The Long Road to Tikal: Maya Archaeology and the Guatemalan Civil War

Throughout the twentieth century, the archaeological investigation of the Maya played a vital role in Guatemalan nation-building projects and efforts to define Indigenous communities’ position within the national imaginary. As political and ethnic violence escalated during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), a fundamental transformation occurred in the state’s instrumentalization of such research. While national archaeological investment in the first half of the century focused on contact era sites of the Southern Highlands, wartime contingencies provoked a shift to the remote ruins of northern Petén. Here, the Guatemalan government commissioned the largest nationally directed archaeological project to date in 1978, the restoration of the ancient Maya city of Tikal. This geographic shift, I propose, corresponds to a change in a wider set of policies concerning heritage management. State investment in the pre-war period emphasized archaeology that supported indigenista narratives of multicultural national identity and an integral, if limited, Maya heritage woven into the fabric of the nation. By the 1970s, however, the state’s management of archaeology at Tikal and other sites was largely oriented away from the politics of nationality, emphasizing instead the production of academic knowledge and the development of tourism capacity. This ostensible depoliticization of archaeology, I argue, represents a transformation in the political utility of archaeological work, one that reflects an increasingly narrowed space for Maya representation within national identity and history. This study seeks to elucidate the strategic adaptation of cultural patrimony to serve the objectives of the Guatemalan state during the war years, and the role that archaeology played within that process.