New ideas for temple tourism: The Maya site of El Pilar on the Yucatán peninsula
by Klaus Wilhelm

The world of the Maya on the Yucatán peninsula is a highly developed touristic world of powerful pyramides and palaces wavering in the heat, beautiful and inflationary like sunrays, which were constructed to serve the needs of a public of millions. „But this here is rather unique“ says archaeologist Anabel Ford, pointing to the ruins of a reseidential structure. Before us lay the remains of walls from five buildings, behind them the jungle towers like an inpenetrable wall. In the twilight orchids are gleaming, blooming orange, like spotlights. Here no lords resided and no priests were held processions. Here in El Pilar, on the border between Belize and Guatemala, the normal Maya lived in their home environment, the subtropical rainforest.
El Pilar does not exactly belong to the big names of Maya tourism. Most travel guides mention the site, if at all, in a brief two or three sentences. Nevertheless, those who, en route from Belize to Guatemala pass through the charming town of San Ignacio, should take a day and drive, with a rental car or taxi, over the 15 km dirt road deep into the rainforest - precisely because El Pilar does not tout the typical monumental style of the maya megacomplexes like Chichen Itzá, Palenque and Uxmal in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala or Copan in Honduras. These sites display reconstructions based largely on imaginings of contemporary archaeologists and tourism experts, and this shows in their often sterile appearances.
Can visitors really imagine how these metropolises once looked, how they smelled, how the farmers and the craftsmen lived in them? Were the plazas really so starkly cleared, left as defenseless against the burning sun as against the monthslong percipitation of the rainy season? Common sense and existing knowledge about how people in hot regions of the earth protect themselves against the sun give us logical answers to these questions. Therefore the archaeologists have hardly thinned out the forest of El Pilar. The jungle is the real monument, says Anabel Ford, who has worked in El Pilar for twenty years now. This site is her project.
This site, hard to access today, was without doubt once a metropolis, only 60 km away from Tikal, the two connected through twisting paths. Six paths wind through the three former urban areas, which stretch out along the green border zone between Belize and Guatemala. Under a thick canopy of banana and palmtrees, we pass flat hills. They are the remains of public buildings, palaces, ballcourts and processional plazas, traces of the prespanish upper class. From a plateau we have a breathtaking vista over the treetops of the neighbouring Guatemalan rainforest. In the distance sound the hollow calls of howler monkeys. There lies the third district of the once prosperous city, in which from the six to the ninth century A.D. approximately 20000 maya lived.
The current centerpiece of El Pilar is named after the maya word for humming bird: Tzunu'un, one of the typical living complexes of which hundreds were spread in clusters over the area of the site. The foundation walls of five houses – one of them a palacelike structure consisting of three rooms – are grouped around a central plaza. The houses differ in from and size and they are evidence that the architechtural art of the Maya did not end in the ornate centers of the nobility. Apparently they served different purposes, like bedrooms and kitchens in our time. A private altar and a small pyramid satisfied the religious needs of the inhabitants of Tzunu'un, who probably belonged to a well-to-do social class.
Unlike sites like Chichen Itzá, archaeologists here did not reconstruct the ruins to the last stairstep, rather they simply consolidated the intact structures according UNESCO standards. To protect the cultural treasures from sun and rain as well as possible, the vegetation was left almost untouched. Everywhere gnarled branches, small roots and leaves can be seen, which shelter the ruins like a poncho. No one here is presented with finished temples. That is novel. Restoration ends where the imagination begins.
Those who let themselves into this Mayan world away from splendor and representation and who inform themselves about the archaeological philosophy of El Pilar, can let their fantasies run free. As we ascend the stairs to the entrance of a house, we notice that the benches have different heights for guests of different ranks. Automatically those reception scenes come to mind, which are depicted on many maya vases. One thinks about the women, who knelt here, grinding corn with a stone pestle and cooking bread in the fire – one almost smells the biting smoke of the consecrations on the altar.
We almost feel like explorers in this enchanted place, like the British draftsman Frederick Catherwood in his day. Overwhelmed by the overgrown, undisturbed ruins in the nineteenth century, the British mayan pioneer painted pictures of wild beauty. The palaces covered with branches and roots inspired him to a simlutaneously romantic and kitschy jungle romanticism, a pictorial compliment to Rudyard Kipling's literary creations. Skeptics might have their problems with these kinds of idealized jungle paradises. But enriched with the knowledge of modern archaeology, they can offer a more authentic experience in El Pilar than the swept empty plazas of other famous Maya sites.
In El Pilar the environment is appreciated as an archaeological relic, because it dominated the daily lives of the Maya. Only a few steps along a small footpath, and one is already in the so-called forest garden of Tzunu'un. Small tags on the plants clarify their names and uses. These gardens were the treasurechests of families: avocado, breadnut (?), granatapple (?), and papaya trees grow here, hot chilipeppers, guavas, soapbark trees (?) with whose barkjuice you can wash yourself, medicinal herbs, tobaco, stickapples (??), sweet potatoes, maniok and pumpkin. That the Maya used the rainforest around inhabited areas as forest gardens is evidenced by studies by David Campbell. The tropical ecologist has conducted studies on three settlement areas of the ancient Maya in the Belizian jungle. Their plant species present - considering climatic and geographical factors - should show significant differences. But the vegetation is similar, because the Maya manipulated the forest for their needs. This aimed and prolonged interference in the environment can still be clearly read 1500 years after the collapse of Maya civilization.
The techniques of forest cultivation are conceptually simple, but only a few decendants of the Maya still know them – such as Heriberto a slight, 64 year old man, who is one of the last forest gardeners. His knowledge is invaluable. He has created not only his own garden in „Bullet Tree Falls,“ on the way to El Pilar, but also the forest of Tzunu'un also bears his mark. With machete in hand he strides through the seemingly eternal rainforest, letting his blade lash out to the right in stride, cutting a useless plant. Yesterday he made a small fire to get rid of annoying brushwood, but three important plants he covered with stones so the flames could not touch them. Almost everything the ancient Maya used here somehow, without plundering the rainforest – as food, building materials, medicine, toys, jewelry.
Only the clever and strategic use of resources on a soil poor in nutrients, lifted the Maya above the other peoples of the rainforest and probably provided the foundation for their cultural ascencion. Areas cleared through controlled burning and used intensively for corn existed alternated with thousands of forest gardens. Apparently the Maya knew something about soil chemistry, drainage, ecology and microclimates. This advanced system stustained the people for almost 2000 years in a difficult environment so well that the population density was three to nine times higher than it is today. While those masses of people did not endanger the rainforest, it now belongs, according to the opinions of environmental protection organizations, to the most endangered jungle areas of the world. All around El Pilar fire cleared areas catch the eye. In most cases they are used a few years, before it becomes apparent how useless the low nutrient limestone is, as the biomatter of the rainforest does not regenerate. The past can, then, point the way into the future.
After years of work Anabel Ford has succeeded in not only outlining a cross-border eco-archaeological national park, recognized by the governments of Belize and Guatemala, but also in bringing into her project those who so far have had almost no voice in this region: the Maya, often poverty-stricken, who have gained for the first time some self-confidence towards local officials and governments. In this way El Pilar could be a model for an „Eco-Archaeology-Tourism“ in the Yucatán whose credo is to both protect the environment and the monuments and thereby let the native peoples earn money from tourism. But so far the Belizian government has vehemently rejected this idea. It would prefer to turn El Pilar into a new and profitable Chichen Itzá. Anabel Ford, on the other hand, imagines an eco-archaeological experience park: one part Catherwood, one part Indiana Jones complimented by research and sustainability, are the ingredience of her both convervative and progressive concept. The solution of this conflict could lie in a compromise, in which one or two temples are rebuilt and the rest left in peace.

Article by Klaus Wilhelm

Appeared in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) page R5 on Thirsday, January 29th 2004