Cultural Policy in Honduras

A while back, I was invited to speak in Honduras on the topic of "the challenges and advances in the investigation of Ciudad Blanca", as part of the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (in Spanish the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, or IHAH).

My already existing summer research plans precluded my accepting the invitation. I toyed with writing the remarks I would have made in the requested "pequeña ponencia" (brief talk) as a blog post here. But there were, frankly, more important things to do.

Now, as Adrienne Pine notes at Quotha, Virgilio Paredes, in charge of IHAH, has written a letter to El Heraldo, thanking them for their contribution to his project of publicizing "Ciudad Blanca", reproduced by that paper in a self-congratulatory ad about their coverage of the supposed discovery.

And that inspires me to follow through on the invitation I received, albeit a couple of weeks later than proposed, in this virtual forum.

What does the present head of IHAH mean when he writes about "los vestigios arqueologicos de la zona de la Mosquitia hondureña, de una civilizacion que puede haber sido la denominada Ciudad Blanca" [the archaeological vestiges in the Honduran Mosquitia, of a civilization that could have been that called Ciudad Blanca"]?

For an archaeologist, that sentence is painful to read. We are long past the time when we spoke in terms of "civilizations"; for us, the question of the archaeology of the Mosquitia is that of cultures represented, histories to be told, and social relations to be understood. Civilizations, unfortunately, can still be "discovered" and "explored"; social relations, histories, and cultural traditions need to be investigated and understood.

The LiDAR imagery produced undoubtedly shows evidence of past inhabitation of the Mosquitia. That is neither surprising nor particularly news. All of Honduras produces evidence of human occupation prior to the arrival of Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century. The relatively low population of the Mosquitia today is an outcome of colonization and its aftermath. Knowing the reality of past habitation in the region requires us to ask what historical, political, and economic processes have disadvantaged the population in recent centuries.

Like much of the pre-hispanic past of Honduras, knowledge of the original distribution of towns and villages in the Mosquitia has been slow in developing, primarily due to over-valuation, both in Honduras and outside it, of the Classic Maya "civilization". This over-valuation of a Maya past became a shared obsession in North America and Honduras in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For North Americans, the Maya offered a civilization as "advanced" as the ancient Greeks-- a way to establish an advanced past in the Americas independent of that of the Classical world. For Central American elites, the Maya could provide antecedents for new nations, antecedents that were cultivated, desirable, and above all, up to the standards of global cultural centers.

The shared obsession with a purely Maya past led to a history of archaeological investigation that focused on the extreme western edge of the country; that normally asked-- and still too often asks-- the question "how were these other societies or cultures related to the Classic Maya?"; and that marginalizes the histories of the majority of the Honduran territory while generalizing the cultural tradition of the extreme margin of the country.

Against this background of "mayanization", attention to the archaeology of eastern Honduras should be welcome. But instead of building knowledge, the recent dramatic publicity about a supposed "discovery" of "Ciudad Blanca" takes refuge in tales of mystery with no basis in historical fact. As we have previously discussed, the legend of Ciudad Blanca is a modern fabrication, extending to false claims about the content of sixteenth-century Spanish documents.

Actual archaeological work conducted in the Mosquitia was ignored in the original publicity and continues to be ignored by the head of the IHAH. That research is of interest itself, because what it showed was an unexpected number of large sites occupied at the same time as Copan, and in some cases later. Some of these sites included architectural features recognizable as ballcourts, the kind of spaces where people from as far north as Arizona through Mexico and Guatemala played games using rubber balls. Not just significant as a sign of cultural identification with the zone to the north, but also socially significant as evidence of a practice through which different, independent towns participated in inter-site political, religious, and social relations, ballcourts had, until the early 1990s, been thought to be limited to the western edge of Honduras.

Yet the archaeology of the Mosquitia also showed abundant evidence of relations further south, to the societies of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. In some ways this was unsurprising: people in Nicaragua and Costa Rica valued the beautiful marble vases carved in the Ulua valley, and emulated the painted pottery of the Ulua tradition in their own locally made ceramic vases. But the modern history of archaeological research in Honduras had, since at least the 1930s, emphasized a break between western Honduras, connected with the Maya and other societies west and north, and the peoples of southern Central America.

What the archaeology undertaken in the 1990s (with little institutional backing or financial support) in the Mosquitia-- and in the department of Yoro, and more recently, in Olancho and the Jamastran valley-- demonstrated was that the old model of two blocs separated by a "frontier" was untenable. Instead, Honduran sites further east than the so-called "frontier" expanded our understanding of the geographical scope of travel, exchange, and knowledge, showing that before colonization by the Spanish, all of Mexico and Central America constituted an active chain of interconnected societies, ultimately linked north to the pueblos of the US Southwest and south into the mountains of Colombia, and perhaps beyond.

These were cosmopolitan peoples. Renewed investigation of the Mosquitia has the promise to remind us of this, and enforce real attention to the mechanisms through which this chain of societies were connected over their long histories.

Unfortunately, there is little likelihood that the present campaign by the IHAH will yield reliable knowledge, even if an expedition is mounted to the sites located through LiDAR imaging. Knowledge is not the same thing as discovery. Knowledge comes from building on what went before; the relentless promotion of the new data as unprecedented stands in the way of trying to honestly compare these sites to those known from the region, and across Honduras. The desire to link these real places to a modern myth, with its highly marketable narrative of lost cities of gold, has already distorted the process of archaeological research. How, in this time of high politicization of archaeology in Honduras, could any government-sponsored expedition dispute the claim that this is the discovery of a lost "civilization", Ciudad Blanca, and instead acknowledge that these sites are like those already known from previous research in the Mosquitia?

The greatest promise of following up on the new LiDAR imagery might be the potential to renew archaeological research outside the Copan zone. The greatest challenge presented is a fact cited by the manager of the Institute in his letter to El Heraldo. Paredes writes:

The government of the Republic presided over by Porfirio Lobo Sosa is working to fortify the economic development of the country through the Cultural Patrimony as a resource that should be used in a responsible and sustainable form, therefore, we do not doubt that the enhancement of such an important site will come to drive the economic development of the country without taking away from the natural and cultural riches that are encountered in the zone of the Mosquitia.

What is wrong here?

The mission of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History is not to exploit sites of cultural and historical importance for economic development. That would be a reasonable statement of the mission of the Institute of Tourism. This passage shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the mission of IHAH. And that lack of understanding of the mission of the Institute, on the part of the person appointed to direct it, is the greatest challenge for any archaeology in Honduras today.

The law governing the Institute of Anthropology and History, established in 1968 and revised in 2008, says that its purpose is

the defense, exploration, conservation, restauration, repair, recovery and growth, and scientific investigation of the archaeological, anthropological, historic and artistic treasures of the nation, as well as places of tradition and natural beauty.

Nothing there, or in the articles that follow, about economic development. Indeed, article 26 explicitly enjoins against approving exploration for any reason other than "scientific investigation":

Projects that could discover archaeological monuments, like the exploration of those already discovered, shall have the exclusive goal of scientific investigation, therefore, the Institute cannot concede permission to persons who are pursuing other ends.

Under the law, sites are supposed to be of interest for one of two reasons: due to their relation to the "social and political history" of the country; and for their "exceptional artistic or architectural value that they characterize as an exemplar of national culture". Again, no mention of economic exploitation.

Also relevant to this discussion of the challenges to an "archaeology of Ciudad Blanca" is the Law for the protection of the Cultural Patrimony. Passed in 1997, it sets out at the beginning the value of the cultural patrimony:

Cultural properties constitute one of the foundations of the culture of the people and acquire their true value when their origin, history, and context are known with precision and are disseminated for the knowledge of the population.

The cultural patrimony law repeatedly cites the role of the Institute of Anthropology and History in the protection of the cultural patrimony-- not in its exploitation for economic ends.

In theory, there is no contradiction between sponsoring research-- the job of the Institute of Anthropology-- and contributing informed understanding to the development of historic and archaeological sites for visitation that is at one and the same time of economic benefit and a means to educate the public about the Honduran past.

In theory.

In practice, when economic development trumps scientific investigation and dissemination of historical knowledge, as clearly is the case in the unfounded promotion of sites in the Mosquitia as the mythical Ciudad Blanca, the interests of the Honduran people in real knowledge about the past are submerged under the desperate pursuit of money.

Welcome to the End of the World (Or Not): Honduras Maya Edition

2012.

Other than the title of one of the world's worst films ever, what does it mean to you?

If you are an archaeologist working in Mexico or Central America, it is likely to bring a sigh of resignation about a conversation no one wants to have. Yes, the prehispanic Maya inscriptions include mention of a date in 2012. Yes, that date "ends" one cycle of the "Long Count" calendar, the 13th cycle of approximately 400 years.

What comes next? Well, not the end of the world. Sorry, but there is nothing to suggest any Maya inscription predicts an apocalypse. In fact, if there were still Maya using the Long Count, we do not really know what they would do on December 22, 2012. There are two main possibilities.

One is that, since most Maya time cycles run in groups of 20, baktuns also should be counted in sets of 20-- which would mean December 22, 2012 would be 13.0.0.0.1, and some day 400 years or so from now, the dial would turn over to 14.0.0.0.0. Like the odometer on your car.

Another possibility is that a new cycle would begin: December 21 would be 13.0.0.0.0, and December 22 would be 0.0.0.0.1. This would be consistent with mythological texts from Palenque that tell of world-beginning events long in the past, which happened the day after a cycle 13 ended, and initiated a new Long Count starting at 1.

Based on confusing mythology about the beginning of time with a prediction of the end of time, a very large group of people have developed popular proposals that the ancient Maya predicted the end of the world, and it will come a year from now. For those who believe it, December 21, 2012 is not just an end of time, it is the end time.

Which brings us to Copan on Wednesday. As El Heraldo writes,

Some fear that it will be the beginning of the end. Others assert that it deals with a new era. What is certain is that together we all began this Wednesday to walk the path that will take us to see the truth face-to-face. The date is 21/12/12.

The clock began ticking. Within exactly one year the world will discover the truth about the enigma that will close the Maya calendar and for that, since yesterday the eyes of humanity turned toward Copán Ruinas, the Maya heart of Honduras.

In case the prose isn't purple enough, take a look at one of the images that accompanied their story:What you are looking at here is spectacle, the outright exoticization of the history of an indigenous group. Read carefully through the coverage and you will not find the names of any representatives of the Chorti, descendants of the authors of the inscriptions on Copan's monuments.

El Heraldo assures us that

Never before in the history of humanity has a generation been present at the beginning or the end of a cycle of baktuns, and therefore 2012 will be a unique moment, in which for the first time humanity will be witness to a change of epoch according to the Maya measurement of time.

That would be news to the ancestors of the Maya who lived lives as hunter-gatherers in 3114 BC, when Palenque's inscription record the beginning of our current era. But of course, what the passage means, other than asserting a universalizing claim to Mayaness as a unique Honduran heritage divorced from any actual Maya people, is that never before has any human being seen the kind of shows and spectacles that are being trumped up for this manufactured event.

On hand to start the festivities off was Porfirio Lobo Sosa, quoted by El Heraldo as saying:

"This is the countdown of this era that we all are waiting for and during these 365 days that today begin we have proposed to celebrate many events of an academic nature. We hope that the world will come to know the marvels of the Mayas and the impressive studies that have been done."

"We hope that the world will come to know": that of course is what this is all about: the desperate need to revive the tourism industry and get it to yield more money for the Honduran economy.

El Heraldo, again, is clear about making the connections:

In Copán Ruinas they are conscious that this opportunity cannot be let past and they want to take advantage to the maximum to revive national and foreign tourism...

Juan Ángel Wélchez, president of the [organizing committee, Comité Copán 2012], affirmed that they would do everything in their power so that Copan would be the center of attention of the world. "It is of greatest importance, this year coming, it is an excellent opportunity to relaunch Copan as a tourist product of high quality for the world. These last years have been difficult, but we believe that now it can change..."

The secretary of tourism, Nelly Jerez, also underlined the importance of promoting this tourist destination in the world and boosting enthusiasm for the Maya civilization that inhabited the zone. "This is the best opportunity and the best window that our country could have, our Maya culture. This is the moment of Honduras".

News reports say that the hope is for 300,000 tourists to visit Copan this year.

Of course, Copan is not alone in trying to exploit 2012. International news coverage gave Honduras shared billing with Guatemala, undercutting the repeated claim in Honduran media that Copan had a special role in astronomy and calendars, based on a now-discredited interpretation of the figures and dates on Copan's Altar Q as a reunion of astronomers.

Starting the festivities, Copan witnessed an enactment of a so-called "fire ceremony" and ballgame, as El Heraldo said, "following the traditions of the Maya". In other coverage, they describe the "new fire ceremony" presented during the recent festivities more accurately, as a hodge-podge of Mexican indigenous ritual and Euro-American New Year's ideologies:

This ceremony comes from the moment in which the calendar of Anahuac was invented, around 4,000 years ago, and has been maintained to the present, being celebrated by many indigenous peoples, although adapted to Catholic festivities.

So where are the Chortis as Honduras inaugurates this celebration of a badly misunderstood, garishly exploited version of their historical legacies?

On December 15, eighty Chorti families were evicted from land in the municipality of Copan Ruinas by police and members of the armed forces:

The Chortis, located in the community, asserted that they had lived for twenty years on the properties where they built their houses. Nonetheless, the sale of the property to another owner initiated the conflict that ended with their eviction.

Men, women and children remained in the street, with their petates, bundles of clothing and other belongings they left the property and set up in the middle of the street. The eviction was peaceful, but tears were visible among the women and children who remained without a roof.

Since five months ago the new owners of the property had appealed for the Chorti to move out of the lands; in the face of the conflict, directors of the National Council of Indigenous Chorti Maya (Consejo Nacional Indígena Maya Chortí) asked the government to assist in purchasing other lands. The government committed on the 12th of October of this year to give 8 million lempiras (about $445,000), but the money did not arrive and the campesinos were evicted.

The government promise made on October 12 came, of course, in response to Chorti occupying the Copan archaeological site. This is a tactic, as we noted at the time, that has been used by Chorti for some time to enlist the visibility of the site to make their own contemporary lives, poverty, and dispossession, visible.

Don't expect to see that authentic reality of Honduran Maya culture covered with the tourism festivities. After all, we don't want the international tourists to feel guilty, now do we?

Mayanization in action: erasing Pech history

A story that caught my eye today, from the Bulgarian site FOCUS Information Agency (billing itself as "the first Bulgarian private information agency" and "the most preferred Bulgarian electronic media both in Bulgaria and abroad"), simultaneously illustrates the complexity of Honduran cultural history, and the narrowing effects of what historian Dario Euraque has dubbed mayanization: the collapse of all the diversity of Honduras' pluralistic indigenous heritage into one category, as generalized "Maya".

The story reports on an initiative by the "Friendship Society Bulgaria – Honduras" who will be traveling to La Ceiba, a city on the north coast of Honduras, east of San Pedro Sula. There, they say, is found the only river in the world named after their native country, the Rio Bulgaria:

Inquiries have shown that a Bulgarian community has been living in the Central American country for 100 years. At the beginning of 20 century they discovered an unknown river and named it Bulgaria in honor of their native country.

That brought me only a moment's pause. While I had no previous knowledge of a Bulgarian immigrant population, the North Coast is incredibly diverse, and waves of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century were drawn there by the business opportunities created by internationalization of the banana industry.

The expedition will bring Honduran photographers Nimer Alvarado and Mervin Corales to trace the course of this river from its headwaters near Tegucigalpita (a small town, not the capital city), as it runs from Pico Bonito, one of Honduras' astonishing national parks, to La Ceiba.

So far, so good. The article notes that the photographic trek is

carried out in cooperation with the culture center in La Ceiba.

This is one of the local "Casas de Cultura", an initiative pushed forward under former Minister of Culture Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle beginning in his first term in that position between 1994 and 1996. Casas de Cultura are intended to encourage public participation in the exploration of specifically local histories. It would seem like nothing could be more localized than a coherent Bulgarian community with sufficient sense of national origin to lead them to name a local landmark in memory of that country.

But wait:

The photographs taken will be displayed in an exhibition called Rio Bulgaria – the Bulgarian Presence in the Land of Maya [emphasis added]

So in what sense were Bulgarians living near La Ceiba "in the land of the Maya"? None, really.

We do know quite a lot about the prehispanic people of the north coast of Honduras. They lived in towns, the largest of which probably had populations of a few thousand people, whose remains are recognizable as mounds today, mapped by archaeologists visiting the area since the first half of the 20th century. At least one large archaeological site is directly adjacent to La Ceiba itself, although not developed for visitation. Based on ceramics, it probably dated to the Classic period-- more or less 500-1000 AD. And, also based on these ceramics, the people living near La Ceiba were not the same as the people of Copan, who we refer to today as Maya.

Who were the people living near La Ceiba? To answer that question, we enter into speculative territory, and need to take into account how archaeologists know who lived anywhere. The common approach is to take the people who Europeans described in the 16th century as most likely descendants of those who had lived in the same place earlier. Notice that this means we assume that people stayed in place, unless there is some strong evidence that they moved; this conservative assumption can sometimes be misleading.

But if we take this common approach, then the likely people of the area around La Ceiba would be the ancestors of the indigenous group today known as Pech, previously called Paya. Pech are recognized as the indigenous people who occupied the island of Roatan in the sixteenth century. The northeast coast opposite the Bay Islands was the earliest focus of Spanish occupation, including massive slave raiding of the indigenous population. This began a long history of depletion of Pech population, including forced resettlement and voluntary movement away from exploitation.

The surviving Pech are among the indigenous groups officially recognized by the State of Honduras, under ILO 160, the Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries of 1989, which was ratified in 1995. According to Minority Rights Group International (MRG), an NGO tracking global diversity, today there are about 2000 Pech who

have resisted total assimilation and, under the national bilingual programme, have developed Pech-language courses and Pech teachers.

In fact, you can find a YouTube video of Pech children singing the Honduran national anthem in translation.

Does it matter that a promotional notice of a pretty bizarre "cultural" exchange between Bulgaria, of all places, and Honduras, erases the historical connection of Pech to the land they once occupied, and replaces it with a generalized "Maya" identity?

Well, yes, it does. Cultural diversity has been a focus of struggle in Honduras for decades. In these struggles, the erasure of other pasts and their replacement with a single Maya past breaks connections between contemporary people and the territory they once occupied. It can lead to investment in understanding one valued indigenous culture to the exclusion of understanding the others that Honduras recognizes. And it undermines attempts fostered by some Honduran intellectuals to forge a national identity that recognizes historical complexity for a nation today working to accommodate various forms of difference.

As MRG puts it

For most of its post-independence history the culture of national unity forged by the state has been on the basis of a mestizo ideal... As a consequence traditional indigenous and minority populations have historically been marginalized, ignored or discriminated against....

This despite the fact that

Unlike other countries of the region, in the 1980s Honduras officially recognized the multicultural composition of its society and the need to protect the economic, cultural and human rights of its ethnic peoples. This helped to create an official space for indigenous and minority populations to work towards having their rights recognized and their needs addressed.

So yes, it matters when a photographic exhibition planned to be shown nationally and internationally erases local identity. And it is especially ironic when this takes place in the context of re-discovering the complexity of European heritages of modern Honduras.

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A historical footnote: the erasure of Pech identity and its replacement by Maya identity has a long literary history.

When Christopher Columbus made his only landfall on the mainland of the Americas in 1502, it was on the north coast of Honduras, across from the Bay Islands-- that is, in the region of La Ceiba. He had first captured a canoe off the island of Guanaja, which, like Roatan, was likely inhabited by Pech speaking people. Most reports today identify the canoe as "Maya traders", ignoring the original accounts, written closest to the time of the incident. These clearly identify the canoe as coming from one of the islands, and its passengers as local people.

Most pernicious, modern accounts base the identification of this canoe on a sixteenth-century general historian, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, who wrote that

this vast region [the mainland of northern Honduras] is divided into two parts, one called Taïa and the other called Maïa

Or, that is what he is said to have written. In fact, the manuscript of his book clearly has "Païa", not "Taïa", the name previously used for the people who call themselves Pech.