Among planters and merchants. How the Tikal Lintels became “scientific objects”

Abstract

This article follows the trajectory of the so-called Tikal lintels from the former Mayan city of Tikal to the Natural History Museum in Basel. Focusing on a network of plantation owners and merchants in Guatemala, the article highlights the crucial role of economic networks for the production and circulation of the Mesoamerican material culture in and from Central America in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this way, plantations can be studied as important places of encounter and curiosity where the meaning and material shape of Guatemala’s Mesoamerican material culture was transformed in a significant way.