Maudslay: The Maya Man

Not often is the work of a nineteenth-century field archaeologist valued as highly by modern scholars as it was by their predecessors a century ago. Yet this is true of the documentation of Maya sculpture and inscriptions that a British archaeologist compiled between the years 1881 and 1894. This pioneer was Alfred Percival Maudslay (1850-1931), whose photographs and plaster casts have proved of enduring worth and beauty, and remain an object lesson in the recording of archaeological remains. In particular, his work has contributed greatly to the decipherment of Maya script, thereby increasing enormously our understanding of the longest-lasting, and also one of the most remarkable, of all preconquest civilisations of the Americas.