Corpus Volume 14

Monuments from La Florida Namaan, Petén, Guatemala

Due to the lack of signage at the site, the scarcity of previous publications, and my own unfamiliarity with the site, I shot many monuments without knowing their name or number. I shot scattered fragments not knowing how they fit vis-à-vis each other. Therefore, for this corpus volume, I am deeply grateful to Joanne Baron for graciously helping me to piece them together. Six of the ten monuments presented here are composites of fragments. Joanne, with her deep knowledge of the site and its monuments, showed me how they went.

Joanne Baron writes:

Bruce Love’s photographs provide us with an excellent record of the La Florida monuments still extant on site. I thank him and Meghan Rubenstein for their efforts to put this volume together. They join a series of previous scholars who have documented La Florida monuments over the years, most notably Ian Graham (1970), who was the first to assign the nomenclature we use today. Comparing this volume to that of Graham shows that time has not been kind to La Florida: monuments have eroded, crumpled and disappeared. But there are reasons for optimism: first, Love’s photographic techniques reveal, in some cases, more detail than Graham’s (who was admittedly working under less-than-ideal conditions). Because of these new details, I was able, along with co-authors Mads Jørgensen and Guido Krempel, to produce a new drawing and interpretation of Stela 1 in 2021. Furthermore, since Graham’s day, two more carved monuments have been discovered at La Florida, including stelae 14 by Paulino Morales and Stela 16 by my own project in 2016. I believe that La Florida holds many more archaeological discoveries in store, and it is my fervent hope to return there to work in the near future. In the meantime, I will continue to pore over these photographs to see what more information we can extract.

References:

Baron, Joanne. 2017. The Mystery Queen of La Florida. Expedition 59(2):32-39.

Graham, Ian. 1970. The Ruins of La Florida, Peten, Guatemala. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology, Papers of the Peabody Museum number 61, edited by William R. Bullard. Pp. 427-455.

Jørgensen, Mads, Joanne Baron, and Guido Krempel. 2021. Shedding New Light on La Florida Stela 1: a Portrayal of Chakjal Chaahk. The PARI Journal 22(1):1-14.

Morales, Paulino. 1998. Asentamiento Prehispánico en El Naranjo-Frontera, La Libertad, Peten. In XI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 1997, edited by Juan Pedro Laporte and Hector Escobedo. Pp. 128-143. Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia, Asociación Tikal.

Photographs by Bruce Love.

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La Florida Namaan, Petén, Guatemala (photographed 2019)
click on the image then the (i) in the lower right to view full image

Altar E
Height: 1.25 m
Width: 1.78 m
Thickness: 0.35-0.37 m

Stela 1 – top piece
Height: 1.00 m
Width: 0.92 m
Thickness: 0.30 m

Stela 1 – middle piece
Height: 1.00 m
Width: 1.10 m
Thickness: 0.29-0.30 m

Stela 1 – bottom piece
Height: 1.53 m
Width: 1.36 m
Thickness: 0.33-0.34 m

Stela 2 – top piece
Height: 2.25 m
Width: 1.94 m
Thickness: 0.40-0.42 m

Stela 2 – bottom piece
Height: 2.12 m
Width: 1.80 m
Thickness: 0.52-0.54 m

Stela 5
Height: 0.25 m
Width: 0.73 m
Thickness: 0.30 m

Stela 7 – top piece
Height: 1.05 m
Width: 0.77 m
Thickness: 0.29 m

Stela 7 – bottom piece
Height: 1.02 m
Width: 0.69 m
Thickness: 0.26 m

Stela 8 – top piece
Height: 0.52 m
Width: 0.41 m
Thickness: 0.38 m

Stela 8 – bottom piece
Height: 0.73 m
Width: 0.52 m
Thickness: 0.32-0.38 m

Stela 9
Height: 2.05 m
Width: 1.50 m
Thickness: 0.23-0.33 m

Stela 14 – top piece
Height: 1.24 m
Width: 0.80 m
Thickness: 0.24-0.29 m

Stela 14 – bottom piece
Height: 1.07 m
Width: 0.79 m
Thickness: 0.29-0.34 m

Stela 16
Height: 1.53 m
Width: 1.04 m
Thickness: 0.37-0.38 m

Suggested Citation: Love, Bruce. “Corpus Volume 14: Monuments from La Florida Namaan, Petén, Guatemala.” Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies, December 1, 2023. https://brucelove.com/corpus/corpus-volume-014.

Downloadable PDF: CtMS_Corpus_V014_LaFloridaNamaan_Peten_Guatemala

The corpus photographs and drawings may be freely used and distributed in non-commercial use and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0