Alfred Percival Maudslay was born in 1850 from a family of distinguished British engineers. He studied medicine for a while, but had to quit because of poor health. Instead, Maudsley traveled widely in Central America, United States and the Pacific Islands, first working as a diplomat for the British colonial office and then as explorer and self-taught archaeologist.
Along with Teobert Maler, Maudslay is considered the explorer who most changed the study of Maya archaeology from a tradition of antiquarian interests and romanticized portrayals of ruins to a more scientific recording of sites and monuments through maps, drawings and photographs.
Diplomatic Career and First Voyages
After his graduation in 1872, Alfred Maudslay made his first visit Central America, accompanied by his brother Charles. At that time, Maudslay was mainly interested in the tropical fauna, especially tropical birds. After few years he began a diplomatic career in the British colonial administration and was appointed different offices in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. In 1880 he decided to leave the diplomatic services due to his chronic health problems, and returned to England.
1880-1894: Explorations of Maya Ruins in Guatemala and Mexico
After he resigned from the diplomatic service, Maudslay could finally return to Central America, where, according to his own words, he was more interested in spending the winter in a warm place than in making great geographical and archaeological discoveries. However, he had read John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood’s 1841 Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, and was curious to visit these ruins.
In 1881, Maudslay, completely self-taught and self-funded, started an expedition at the Maya ruins of Quiriguá in Guatemala, Copan in Honduras, and other smaller sites, where he hired local workers and proceed to clean up, map and record buildings, stelae, and artifacts.
Maudslay's Innovations
In his expeditions, Maudslay applied innovative techniques such as casting and photography and was careful to take reliable measurements. He worked with experts such as Lorenzo Giuntini and Gorgonio Lopez who made plaster and papier-mâchés casts of the monuments and artist Annie Hunter, who made precise drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions. Maudslay himself took detailed photographs of buildings, carvings, and sculptures, using the recently-developed dry plate camera.
In 1882, Maudslay visited the site of Yaxchilan, arriving just a few days before the French explorer Désiré Charnay. Here Maudslay made a first map of the ruins, which he called Menché, carefully reproducing the main plaza, and making plans of buildings and taking pictures of the surrounding environment and structures as well as castings of stone lintels. He also had many of the stone lintels cut from their original locations and shipped to London, where they are now located in the British Museum. He also brought back to Europe casts of larger monuments.
During the 1880s, Maudslay visited the site of Chichen Itzá, in the Yucatan peninsula, a site which had entered the western imagination thanks to the book of Stephens and Catherwood. Here he took many pictures, especially of the Las Monjas complex, the Caracol, and the Great Ball court.
In 1890 and 1891 he went to Palenque where he photographed most of the buildings located in monumental core of the site, and recorded through casts and drawings many carvings and sculptures from the palace as well as the Cross Group. His plans of the palace houses and the tower are of the most accurate. He also paid special attention in the reproduction of the stucco ornaments of the walls as well as the stone piers.
In 1892 Maudslay married Anne Cary Morris, a member of an important American family, and they traveled to Guatemala for their honeymoon. At their return, they collaborated for a short period with the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
The Biologia Centrali-Americana
The impressive and careful recording of more than 10 years of archaeological work done by Maudslay is collected in the volumes of Biologia Centrali-Americana, or Contributions to the Knowledge of the Flora and Fauna of Mexico and Central America. This monumental work was published between 1889 and 1902 by Ducane Godman and Osbert Salvin, who invited Maudslay to enrich the publication by adding the plates and texts from his expeditions in an archaeological appendix of 4 volumes.
The series of plates, which include the drawings and photographs of hundreds of buildings, site maps, inscriptions, and carvings of Maya sites, such as Copan, Quiriguá, Chichen Itzá, Palenque, Yaxchilán, and other smaller sites, represent a masterpiece, constituting a unique resource for people interested in Maya history. His work also laid the foundation for the study and eventual decipherment of Maya writing.
Final Years
After seven expeditions in the Maya lowlands, in 1894 Maudslay retired from active field work and in 1905, started the translation from Spanish of Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España, which he completed in 1912. In 1912 he was elected president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and chaired the 18th International Congress of Americanists held in London the same year.
Alfred Maudsley died in 1931 in England. His original materials and notes are stored at Harvard and at the British Museum.
Sources
Graham, Ian, 2002, Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography, University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Joyce, T. A., 1932, "Alfred Percival Maudslay" (obituary), Man, Vol. 32, pp. 123-125.
Tozzer, Alfred M., 1931, "Alfred Percival Maudslay" (obituary), American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 403-412.
Biologia Centrali-Americana. Maudslay’s Archaeology: The Plates. A Digital Facsimile, (www.mesoweb.com/publications/Maudslay/index.html accessed through mesoweb, on June 15, 2011)