to a truly scientific archaeology, anchors its subject firmly in a cultural milieu that was in its own way witnessing the onset of modernity. [End Page 112] Graham's evident admiration for his great precursor is one of the book's strengths, breathing life into what in other hands might have been an arid subject. But the affinity of the author for his subject may also account for some of the work's blind spots. Graham, for example, disregards the larger critique of archaeology as a tool in the armature of British cultural imperialism. For him, Maudslay is a hero...