Exposing the Maya

A compelling account of the early period of expeditionary archaeology and photography told through the words and works of six pioneers. Exposing the Maya focuses on the works of Desire Charnay, Alice and Augustus Le Plongeon, Teobert Maler, Alfred Maudslay and Adela Breton, all of whom were masters of their craft and travelled extensively to sites in Mexico and Central America. The over 100 selected images in this volume, together with nearly 40 additional contextual images featuring sketches from travel journals, hand-coloured drawings, prints, and maps, are combined with the photographers' own words found in their published writings, journals and letters to provide insight into their methods, context for their images, and to capture the realities of field work in Mesoamerica. Accessible and highly illustrated, Exposing the Maya is a wonderful account of this period of expeditionary photography, an age that witnessed the evolution of photographic techniques and brought to life the long-faded murals and decoration of these ruins. This is a compelling story of incredible journeys, and the challenging conditions under which these pioneering photographers produced their images, and how they perceived the remnants of these ancient indigenous cultures in modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. AUTHORS: John W. Hessler is the curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology and History of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress and a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Collecting for a New World: Treasures of the Early Americas and many other books. Katia Sainson is a professor of French in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Towson University. She is the author and translator of The Manuscript Hunter: Brasseur de Bourbourg's Travels Through Central America and Mexico, 1854-1859. SELLING POINTS: . This is not a collection catalog; it's an overview of the antecedents of expeditionary exploration and recording of the landscapes and jungles of Mexico and Central America, and of a period of expeditionary photography in which photographs brought far-away lands to those who were not able to travel to the jungles of Mexico and Central America . Discussion of the evolution of photographic techniques from wet collodion, to dry plates, to stereography, the first three-dimensional photographic technique . Wonderful examples of illustration, drawing and painting and how these were used to supplement photography, and the early use of colourised photographs that are now the only evidence of long ago faded murals and painted facades Discussion of photography's crucial role in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs and Nahuatl pictographic script. Survey of early theories about the origin of the indigenous peoples and cultures that created the ancient cities of the . Americas and how their sculpted stones, ruins and art were interpreted by these first-hand European witnesses 140 colour illustrations