Mayan Jaguar Head

Mayan Jaguar Head

In 1999, acting on an anonymous tip, New York City police raided a Brooklyn garage where they made a surprising discovery. Inside a wooden crate, they found a 500-lb Pre-Columbian stone sculpture depicting a jaguar head with a screaming man in its jaws. The previously unknown Mayan carving dates from around 150 BCE during the Late Preclassic period. Guatemalan archaeologists were unable to determine the precise origin of the piece but noted that it was stylistically characteristic of Mayan sculptures found at sites in the Guatemalan highlands.

How the sculpture came to be in the garage is unknown; the landlord and tenants of the Brooklyn home next to the garage denied any knowledge of it, and no arrests were made. The police suggested that criminal gangs were using the garage as a drop-off place for smuggled goods. The jaguar head had been in the garage for several months before it was found, and it is likely that the traffickers abandoned it after a deal went bad.

The sculpture remained in storage in New York while the Guatemalan government prepared gallery space for it in the National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Guatemala City. The United States finally returned the head to Guatemala in 2002.

1

Sculpture – statues, carvings, bronzes, reliefs, figurines

Mayan

Guatemala

https://web.archive.org/web/20251129040617/https://archive.archaeology.org/0205/newsbriefs/brooklyn.html

Lisa Duffy-Zeballos

Jason Felch