chapter 8 Finding Places
Through the end of the 1920s, despite a great level of interest in understanding how the pottery produced in the Maya and Ulua regions was related, there was almost no attention given to gaining a greater understanding of the distribu- tion of Honduran archaeological materials in space. As long as the painted pot- tery of Honduras was understood as evidence for level of civilization (even if that concept had been relabeled using terms for peoples like tribe) the precise delineation of where these objects were found was unimportant. Expeditions returned over and over to the same areas explored by Gordon. A decade after Gordon’s work ended, A. Hooten Blackiston (1910a:197) traveled in the Chamelecon and Ulua valleys, reporting on finds illuminating what he called “past civilizations” from multiple “playas de los muertos” (“beaches of the dead,” in reference to the exposure of burials) on the Ulua and Chamelecon rivers. He reported excavating in one of these sites on the Ulua River at a place he named San Miguel, most likely an error for San Manuel Tehuma, op- posite Santana, as there is no known historic place called San Miguel along the Ulua river. Here he says he uncovered two burials 15–18 feet below the modern ground surface. His reports of whistles in animal and human form, and fine pottery vessels “covered with striking symbols and figures of Mayan type” (Blackiston 1910a:198), leave no doubt that his excavations sampled Ulua Polychrome-associated deposits. The location of his second excavation in river-cut deposits was also within the lower Ulua Valley, on the Chamelecon River six miles downstream from the town of Chamelecon. This would place these excavations in the vicinity of what would later be the town of La Lima, Cortés, headquarters of the United Fruit Company. Following Gordon and Blackiston, Marshall Saville, appointed staff of the newly established Heye Foundation museum in New York City, returned in 1915 to the well worked over territory of the lower Ulua river valley. Saville was able to assemble a collection of what were described as “objects of several well- known and far-distant cultures” from “the restricted area of the broad valley in which flow both the Ulua and Chamelecon Rivers” for the new museum (Pepper 1916:409). Saville himself, interviewed in the New York Times (1915), was more expansive:
“The remarkable fact about the potteries and other objects,” said Professor Saville yesterday, “is that they represent at least six kinds of civilization. We have not the facilities at present to dig down eighteen feet, which
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004341500_010
seems to be necessary, but what has been found shows that there is an opportunity for vast research.” Many of the objects which Professor Saville exhibited were of exqui- site beauty, as for instance some perfect bowls of the Maya civilization… Other objects found originated, according to the archaeologist, in Vera Cruz, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, in Jalisco, in Oaxaca, in various prov- inces of Mexico, and in the Lesser Antilles….Professor Saville said that all the indications pointed to the existence of a great city where a culture had been reached which is a revelation to the explorer…. It is probable that to this ancient metropolis were drawn peoples from all Central and South America. It may have been like Tyre of old.
Saville’s Honduran collections, now in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, were recorded as coming from specific points along the Chamelecon and Ulua rivers. These were already familiar as archaeological sites, not quite twenty years after the first formal published re- ports on the archaeology of the region: Chasnigua, Playa de los Muertos, Pro- greso, Ranchería, Santiago and Travesia (Figure 6). At these locations, as Saville noted, collectors recovered antiquities that were deeply buried, and thus (in these pre-stratigraphic investigations) without any defined context. Despite a passing reference to mounds near the known sixteenth century town of Naco, Saville, like archaeologists before him, showed no interest in locating settlements, not even the fabled city whose presence he judged was indicated by the diversity of sources he identified for the objects he collected. For him, the spatial location of ceramic styles was to be found at the level of the region: Veracruz, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Jalisco, Oaxaca, the Lesser Antilles, and of course, the Ulua valley. A shift to describing spatial locations in ways more closely related to the lifetimes of actors would require decades of archae- ological work and changes in archaeological thought.
Recognizing Settlements
When Marshall Saville arrived in Honduras in 1915, he already would have known of the report by Blackiston (1910a) on sites with surface visible archi- tecture in the Ulua valley. It appears that Blackiston may have been the first archaeologist to explicitly identify mounds representing the 16th century town of Naco, which Saville also mentioned in his New York Times interview (Black- iston 1910b). Blackiston does not appear to have excavated at Naco itself. In- stead, he concentrated his efforts in the lower Ulua valley, becoming the first