“Silent and Alone”: How the Ruins of Palenque Were Taught to Speak the Language of Archaeology

Abstract

Taking as main object of our study the London itineraries of the manuscript “Descripción del terreno y población antigua nuevamente descubierta en las inme- diaciones del pueblo de Palenque, jurisdicción de la Provincia de Ciudad Real de Chiapa, una de las del Reino de Guatemala de la América Septentrional” (originally dated 1787), I will tackle the debates and circulation of information about the ruins of Palenque. This manuscript was the report presented to his superiors by a military engineer Antonio del Río, who was in charge of the exploration of the ruins in 1786. The first part of this chapter will focus on the manuscript’s publication and transla- tion into English in 1822 and the path it followed in the literary circles of London and Europe, including the German language translations of 1823 and 1832. The second part is devoted to the intellectual debates caused by these translations. The feedback from these debates generated a commercial competence to find more docu- ments “lost” in the archives, and to gain reliable data about the ruins. I argue that this commercial competitive and collective character of exchange of information was constitutive of the research practices linked to the study of Latin American past.