page_title: Quiriguá
section_title: Modern history
hierarchical_section_title: Quiriguá / History / Modern history
caption_attribution_description: English: Quirigua, Guatemala: Zoomorph B, after Maudslay, 1902
context_page_description: Quiriguá is an ancient Maya archaeological site in the department of Izabal in south-eastern Guatemala. It is a medium-sized site covering approximately 3 square kilometres along the lower Motagua River, with the ceremonial center about 1 km from the north bank. During the Maya Classic Period, Quiriguá was situated at the juncture of several important trade routes. The site was occupied by 200, construction on the acropolis had begun by about 550, and an explosion of grander construction started in the 8th century. All construction had halted by about 850, except for a brief period of reoccupation in the Early Postclassic. Quiriguá shares its architectural and sculptural styles with the nearby Classic Period city of Copán, with whose history it is closely entwined.
  Quiriguá's rapid expansion in the 8th century was tied to king K'ak' Tiliw Chan Yopaat's military victory over Copán in 738. When the greatest king of Copán, Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil or "18-Rabbit", was defeated, he was captured and then sacrificed in the Great Plaza at Quiriguá. Before this, Quiriguá had been a vassal state of Copán, but it maintained its independence afterwards.
context_section_description: The first European visitor to publish an account of Quiriguá was English architect and artist Frederick Catherwood, who reached the ruins in 1840. The previous landowner, by the surname of Payés, had related the existence of the ruins to his sons and to Carlos Meiney, a Jamaican Englishman resident in Guatemala. The elder Payés had recently died and passed the land to his sons and, since neither Meiney nor Payés' sons had visited the land containing the ruins, they invited John Lloyd Stephens and Catherwood to join them on their first trip to the site. Stephens had other duties to attend to, but Catherwood was able to accompany the Payés brothers to Quiriguá. Due to adverse conditions he was only able to stay a short time at the ruins, but made drawings of two of the stelae, which were published with a short account of Catherwood's visit in John Lloyd Stephens's book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan in 1841. Quiriguá was the first site that Stephens and Catherwood could claim to have discovered themselves. A longer account of the ruins was made in 1854 by Dr. Karl Scherzer.
  Explorer and archaeologist Alfred Maudslay visited Quiriguá for three days in 1881; they were the first pre-Columbian ruins that he saw and they were sufficiently impressive to inspire him to take up a permanent interest in Central American archaeology. He was able to return on three further occasions, the last being in 1894, and he made the first efforts to clear the monuments before recording them. He carried out a very thorough examination and made a photographic record of all visible monuments, carried out some minor excavations, made paper and plaster molds of the hieroglyphic inscriptions and surveyed the principal sculptures; these molds were then shipped to the Victoria and Albert Museum, with casts being transferred to the British Museum.
  In 1910, the United Fruit Company bought Quiriguá and all the land for a great distance around the site for banana production; they set aside 75 acres (30 ha) around the ceremonial centre as an archaeological park, leaving an island of jungle among the plantations. More archaeological work was carried out from 1910 to 1914 by Edgar Lee Hewett and Sylvanus Morley for the School of American Archaeology in Santa Fe.  Duplicates of the stelae of Quiriguá made from Hewitt's plaster casts of the originals were exhibited at the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, California, in 1915. The casts are still on display at the San Diego Museum of Man in their "Maya: Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth" exhibition. The Carnegie Institution conducted several intermittent projects at Quiriguá from 1915 through 1934.  Aldous Huxley, writing after visiting the site in the early 1930s, noted that Quiriguá's stelae commemorated "man's triumph over time and matter and the triumph of time and matter over man." Quiriguá was among the first Maya archaeological sites to be studied intensively, although little restoration was carried out and the ruins once again became overgrown with jungle.
  Quiriguá was declared a National Monument in 1970 under Ministerial Accord 1210, this was followed on 19 June 1974 by its declaration as an Archaeological Park under Governmental Accord 35-74.
  From 1974 through 1979, an extensive archaeological project was conducted at Quiriguá sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, the National Geographic Society, and the Guatemalan Instituto de Antropología e Historia. Directed by Robert Sharer and William R. Coe, the project excavated the acropolis, cleaned the monuments, and studied outlying groups. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981, and in 1999 UNESCO approved one-off funding of US$27,248 for "emergency assistance for the rehabilitation of the archaeological site of Quiriguá". One of the site's stelae is depicted on the Guatemalan 10 centavo coin.
  The 34-hectare (84-acre) area included within the Archaeological Park of Quiriguá has been developed for tourism with the construction of a car park, site museum, and sanitation facilities and is open to the publ
caption: Zoomorph B – photo by Maudslay
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