Alfred Maudslay

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Alfred Maudslay (1850-1931) was a British colonial diplomat, explorer and archaeologist. He was one of the first Europeans to study Mayan ruins.

Alfred Percival Maudslay was born into a wealthy engineering family in 1850. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge in 1868-72 and was acquainted with J.W. Clark, who was Secretary of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. After graduation he enrolled in medical school but left because of acute bronchitis. He moved to Trinidad and became private secretary to the governor William Cairns. He transferred with Cairns to Queensland but later moved to work with Sir Arthur Gordon, governor of Fiji. During his time there, Maudslay took part of the campaign against local rebellious tribes. Later he served as British consul in Tonga and Samoa. In total, Maudslay spent six years in the British colonies in the Pacific.

In February 1880 Maudslay resigned from the colonial service to pursue his own interests. He joined his siblings in Calcutta during their round-the-world trip and returned to Britain in December. He set out for Guatemala via British Honduras.

In Guatemala Maudslay went to the Maya ruins of Quirigua and Copan. With the help of Frank Sarg, he began to hire laborers to help with the ruins. Sarg also introduced Maudslay to the newly found ruins in Tikal and to a reliable guide Gorgonio Lopez.

Maudslay had the ruins cleared and surveyed them. He pioneered many of the later archaeological techniques. He hired technicians to make plaster casts of the carvings, took numerous photographs - dry-plate photography was still a new technique in those days - and made copies of the inscriptions.

Maudslay decided to make plaster casts of many of the sculptures. For this purpose he hired Italian expert Lorenzo Giuntini. Gorgonio López learned to make casts out of papier-mâché. Casts were then shipped to Britain. Two of them were damaged during transportation. Maudslay then hired artist Annie Hunter to draw impressions of the casts.

Maudslay made a total of six expeditions to Maya ruins. He was the first to describe the site of Yaxchilán. The result of Maudslay's work was published as a 5-volume archaeology section in a compendium entitled Biologia Centrali-Americana.

In 1892 Maudslay married US-born Annie Morris. For their honeymoon, the couple sailed to Guatemala via New York and San Francisco. There the Maudslays worked for two weeks on behalf of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. Their account was published in 1899 as A Glimpse at Guatemala.

Maudslay also applied for permission to make a survey of Monte Albán in Oaxaca but when he finally received permission in 1902, he could no longer finance the work with his own money. The firm of Maudslay, Sons and Field had gone bankrupt and reduced Maudslay's income. He unsuccessfully applied for funding from the Carnegie Institution. The Maudslays moved to San Angel near Mexico City for two years.

In 1905 Maudslay began to translate the memoirs of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who had been a soldier in the troops of the conquistadors; he completed it in 1912. In 1907 the Maudslays moved permanently back to Britain. Maudslay become a President of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1911-12. He also chaired the 18th International Congress of Americanists in London in 1912.

Annie Maudslay died in 1926. In 1928 Maudslay married widow Alice Purdon. In the following years he finished his memoirs, Life in the Pacific Fifty Years Ago.

Alfred Maudslay died January 1931 in Hereford, England. He was buried in the crypt of Hereford Cathedral next to his first wife. Materials he collected are currently stored at Harvard and the British Museum.