The Fruits of Extraction
United Fruit Company, Archaeology, and Harvard’s Peabody Museum
Peeling History
"The Fruit Company, Inc. reserved for itself the most succulent piece, the central coast of my own land, the delicate waist of America. It rechristened its territories 'Banana Republics', and over the sleeping dead, over the restless heroes who brought about the greatness, the liberty, and the flags, it established the comic opera: it abolished free will, gave out imperial crowns, encouraged envy, attracted the dictatorship of flies ... flies sticky with submissive blood and marmalade, drunken flies that buzz over the tombs of the people, circus flies, wise flies expert at tyranny."
As you walk into Harvard’s Peabody Museum, you pass a large stone sphere that sits between the Tozzer Anthropology Building and the museum entrance. The label on the sphere reads: “Monumental Stone Sphere; Pre Columbian Period -- Diquís Delta -- Costa Rica” providing little information on the Indigenous Diquís artists who carved this sphere and other similar spheres between 300-1500 CE. The placement of the sphere suggests its importance, “almost acting as a face for the anthropology department” and the Peabody Museum. As you enter the Tozzer Anthropology Building, you encounter another monumental sculpture—a cast of an eighth-century stela from the Maya site of Quirigua located in the Motagua River Valley of Guatemala.
But, you may ask, what does this have to do with bananas?
In 1917 the United Fruit Company published “The Food Value of the Banana,” a collection of 15 opinion pieces touting the virtues of the banana as a nutritious snack.
The humble banana is a mainstay of the American diet. It is cheap, nutritious, and plentiful. Before 1870 most Americans had never seen a banana, but by the 1920s bananas were everywhere in the American diet praised by the Food and Drug Administration as a readily available source of potassium, fiber, magnesium and B6.
One of the major suppliers of bananas in America is the United Fruit Company (currently known as Chiquita Brands International). Established in 1899 and based in Boston, the United Fruit Company grew to own nearly 3.5 million acres of land in Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and Costa Rica, which included numerous archaeological sites that were excavated with funds provided by the United Fruit Company. In this Story Map, we investigate the relationship between the United Fruit Company, Harvard’s Peabody Museum and Department of Anthropology. This collaboration was responsible for the extraction of cultural heritage and Indigenous labor in the name of bananas and archaeology.
Sam Zemurray, "The Banana Man," in an undated photo.
Run by Samuel Zemurray (1877-1961)—known as “The Banana Man”—in the first part of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company was a monopoly known for bribing government officials in exchange for preferential treatment and exploiting workers. Latin American journalists and writers, including Pablo Neruda, often referred to the company as el Pulpo ("the octopus") and encouraged the company's workers to strike for fair wages and treatment.
As banana plantations were cultivated by Indigenous laborers, archaeological sites were being exposed. Archaeologists used the United Fruit Company’s resources to conduct excavations throughout Central and South America. The company would employ archaeologists to conduct this work, fund excavations, publish findings for academic and public audiences, and even produced the film Maya Through the Ages in 1949. In the process, the United Fruit Company became the producer of scientific knowledge, while simultaneously obscuring labor and the extraction of cultural heritage from source communities. As Liliana Gómez notes, “it is remarkable that the United Fruit Company not only became a financing body for archaeological research, but more importantly was deeply involved with the infrastructure and the archaeologists themselves" (2022:276).
Samuel Zemurray’s daughter, Doris Zemurray Stone (1909-1994), was a central figure in this archaeological work. Doris Stone studied at Radcliffe in the 1920s and could take archaeology classes with Harvard male faculty and students only with permission. As she notes, “In the 1920s I was required to obtain special permission to attend classes at the Peabody Museum, and with the permission came the warning that if my deportment was not entirely proper, my association with the austere building would be ended” (Stone 1980:20). In 1924, Zemurray founded the Department of Middle American Research at Tulane University, which later became the Middle American Research Institute.
In 1939, Doris Stone and her husband Roger moved to Costa Rica, where they had business interests in a coffee plantation. Stone would remain based in Central America for the next two decades, publishing works for both academic and public audiences in English and Spanish. Her connection to Harvard remained strong during these decades. In 1942, she was appointed Research Fellow in Central American archaeology, and she also published several volumes for the Peabody Museum Press, donated collections to the Museum, and had close working relationships with Alfred Tozzer, professor of anthropology (1877-1954) and Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, research associate at the Peabody Museum (1892-1965).
Doris Zemurray Stone donated nearly twenty-five different accessions of archaeological, ethnographic, and photographic material representing approximately 1,000 items (many of them collected in collaboration with Tozzer, Lothrop, and others discussed here in this StoryMap) to Harvard’s Peabody Museum between 1930-1955. Additionally, there are numerous photographic collections donated by or associated directly with the United Fruit Company.
Buildings reconstructed by the United Fruit Company at archaeological site of Zaculeu, Guatemala.
In 1979, the United Fruit Company donated 75 photographic volumes that document the company’s operations and holdings in Central and South America, the West Indies, and the United States to the Baker Library at Harvard Business School .
In this Story Map, we highlight four areas where the United Fruit Company and Harvard’s Peabody Museum intersected with local communities in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.
Costa Rica
The United Fruit Company has a long, tumultuous history with Costa Rica that started before the company was even established. Between 1871 and 1899, Minor Keith (1848-1929), a railroad tycoon who eventually became vice president of the United Fruit Company, established the railway system that would become essential for the United Fruit Company’s business operations, literally paving the way for their success. This infrastructure project was negotiated by the Costa Rican government who intentionally sought support in establishing the railway system. Keith undertook this venture in exchange for a 99-year lease on 9% of the nation’s land. Upon the creation of the United Fruit Company in 1899, they immediately began operating on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica with an office in Límon, and would eventually come to be “responsible for 58% of the country’s exports, employing 14% of the agricultural labor force and 7% of total employment” (Harvesting History).
Prior to the United Fruit Company’s invasion, independent Costa Rican farmers had cultivated a robust banana industry. The United Fruit Company came to the area with a distinct mission: own as much arable land as possible, cultivate as much as possible, and export as much as possible. In order to achieve this, they started by buying land out from underneath the people who were already living and farming there. In Talamanca, this meant many people indigenous to the area were relocated to land that had been reserved by the government, though not without resistance. Once this land was acquired, the United Fruit Company created extensive plantations on which laborers worked and lived. They were designed as miniature towns so that the workers would never have to leave, relying exclusively on what the United Fruit Company provided.
By doing this they accomplished two things. First, by providing amenities that other agricultural companies did not, they encouraged workers to continue laboring for them instead of other companies. Second, this meant that the United Fruit Company controlled not only the workers’ wages but also their food, housing, medical care, and children’s education. This imbalanced power structure between the United Fruit Company and its workers was made worse by the fact that many of these workers were not in their home country. The United Fruit Company thought very carefully about how to distribute their workforce. This entailed sending Costa Rican workers to Nicaragua and hiring Jamaicans to work in Costa Rica, removing many workers from their home communities and support systems. However, this does not mean that they were complacent with any mistreatment they received.
Indigenous Costa Ricans and Jamaican laborers of the United Fruit Company plantations organized enough community resistance for the United Fruit Company to notice. This included refusing to sell their land to the company and advocating for timely paychecks. This ramped up to the point of a strike in 1934 that resulted in the entire coast being shut down for weeks. Eventually, due to labor and environmental issues, the United Fruit Company shut down its Atlantic Coast operation and moved to the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, though this location also had its conflicts.
Although evidence suggests that households employed by the United Fruit Company were overall more prosperous than households in the same area that were not, there were still significant health and safety issues for the workers that were directly imposed by the company. The Pacific Coast plantation commissaries were often not adequately stocked with enough food and work clothes for the laborers, despite what the pictures may suggest. Even worse, their medical and sanitation services were poor enough to warrant review by the government. Evidently, the company that these workers were made to rely upon was systematically failing them and taking advantage of the fact that their bare minimum was “better” than those around them.
But what does this have to do with archaeology?
The monumental stone sphere that is on display in front of the Peabody Museum was found on land owned by the United Fruit Company. Doris Stone was among the first to document the spheres, which were later excavated by Eleanor Bachman Lothrop and Samuel Kirkland Lothrop in the 1940s. The monumental sphere then was then taken from Costa Rica to eventually come to Harvard in 1965.
Multiple collections from Costa Rica arrived in Cambridge in the 1940s, including those excavated by Doris Zemurray Stone and from a Peabody Museum Expedition directed by Samuel Kirkland Lothrop.
Honduras
01 / 08
1
Yoro
Before the Spanish invasion of the Americas, the Tolupan people were living on the land now known as the Ulúa Valley of Honduras. Between 1863 and 1866, the Tolupan were forced off of their land by the government of the Yoro Department, and into forced labor collecting sarsaparilla and transporting it to the Atlantic Coast. Around this period, sarsaparilla was used to make root beer in the United States. After the land was taken, many of the Tolupan became laborers on coffee or banana plantations, or intermarried with Spanish families. Three families fled to Montaña de Flor, outside of the Yoro jurisdiction, and began a community there.
2
Copan
Towards the end of the 19th century, European and American museums looking for antiquities took an interest in Mesoamerica. In 1891, Harvard graduate student Marshall Saville led the first expedition to Copan, supported by the Peabody Museum and Charles P. Bowditch, a benefactor of the museum. The expedition focused on mapping, recording artifacts in their contexts to document the site, and creating casts of monuments for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The expedition members also exported antiquities for study and display in the Peabody Museum. Graduate student John Owens was the second field director, who died in 1893. The expedition was finished from 1895–1901 by Harvard student George Byron Gordon, who became director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Bowditch and Putnam arranged concessions with the Honduran government in 1891 that gave the Peabody rights to work at Copan for ten years, with the excavated material to be split 50/50 between the Peabody and the Honduran government. Following Owens death and a lapse of a full field season, the terms of this agreement were often debated. The concessions for Copan proved particularly tricky for Gordon, and after 1901 he moved excavations to the Ulúa Valley.
3
Lancetilla
In 1911, the Honduran government was replaced after the United Fruit Company’s founder and CEO, Samuel Zemurray, orchestrated a military coup. The new government favored foreign business interests and the installation of railroads for shipping.
In 1925, the United Fruit Company hired Frederick Wilson Popenoe as Director of Tropical Agricultural Experiments. Wilson and his wife, Dorothy Popenoe, moved to Honduras to establish a field station in Lancetilla, Tela. When laborers were clearing the site for the field station, they discovered archaeological artifacts. Between 1927 and 1932, Dorothy Popenoe oversaw excavations in Tela, specifically at the site of Playa de los Muertos, under the auspices of Alfred Tozzer and the Peabody Museum. These excavations were systematic and research-driven with the goal of defining the break between monochrome and polychrome styles in pottery. In 1932, Dorothy Popenoe died after eating a raw akee fruit, which likely poisoned her.
4
By this time, the United Fruit Company had essentially replaced the US State Department as the mediating body between archaeologists and the Honduran government over site permits and other permissions. The United Fruit Company offered tours of the sites and plantations via excursions on the Great White Fleet, a cruise line also used to ship bananas back to the United States. For the Peabody excavations in the Ulúa Valley, the United Fruit Company furnished living quarters for the site staff, materials and tools for excavation, and shipped goods back to Boston via the Great White Fleet.
The entanglement of the United Fruit Company with archaeologists, especially the employment of the Great White Fleet to ship artifacts back to the United States, gave rise to the “Banana Cowboys,” a term for United Fruit Company affiliates who smuggled goods to sell on the art market in the United States. Looting was driven by market demand for Latin American antiquities.
5
Los Naranjos
One of the most infamous looters was J. B. Edwards, an American citizen whose looting around the region of Lake Yojoa, just south of the Ulúa Valley, eventually caused the Honduran government to crack down on looting and close the border to antiquities in 1936. Edwards oversaw excavations at Los Naranjos, a site that Doris Stone visited and wrote a report on in 1934, which was published by the Peabody Museum Press.
6
Ulúa Valley
During the 1930s, Frederick Wilson Popenoe continually bought looted goods from Edwards to sell or gift to the Peabody. After a few years, Tozzer had to send him a letter urging him to stop participating in seedy trade and focus on Dorothy’s original research goals for the excavation: defining the break between monochrome and polychrome pottery styles.
This research goal was revisited when, in 1936, excavations resumed in the Ulúa Valley under Alfred Strong and the Peabody Museum. In the site report, Strong acknowledges that the “United Fruit Company, both in the United States and in Honduras, furnished very material aid in ways too numerous to mention.”
7
Montaña de Flor
The effects of this period of extraction and loss of land and rights for Indigenous people persists to this day. In 2009, the Tolupan members of the San Francisco de Locomapa Indigenous Community staged a 13-day street blockade to protest antimony mining in the community’s territory.
8
Boston
In 2021, Nancy Valladares, an artist from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, revisited the history of extraction and colonialism at the site in the web experience Botanical Ghosts . Botanical Ghosts stages an interaction between Dorothy Popenoe, the akee fruit, and Valladares herself, pulling from archives, speculative fiction, letters, photographs, and Peabody collections.
Guatemala
The tentacles of the United Fruit Company also extended into Guatemala and Mexico. By 1908 the United Fruit Company had acquired the railroad line along Guatemala’s Motagua River to transport people and commodities from the interior of the country to Puerto Barrios. From Puerto Barrios, ships of the Great White Fleet sailed to and from New Orleans, and onto New York and Boston. The United Fruit Company’s land purchase along the Motagua River included possession of the ancient Maya city-state of Quirigua.
Quirigua's Stela K, c. 1910.
Quirigua, known for its impressive stone sculptures—or stelae, as archaeologists call them—had already been “re-discovered” by 1798 by local landowner Juan Payes y Font. The Peabody Museum’s entanglement with Quirigua began in the late nineteenth century, after British archaeologist Alfred Maudslay visited the area over several years to clear and survey the site. With Italian expert mould-maker Lorenzo Giuntini, he also recorded the ancient Maya monuments and their inscriptions through photography, drawings, and plaster and paper moulds. In 1901, George Byron Gordon of the Peabody Museum's Central American Expedition engaged Gorgonio López and his son Carolampio (trained by Giuntini) to make additional paper moulds to create the plaster copies of stelae from Quirigua and Copan that still stand on display in the Peabody Museum’s Encounters in the Americas gallery today.
Once the United Fruit Company acquired Quirigua in the early 1900s, it developed an infrastructure to support the banana industry, including a hotel and golf course. This made Quirigua a popular stopping point for those traveling between the Atlantic coast and Guatemala City. The company promoted tours to the site, provided free steamship passes to archaeologists, and funded excavations. From 1910 to 1912, Harvard archaeologist Sylvanus Morley began his fieldwork career in Central American archaeology by working as an assistant to Edgar Lee Hewett at the United Fruit Company-funded Quirigua excavations. Morley’s diaries from that time include numerous references to United Fruit Company offices, boats, and the station at Quirigua, highlighting the ways in which Morley and American academic institutions in general benefited from the services and sponsorship of the United Fruit Company.
Sylvanus Morley, possibly at Copan in Honduras, c. 1912.
Photographs of Quirigua taken by Minor Keith around 1910, including of Stela K shown above, were donated to the Peabody Museum by Doris and Roger Stone. They document the ongoing transformation of the Quirigua landscape in the service of scientific research, and the company’s possession of an Indigenous cultural space. Cultural items obtained through excavation and gifted by Morley in 1919 are also part of the Peabody’s current collections.
Over the years, the United Fruit Company’s financing of archaeological work was promoted by its public relations branch as a public service for the benefit of global heritage. Between 1946 and 1950, the United Fruit Company funded excavations at Zaculeu, with the goal of creating an “enduring gift for the Guatemalan people” through the restoration of the site to its former greatness. Its team of researchers included Harvard-affiliated archaeologists, such as A. Ledyard Smith, Alfred Kidder, Stanley H. Boggs, and Richard B. Woodbury. The project focused on the excavation of burials and removal of cultural items including ancestors to the capital Guatemala City over 200 km away, against the wishes of the local community. The restoration of Zaculeu has been criticized as a “Disneyland style,” which was created by covering the original buildings with cement. The result was a fake, newly plastered Maya site, rather than the conservation of its several-hundred-year history of original architecture. Recent discourse in Guatemala has argued for local repatriation of materials back to communities, in response to nationalist programs of the mid-twentieth century.
“The United Fruit Company’s interest in the nations of Middle America embraces an exhaustive program of public service projects. The Company, by financing agricultural schools, undertaking reforestation, and running experimental farms, plays a leading role in improving the agricultural methods (and therefore economic conditions) of the peoples of Middle America. It also supports archaeological fieldwork and research to help unearth and restore to these peoples their great cultural heritage.”
Mexico
As part of their ongoing public service programs, the United Fruit Company ventured into film production. In 1946, the United Fruit Company hired Giles Greville Healey to photograph and film the Lacandón Maya in the remote rainforests of Chiapas, Mexico. The “Hach Winik,” or “true people” as the Lacandón call themselves in Yucatec Maya, moved from the Yucatan Peninsula to lowland Chiapas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to escape colonialism, where they lived in relative isolation until expeditions in search of mahogany and tropical cedar trees in the twentieth century encroached on their territory. The United Fruit Company’s film, titled Maya Through the Ages portrays the Lacandón as “simple” villagers directly descended from their ancient Maya ancestors. A copy of the film was donated to the Peabody Museum in 1950 by Edmund S. Whitman, United Fruit Company’s Public Relations director, who happened to be married to Ann Whitman, the personal secretary of President Eisenhower. Today, Lacandón agroforestry systems are recognized and admired as sustainable techniques for producing food and shelter in a manner compatible with forest regeneration and preservation—far from a “primitive” system as the film would suggest.
The man photographed here is not named in the description written on back of the photograph, nor is his name recorded in the Peabody Museum catalog. Rather, it says: "Lacandone, contemporary Maya man, stands beside a segment of ancient Maya altar stone recently discovered at Bonampak in remote Peten frontier of Chiapas, Mexico. Photograph by: Giles Greville Healey United Fruit-Carnegie Institution Bonampak Expedition 1947."
Two of the Lacandón being filmed, Acasio Chan and Jose Pepe Chambor, brought Healey to a nearby archaeological site to show him paintings they knew of there. This led to the “discovery” of Bonampak and its famous murals. Three rooms of dramatic mural paintings depicting courtly life from the Late Classic period changed the way archaeologists understood the political landscape of Classic Maya society.
In 1947, jointly with the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the United Fruit Company sponsored an expedition to survey and map Bonampak, as well as document its paintings and monuments. The team included Antonio Tejada F. of Guatemala (who painted the reproduction of the Bonampak mural section that hangs in the Peabody Museum), Augustin Villagra of Mexico (who painted the reproduction of the Teotihuacan mural section that hangs in the Peabody Museum), J. Eric Thompson, Gustav Stromsvik, Karl Ruppert, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff.
Reproduction of Bonampak Mural in Room 1. Painting by Antonio Tejada F.
Detailed painted reproductions and photographs of the Bonampak murals.
As Liliana Gómez (2022) argues, photographs from the Bonampak expedition— many of which reside in the Peabody collection —control the narrative of the archaeological and ethnographic discovery, emphasizing the “taming of nature” as monuments are revealed through the clearing away of plants and trees. The civilization of the ancient Maya is glorified while the modern Maya are “othered” and displayed like objects themselves.
Since the 1950s, more than two-thirds of the Lacandón rainforest have been transformed into corn fields and pastures by migrant farmers and cattle ranchers. In 1998, Mexican law allowed Lacandón communities to designate their territory as the Metzabok Floral and Faunal Conservation area, which provides some legal protections to help the Lacandón maintain their way of life. In addition to sustainable farming practices, many Lacandón today make a living through tourism to Bonampak and the biosphere reserve.
Structure 3 at Bonampak, 1947.
In 1984 the United Fruit Company was renamed Chiquita Brands International, which continues its presence in Chiapas, Mexico. In 2018, investment in Puerto Chiapas on the Pacific coast of Mexico allowed for large container ships to dock, significantly increasing Chiquita’s shipment of bananas from Mexico to Los Angeles and China.
Conclusion
The appropriation of land and commodification of plants by the United Fruit Company directly contributed to the commodification of Indigenous cultures by academic institutions in its network, including Harvard University and the Peabody Museum. Archaeological work forced Indigenous cultures into a western system of knowledge and tried to transform them into something “civilized” and consumable by the English-speaking public.
This was not neutral. It harmed Indigenous communities and extracted cultural heritage from countries of origin.
One may not expect this connection between Harvard University, the Peabody Museum, and the United Fruit Company to be displayed so publicly through a monumental stone sphere that sits in front of the Peabody Museum and the Tozzer Anthropology buildings. Yes, this iconic piece that is seen first by anyone that enters either of these buildings is at Harvard because of the Peabody Museum’s relationship with the United Fruit Company. The monumental stone sphere is emblematic of the United Fruit Company’s extraction of labor and cultural material and how academic institutions like Harvard University and the Peabody Museum have benefited from it.
References and Further Reading:
Bourgois, Philippe. United Fruit Company Archive. Electronic document, http://www.philippebourgois.net/ufco.html , accessed May 6, 2024.
Browman, David L., and Stephen Williams. 2013. Anthropology at Harvard : a biographical history, 1790-1940. Peabody Museum Press, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Castillo, Victor. 2022. Zaculeu, Guatemala: reflexiones y propuestas para un retorno local. Revista de Arqueología Americana 40:163-182.
Chomsky, Aviva. 1996. West Indian workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.
Cohen, Rich. 2012. The fish that ate the whale: the life and times of America's banana king. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
Gómez, Liliana. 2022. Archive matter: a camera in the laboratory of the modern. Diaphanes, Zurich.
Koeppel , Dan. 2008. Banana: the fate of the fruit that changed the world. Hudson Street Press, New York.
Luke, Christina. 2006. Diplomats, Banana Cowboys, and Archaeologists in Western Honduras: A History of the Trade in Pre-Columbian Materials. International Journal of Cultural Property 13(1):25–57.
Museo Nacional de Costa Rica. 2024. Diquis: Timeline. Ministerio de Cultura y Juventud. Electronic document, https://www.diquis.go.cr/en/linea-de-tiempo.html#epoca_3 ., accessed May 6, 2024.
Nations, James D. 2020. The Through Line: Lacandón Maya, Their Forest, and the Future. Electronic document, https://terralingua.org/langscape_articles/the-through-line-lacandon-maya-their-forest-and-the-future/ , accessed May 6, 2024.
Patten, Diana Van, and Esteban Mendez. 2024. Harvesting History: The Untold Story of United Fruit in Costa Rica. ReVista. Electronic document, https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/harvesting-history-the-untold-story-of-united-fruit-in-costa-rica/ , accessed May 6, 2024.
Phillips, James. 2019. State Violence and Indigenous Resistance in Honduras. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 48(3/4):343–78.
Jenkins, Virginia Scott. 2000. Bananas: an American history. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Stone, Doris Zemurray. 1941. Archaeology of the North Coast of Honduras. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 9, no. 1. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Stone, Doris Zemurray. 1949. The Boruca of Costa Rica. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 26, no. 2. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Stone, Doris Zemurray. 1957. The Archaeology of Central and Southern Honduras. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 49, no. 3. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Stone, Doris Zemurray. 1980. A Fair Period for a Field Study. Radcliffe Quarterly 66(3):20–22.
Strong, William Duncan, Alfred Kidder II, and A. J. Drexel Paul, Jr. 1938. Preliminary report on the Smithsonian Institution-Harvard University Archeological Expedition to Northwestern Honduras, 1936. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections v. 97, no. 1. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Ward, Christopher, and Prudence M. Rice. 2021. The Archaeological Field Diaries of Sylvanus Griswold Morley, 1914–1916. Electronic document, www.mesoweb.com/publications/Morley/Morley_Diaries_1914-1916.pdf, accessed May 6, 2024.
Ward, Christopher, and Prudence M. Rice. 2022. The Archaeological Field Diaries of Sylvanus Griswold Morley: Excavations at Quirigua, 1912 and 1919. Electronic document, www.mesoweb.com/publications/Morley/Morley_Diaries_Quirigua.pdf, accessed May 6, 2024.
United Fruit Company. 1949. Bonampak. Middle America Information Bureau, New York.
United Fruit Company. 1947. Zaculeu; restoration by United Fruit Company. Middle America Information Bureau, New York.
Acknowledgments:
This Story Map was created through an independent study course in archaeology in Harvard's Department of Anthropology with Abigail Cusick (Harvard '24), Sarah Faber (Harvard '24), Diana Loren (Peabody Museum and Department of Anthropology), and Jennifer Carballo (Peabody Museum and Department of Anthropology). Many people at the Peabody Museum and Harvard University offered their help and insight as we worked on the project. Cindy Tian (Harvard '23) worked as intern at the Peabody Museum and conducted the background research on the United Fruit Company and Peabody Museum collections that gave our Story Map a huge head start. Images were provided by Cynthia Mackey, Associate Registrar for Rights and Reproductions at the Peabody Museum, and by Heather Oswald, Manager of Public Services, Special Collections and Archives at Baker Library of the Harvard Business School. Marie Wasnock and Katherine Satriano, archivists at the Peabody Museum, also provided their invaluable expertise and assistance.
