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Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A biography by Ian Graham, British Museum Press, £29.99, ISBN 071412561X Reviewed by Nicholas Saunders

SWEATING it out in 19th-century Central America, Alfred Maudslay captured Maya culture using little more than film, plaster and papier mâché. His extraordinary scientific record of archaeological monuments not only broke new ground, but has endured. In the erudite and readable Alfred Maudslay and the Maya, Ian Graham, a scholar of the Maya, charts the life of a man equally at home in the jungle and with the life of the mind.

Born in 1850, the seventh of eight children, Maudslay grew up wealthy. After a mediocre academic career at Cambridge, he worked in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa for the British colonial service. But in 1881 he travelled to Belize, then known as British Honduras, and began his life’s great work.

Maudslay was following in the footsteps of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who had rediscovered the Maya civilisation some 40 years before. Arriving at the remote site of Quiriguá, he cleared the undergrowth, then scrubbed down the strange hieroglyph-covered monuments before taking the first of his now famous photographs.

Using large-format cameras and developing the glass-plate negatives in the field – where mistakes could not be quickly rectified – was time-consuming and awkward. But the method gave superior results, and Maudslay’s painstaking dedication has ensured the fruits of his labour have lasted. He recorded a roll-call of great Maya sites, including Copán, Tikal, Palenque and Chichén Itzá, just at that critical time when serious archaeological investigation was beginning.

That first visit to Quiriguá also brought him into contact with the French explorer Désiré Charnay. Charnay taught him how to make papier mâché moulds, and by the time Maudslay left the Americas for good in 1907, he had shipped some 400 of them back to London, along with 20 pieces of sculpture, several tonnes of plaster moulds, and innumerable photographs, plans and textiles.

When Maudslay came to publish his groundbreaking work, it came to four volumes of photographic plates and four of text. These were then published as just part of the 67-volume, subscription-only compendium Biologia Centrali Americana. It’s the images that continue to interest and educate today’s students of the culture.

Graham’s empathy with Maudslay make this an engaging biography. And it’s a rounded portrait. For all the man’s monumental accomplishments, including details such as an unidentified illegitimate child, remind us that Graham was human after all.