A Maya stone lintel was just lately returned to Mexico after it was taken to the Mexican consulate in New York by an unnamed US businessman. However hours after its official repatriation on 16 April, specialists decided the piece had truly come from Guatemala. Guatemala’s cultural ministry has now formally requested the item’s repatriation from the Mexican authorities by way of diplomatic channels.
Guatemala’s cultural ministry mentioned in an announcement that technical evaluation based mostly on bibliographic analysis, comparative research and consultations with archaeologists had concluded that the lintel got here from the nation’s Petén Basin. Consequently, it’s thought of a part of Guatemala’s cultural heritage.
Guatemala’s cultural minister, Luis Méndez Salinas, mentioned the federal government has already begun formal efforts to recuperate the artefact. The method is being coordinated by way of Guatemala’s Ministry of International Affairs. “There’s a very constructive perspective, as has been the case lately, in the direction of the sort of collaboration,” Méndez informed native media in Guatemala, “in order that cultural heritage can return to its hometown.”
The limestone lintel, relationship from the Mesoamerican Basic interval (AD600-AD900), exhibits a fancy ritual scene related to the Maya ruler Cheleew Chan Okay’inich. The lintel remained hidden from public view for many years and handed by way of non-public collections earlier than just lately reappearing in New York.
The repatriation ceremony on the Mexican consulate in New York Courtesy the Consulate Common of Mexico in New York
In line with the archaeologist Stephen Houston, one of many world’s main specialists on the Maya civilisation, the lintel is certainly from Guatemala—created by an elite artist referred to as Mayuy. The artist, initially from the traditional Maya metropolis of Piedras Negras, was “the Michelangelo of the pre-Columbian period”, Houston tells The Artwork Newspaper. Mayuy’s signature stays seen on the stone greater than 1,200 years after it was made.
“He is without doubt one of the solely artists in historical America who could be named and whose oeuvre could be studied,” Houston says. “He signed his sculptures. He was terribly ingenious, fusing in his carvings relationships amongst gods, the ordering of the cosmos and dynastic machinations. Kings and aristocrats mapped their identities onto these of gods, and Mayuy exhibits this masterfully. He rendered stone as dwelling flesh, deployed color on his carvings with verve and imparted an virtually unparalleled sense of important, dynamic power.”
In Houston’s 2021 e-book A Maya Universe in Stone, he devotes the opening chapter to this specific lintel, bringing collectively historic information and analysis associated to the piece and its provenance. The artefact was documented by explorers within the Nineteen Fifties, earlier than it was illegally faraway from the Guatemalan jungle and entered the worldwide antiquities market. It’s a part of a collection of 4 Maya lintels now divided between non-public collections within the US and the Kimbell Artwork Museum in Texas.
In line with Houston, the lintel was initially found on the Guatemalan aspect of the Usumacinta River. Maya territory as soon as prolonged throughout each side of the river, now a part of the border between Mexico and Guatemala, explaining the confusion surrounding the item’s precise origin.
