Harvard Magazine
Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs

Previous Page


Barbara Fash oversees the painting of Rosalila, in colors faithful to the original.
Barbara Fash oversees the painting of Rosalila, in colors faithful to the original.
Barbara (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. 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. 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. Funding for the exhibits came from the nonprofit Copán Association (founded by Agurcia and Fash), the IHAH, and USAID.

Some of the original sculptures carved at Copán have already deteriorated badly. Abundant ground moisture-which both pine trees and coconut palms, growing side by side, find congenial-causes the sculptures to decay at the base. "Furthermore," says Bill Fash, "the city is cursed to be in the center of an earthquake zone. Ancient Copán was founded around a.d. 400 in the midst of the area's most fertile farmlands," he explains. "As the city prospered, its population grew to 20,000, outstripping local resources. 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. A single 1934 earthquake reduced four buildings on the Copán acropolis to rubble, and broke the
A wall from Temple 26, with casts (in white) of original stones taken to Harvard's Peabody Museum in the 1930s. Carved in two different scripts, the wall is the Mayan equivalent of the Rosetta stone.
A wall from Temple 26, with casts (in white) of original stones taken to Harvard's Peabody Museum in the 1930s. Carved in two different scripts, the wall is the Mayan equivalent of the Rosetta stone.
sculptures off another nine.

What can't be restored can at least be recreated-that will be the legacy of the early archaeological expeditions. "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. The artisans grind up a light green volcanic tuff, from which the originals were also carved, to color their cement casts.

But Fash has mixed feelings about the overall impact that the dig has had on village life in Copán.
 David Stuart's line drawing of four glyphs shows the intricacy of Mayan writing.
David Stuart's line drawing of four glyphs shows the intricacy of Mayan writing.
"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 village of Copán, with a population of 4,000, now gets 100,000 tourists a year [these figures predate the completion of the museum] and as a result some traditional aspects of the community have been lost. 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.

According to Fash, some Maya traditions are still observed in Copán. Respect for the ancient culture is widespread. During preparations for one of the museum exhibits, an ancient god seemed to awaken from a long slumber. 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. 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. "When we reassembled it," says Barbara Fash, "all of a sudden a huge storm blew up. The wind, lightning, rain, and thunder were so loud that you couldn't talk. It came out of nowhere. The local workers dropped what they were doing-they were terrified," she says. Carved skulls, representing sacrificial victims, which surrounded the stairway panel added to the effect.

Barbara 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. Rosalila was chosen as the centerpiece because it dramatically illustrates
Abundant natural light brightens the museum interior.
Abundant natural light brightens the museum interior.
the point that the vast majority of Copán's sculpture was architectural, not freestanding stelae, as most people have been taught. Constructed of reinforced concrete coated with white cement and lime, the temple rises 46 feet to an open skylight at the museum's center. Because it is exposed to the sun and rain, finding permanent pigments to match those on the original temple was a major challenge. Fash finally settled on special German mineral paints that bond with the cement and will not weather and age. A period of experimentation followed; the major challenge was to make the colors look as though they were faded from prolonged exposure to the elements. As the musuem opening drew near, there was some doubt about whether the painting would be done in time. There simply wasn't enough scaffolding to go around. Harvard students attending the field school stayed an extra week to help finish the painting, completing the final touches at 5:30 on the night before the opening. "We couldn't have done it without their help," says Bill Fash.

An important contribution also came from the Peabody Museum. The Maya analog to the Rosetta stone is an interior temple wall carved in paired columns of glyphs in two different scripts, one Mayan, the other from the Central Mexican town of Teotihuacaan, the "City of the Gods." Harvard archaeologists had collected 25 pieces of this wall in the 1930s. David Stuart, the associate director of the Peabody Museum's Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphs Project, pieced the fragments back together with Barbara Fash, who made molds and brought them to Copán. There she made casts, completing the wall from Temple 26, now nicknamed "the Harvard wall."

At the museum's August 1996 dedication ceremony, attended by the presidents of Guatemala and Honduras, the townspeople of Copán gave Barbara Fash a seven-minute standing ovation. They knew how long and hard she had worked to piece the buildings back together. The museum's central module is now complete. Six more are planned, the first of which will house the hieroglyphic stairway (a dynastic history of the kingdom's rulers), a project even more complex than Rosalila (which took three years to build). As the Fashes well know, there are decades of work yet to be done-fitting tribute to a kingdom that prospered for more than 400 years.


Jonathan Shaw '89 is an associate editor of this magazine.