perished in aWre that destroyed various items that were going to form the
nucleus of the museum (Bernal 1980: 124).
Matters of trade, politics, and archaeology were fused together for US citizens
travelling in Latin America, and Catherwood and Stephens were followed by
many others. One of those was Ephraim George Squier (1821–88), a journalist
trained as a civil engineer, who had acquired some archaeological experience in a
survey of the mounds of the Ohio River. After his failure to obtain funding from
the Smithsonian Institution, in 1850 Squier was appointed to Central America
with the diplomatic mission of researching canal and railroad routes to cross
the isthmus which would provide an alternative to those being built by the
Europeans. In 1852 he publishedNicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments and
the Proposed Interoceanic Canal, followed in 1855 byNotes on Central Americain
which he described Honduras and Salvador and in 1858 by hisThe States of
Central America. Squier acquired antiquities that he then sent to the US. A ship
containing ‘Wve large stone idols’ was sent to Washington to be the nucleus of the
National Archaeological Museum (Hinsley 1993: 109). When his project failed,
on his return to the US Squier was sent to Peru in 1862 as United States
Commissioner. His experiences led to another book,Peru; Incidents of Travel
and Exploration in the Land of the Incas(1877) (Barnhart 2005).
Squier was not the only one not to receive state funding. As in Britain, the
state’s capitalism and philistinism in the US (as deWned in Chapter 1) led to
an absence of state expeditions. Yet, as in Europe, the cultural intelligentsia
showed an interest in Latin American monumental antiquities, and like in
Britain, their study would be sponsored privately. The interest of some
American tycoons (and of their wives) is exempliWed in the case of Allison
Armour, the wife of a Chicago food magnate. For thirty years from 1883 she
sponsored Edward H. Thompson’s (1856–1935) work in Chiche ́n Itza ́, where
land was even bought to facilitate the excavation, and in other places in the
Yucata ́n peninsula (Hinsley 1993: 112). An earlier example of this support was
the Chicago World Fair in 1893 (some of whose collections were the origin of
the Natural History Museum of Chicago). At the Fair Mesoamerican archae-
ology became popular (Fane 1993: 159–62) through displays such as the
moulds and casts of the portal of the Mayan sites of Labna ́ and Uxmal
made by Thompson. The public reaction, however, was still mixed. As the
Massachusetts Board of World Fair Managers reported:
Everyone who visited the Exposition will recall the weird eVect produced on the
imagination by these old monuments of an unknown past standing in stately grand-
eur amidst all the magniWcence and beauty that landscape art and architecture of
today could devise.
(Hinsley 1993: 110).Latin America, China, and Japan 179