RESCUING THE ROSALILA

Text by Barbara W. Fash / Photos by Ricardo Mata

Nestled in the foothills of western Honduras is the ancient Maya city of Copan. Here, sculptors and architects created works of art like nowhere else in Mundo Maya to eulogize their rulers and reaffirm their political and religious beliefs. Artisans were encouraged to surpass their predecessors in an ongoing effort toward excellence. Copan was truly the artistic center of ancient Maya land.

    Copan's Principal grouping is the so-called Acropolis, a manufactured mesa that stands above and overlooking the Copan River. The Acropolis was added to, modified and remodeled repeatedly over the centuries, new buildings going up over old. By A.D. 750, the four largest buildings of the Acropolis—Structures 11,16, 22 and 26—had antecedents dating back three centuries.

    To learn more about these earlier buildings, Dr. William Fash, in conjunction with the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History launched the Copan Archaeological Acropolis Project (PAAC) in 1986, and tunneling began beneath Structure 26 and its famous Hieroglyphic Stairway. In 1989, Fash asked Honduran archaeologist Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle to excavate under Structure 16, the construction we now call Rosalila was the discovered.

    The Rosalila is an Early Classic temple built around AD 571 by "Moon Jaguar," the city's 10th leader. It is wholly intact and covered with the most elaborate facade decoration yet discovered at Copan. An intact 'under' building, in any condition, is a rarity among ancient Maya architecture. Engineers usually demolished the roof of the original structure and filled the rooms with the resultant rubble to create a suitable foundation on which to build. In the case of the Rosalila, not only did they avoid doing that, they took measures to preserve the temple. First, they plastered over the facade with a thin veneer of stucco, and then they covered the whole building with a protective layer of thick clay. For some reason, it was decided not to destroy Rosalila, and to this date no other Maya structure is known to have been so conserved.

    The Rosalila was effectively entombed, and the termination rituals included leaving a cache of nine eccentric flints wrapped in a blue cloth at the front doorway. The plaster covering was a way to snuff out or 'kill' the spirit of the building, which had come alive with the application of color. Nearly the entire structure, including the roof crest was preserved (the latter an architectural element heretofore unknown at Copan).

    Rosalila stands 14 meters high, with a 19 by 19-meter base. To prevent deterioration, the protective plaster or stucco covering has not been entirely removed. Probes at selected areas allowed us to infer the overall design and color scheme of the building and produce drawings of how it must have appeared in its day. The replica of Rosalila that is the centerpiece of the new Sculpture Museum in Copan (opened 1996) was created over a three-year period, from 1993-96, from the archaeologist's drawings.

    Marcelino Valdez and Jacinto Abrego Ramírez, two talented artisans were hired to make a clay version of the temple. The men normally worked in stone, but they soon realized the complex designs of Rosalila's facade were more easily rendered in clay. They sectioned off the drawing and carefully measured everything. Each section was made into a slide on a scale of 1:1 and projected against a piece of plywood. The design was traced onto the plywood and 'gotten up' in clay. A latex mold was created from the clay and used to cast the pieces in reinforced cement.

    Copan native Ramon Guerra, on a frame built by PAAC architectural restorer, C. Rudy Larios and his assistant, Fernando López, mounted these pieces or 'building blocks'. Each section took approximately 3-6 months to complete for a project length of three years. More than 20 local masons and their assistants participated in the project.

    Studies revealed that the surface of the Rosalila had been redone, or replastered on numerous occasions, sometimes completely changing the original color scheme. Probing beneath the stucco cover, we found vivid yellows, reds and greens, samples of the original pigments. Red, the prominent color used on Rosalila, represented life/blood, the east and the rising sun. Fortunately, Agurcia found a bird that, for its location low on the building was spared the protective stucco. We could clearly see its green feathers and yellow claws. This discovery served as an excellent color guide.

    We worked in an area protected from the elements and, as it turned out during a drought—a gift from nature even more precious for it having been the rainy season. Everybody on the remodeling/sculpting team—around 8 to 10 people—helped paint the replica, as did some 10 to 20 students, instructors and conservators on hand as part of the Harvard University Summer Field School in 1996.

TEMPLE OF THE SUN

Rosalila's artwork must be interpreted in context. There were several earlier versions of the structure and research connects the first dates to Kinich Yax Kuk Mo. It has two burial sites thought to belong to the founder and a noblewoman, perhaps his wife.

    Symbolism from these earlier structures was carried over to the Rosalila and embellished even further. The central themes of the Rosalila establish the divine heritage of the founder with the sun god as his ancestor. The building itself is meant to be the 'sacred mountain' home of this ancestor (the roof comb has a figure with kernels of corn on the brow thus identifying it as the mountain deity and the building as the sacred mountain—for the mountain was the birthplace of corn).

    Fiery sun-god images flank the four sides above the door. Their outstretched serpent-style wings transform the sun into a fearsome, avian creature that ruled over the daily lives of the ancients. Lower down on the structure the sun god is pictured as a bird, specifically a kuk-mo, or quetzal-macaw. A skull caps the mountain, which is a symbol for death. Serpents flowing from the skull is an image variously interpreted as a symbol for smoke, the sky or the chicchans—earth serpents of the Chorti Maya that burst forth from the mountains during the rainy season.

    The Maya believed death was followed by rebirth—the sun rises every day, the corn grows anew every year etc. This cycle of life, death and rebirth was, and still is central to understanding Maya religion and ideology. The termination rituals of one structure were a prelude to the dedication rituals of the next. The juxtaposition of skulls and flowering vegetation is a visual expression of the concept that death and regeneration go hand in hand.

    The Rosalila was one of the last stucco-decorated structures ever built on the Acropolis. At one time all the buildings there were thus decorated but this technique went out of fashion. Over a period of time temples with stone-carved facades replaced it.

    The exteriors of these new-style temples were given a thin wash of lye, then painted. The switch in technology occurred sometime around AD 600. Carved stone was an entirely different medium. The possibilities it presented for monument building appealed to the Maya. Roofs and floors might still have been stuccoed, but stucco 'sculpting', as a decorative/architectural technique had become passé. The Rosalila and its neighbor, the Ani Structure, were probably preserved as relics.

    The Rosalila was built-over several times. The final construction dates to the reign of Yax Pasah, 16th of his dynasty, which is the building that today stands at Copan.

*Barbara W. Fash is a researcher with Harvard University's Peabody Museum (USA). She has worked in Copan since 1977 and is co-director of the Mosaico Copan Project together with her husband William M. Fash. She is presently director of a project to study and preserve Copan's great hieroglyphic stairway.