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Renowned archaeologist Clemency C. Coggins criticized Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography for excavating the Mexican Sacred Cenote without properly accounting for the “archaeological context” of the site.
Coggins, an expert in Maya archaeology, appeared at the Peabody Museum on Thursday evening to discuss artifact looting and illicit trading. She said that these practices not only damage the artifacts but also destroy the cultural and historical significance of the dig sites themselves.
“I became very focused on context, what was the actual original location, and finding point of any object, which to me, was some of the most important things about it, rather than what it looked like,” Coggins said. “You can’t barely understand how much is destroyed, how much is lost by bringing this one beautiful, expensive object to a gallery in New York.”
In an interview after the event, Coggins used the Peabody’s 20th-century excavation of the Sacred Cenote as an example of an improper archaeological dig that damaged the surrounding environment.
“They didn’t excavate it. There was no way they could excavate it carefully,” she said. “All of the objects that came from this place in Northern Yucatan were dredged out of this place, so there was no context, archeological context.”
American archaeologist Edward H. Thompson excavated the site in the early 1900s, an expedition that added approximately thirty thousand artifacts to Peabody’s collections. The museum indirectly sponsored Thompson’s work in Mexico through remittances from the museum’s director and patron.
Coggins specifically took issue with the dredging technique used by Thompson, a water-based excavation tool to remove sediment from underwater sites. The Sacred Cenote, a Mayan sacred site at Chichén Itzá, is a natural sinkhole that served as a repository for human sacrifices from 1500 B.C. to 300 A.D.
“They could not say when one thing was thrown in there and when another one was thrown in there,” she said. “They all had to be analyzed well after the fact, they all came here to the Peabody Museum.”
Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson James Chisholm, clarified that Coggin’s remarks referred to early 20th-century archaeological practices, not the museum’s present-day methods.
“The Peabody already acknowledges the questionable ethics of Thompson’s methods,” he wrote, which are described in the current exhibition text about the Sacred Cenote on the third floor of the Peabody.
Chisholm also noted that the museum did not sponsor the Sacred Cenote dredging, which was privately funded. He pointed to the display label, which states that the exhibit “topic is part of an ongoing discussion about ethical stewardship and institutional history at the Peabody.”
Coggins, who has worked as a research assistant at the Peabody Museum since 1979, has dedicated her academic career to researching the looting and illicit trade of ancient artifacts. She published a book on the excavation of the Sacred Cenote and helped shape U.S. policy and UNESCO conventions on cultural property, impacting how ancient artifacts were understood globally.
During the Thursday talk, Coggins said the “ultimate source story” of an artifact — details about its excavation and the location it came from — is often the “most important thing about an ancient object.”
“It’s often hard for them to understand that these come from somewhere, and wondering how they came from wherever it was,” she said. “This is what we’re talking about, is the way archeological sites are destroyed in the process of producing these objects for the art market.”
“Someone would say, ‘Well, we would never have seen these things,’” she added. “As if our perception, our ownership, was the most desirable final outcome perception — whereas from an archeological point of view, it is the remains of a whole culture, of a whole society, of a whole archeological site, which is a very complex, complicated thing.”
