Thomas William Francis Gann (13 May 1867 – 24 February 1938) was a medical doctor by profession, but is best remembered for his work as an amateur archaeologist exploring ruins of the Maya civilization.
Thomas William Francis Gann (13 May 1867 – 24 February 1938) was a medical doctor by profession, but is best remembered for his work as an amateur archaeologist exploring ruins of the Maya civilization.
Thomas Gann was born in Murrisk Abbey, County Mayo, Ireland, the son of William Gann of Whitstable, England, and Rose Garvey of Murrisk Abbey. He was raised in Whitstable, where his parents were prominent in the social life of the town. Gann trained in medicine in Middlesex, England.[ citation needed ]
Somerset Maugham named the heroine of Cakes and Ale Rosie Gann. [2]
In 1894 he was appointed district medical officer for British Honduras, where he would spend most of the next quarter century. He soon developed a keen interest in the colony's Mayan ruins, which up to then had been little documented. He also traveled in the Yucatán Peninsula, exploring ruins there.
Gann discovered a number of sites, including Lubaantun, Ichpaatun, and Tzibanche. He published the first detailed descriptions of such ruins as Xunantunich and Lamanai. He made important early explorations at Santa Rita, Louisville, and Coba. At Tulum he documented buildings overlooked by previous explorers, including a rare find of a temple with the Pre-Columbian idol still intact inside.
Midway through his career, in 1908 Gann became the honorary lecturer in Central American Antiquities at the new Institute of Archaeology of the University of Liverpool (not long after he had taken the Diploma there in Tropical Medicine). Liverpool subscribers funded several of his fieldwork seasons up to 1912. [3]
Thomas Gann retired as British Honduras's medical officer in 1923 when he wrote several books about his travels and explorations. He sold a large number of objects he had collected in the Mayan region to the British Museum in 1924.
Thomas Gann is reflected upon by different contemporaries in many ways. Some like David Pendergast reflect on Ganns methods as destructive saying he ‘remained more destructive than protective of evidence from beginning to end’ [4] This was supported by Gann's independent claims of blowing up numerous mounds all across Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico to the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1897. Jared Milanich took a more comedic route when discussing Gann referring to him as a "mound mauler" [5] for his past actions and excavation techniques. This implies that while he doesn't approve of his methods, he views them as something comical from a prior era. Author Cynthia Robin an anthropologist at NorthWestern] described them as both "unsightly" and as "'Gann Holes'" [6] Though some Authors such as J.E. Thompson cut Gann some slack saying, "Gann reflected the attitude of his period, which regarded excavation as the retrieval of works of art or "curios," not as a means of recovering history." [7]
Xunantunich is an Ancient Maya archaeological site in western Belize, about 70 miles west of Belize City, in the Cayo District. Xunantunich is located atop a ridge above the Mopan River, well within sight of the Guatemala border – which is 0.6 miles (1 km) to the west. It served as a Maya civic ceremonial centre to the Belize Valley region in the Late and Terminal Classic periods. At that time, when the region was at its peak, nearly 200,000 people lived in the Belize Valley.
Altun Ha is the name given to the ruins of an ancient Maya city in Belize, located in the Belize District about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north of Belize City and about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) west of the shore of the Caribbean Sea. The site covers an area of about 8 square kilometres (3.1 sq mi).
Chetumal is a city on the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It is the capital of the state of Quintana Roo and the municipal seat of the Municipality of Othón P. Blanco. In 2020 it had a population of 169,028 people.
Coba is an ancient Maya city on the Yucatán Peninsula, located in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. The site is the nexus of the largest network of stone causeways of the ancient Maya world, and it contains many engraved and sculpted stelae that document ceremonial life and important events of the Late Classic Period of Mesoamerican civilization. The adjacent modern village bearing the same name, reported a population of 1,278 inhabitants in the 2010 Mexican federal census.
Lubaantun is a pre-Columbian ruined city of the Maya civilization in southern Belize, Central America. Lubaantun is in Belize's Toledo District, about 42 kilometres (26 mi) northwest of Punta Gorda, and approximately 3.2 kilometres (2 mi) from the village of San Pedro Columbia, at an elevation of 61 metres (200 ft) feet above mean sea level. One of the most distinguishing features of Lubaantun is the large collection of miniature ceramic objects found on site; these detailed constructs are thought to have been charmstones or ritual-accompanying accoutrements.
Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson was a leading English Mesoamerican archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and epigrapher. While working in the United States, he dominated Maya studies and particularly the study of the Maya script until well into the 1960s.
Lamanai is a Mesoamerican archaeological site, and was once a major city of the Maya civilization, located in the north of Belize, in Orange Walk District. The site's name is pre-Columbian, recorded by early Spanish missionaries, and documented over a millennium earlier in Maya inscriptions as Lam'an'ain. Lamanai is renowned for its exceptionally long occupation spanning three millennia, beginning in the Early Preclassic Maya period and continuing through the Spanish and British Colonial periods, into the 20th century. Unlike most Classic-period sites in the southern Maya lowlands, Lamanai was not abandoned at the end of the 10th century AD.
The Maya Mountains are a mountain range located in Belize and eastern Guatemala, in Central America.
Belize, on the east coast of Central America, southeast of Mexico, was inhabited by the indigenous peoples who fought off the Spaniards in an attempt to preserve their heritage and to avoid the fate of their neighbors who were conquered and under Spanish rule. While this was going on, British pirates would rob Spanish merchant ships and navigate through the shallow waters and small islands even going up river later to hide their bounty. The indigenous people of Belize did not resist the British like they did the Spanish. In the 17th century, however, the British settlement became a formal British crown colony from 1862 through 1964, where they first achieved self government and later in 1981 became an independent country recognized globally with all its territory intact. The British brought along with them slaves taken from Congo and Angola during the eighteenth century.
Ancient Maya women had an important role in society: beyond propagating the culture through bearing and raising children, Maya women participated in economic, governmental, and farming activities. The lives of women in ancient Mesoamerica are not well documented: "Of the three elite founding area tombs discovered to date within the Copan Acropolis, two contain the remains of women, and yet there is not a single reference to a woman in either known contemporary texts or later retrospective accounts of Early Classic events and personages at Copan," writes a scholar.
Nohmul is a pre-Columbian Maya archaeological site located on the eastern Yucatán Peninsula, in what is today northern Belize. The name Nohmul may be translated as "great mound" in Yucatec Maya. It is the most important Maya site in northern Belize. The site included a large pyramid, about 17 meters (56 ft) tall, built around 250 BC. Most of the pyramid was destroyed in May 2013 by contractors tearing it apart for rocks and gravel to use to fill roads, leaving only the core of the pyramid behind.
Grace Bank, formerly Barcadares, is an unincorporated hamlet 33 miles up the Belize River. It was the second settlement founded by the first English settlers of present-day Belize. It was settled in the 1650s, relocated in 1760, and resettled in 1853.
Santa Rita is a Maya ruin and an archaeological reserve on the outskirts of Corozal, Belize. Historical evidence suggests that it was probably the ancient and important Maya city known as Chetumal.
David Michael Pendergast, is an American archaeologist, and is most famous for his work at Altun Ha and Lamanai, Belize. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology in 1955 from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his Ph.D. in 1961 at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying with Clement Meighan. He was later married to Elizabeth Graham, also a Mesoamerican Archaeologist.
Pusilhá is an archaeological site in Belize. The location of this Late Classic Maya urban complex, along the east and west flow of trade, made the city a major transfer point for economic activities in the whole region. In addition, the city gave archaeologists a historical view of a secondary Maya site. Large and extended excavation efforts have changed the overall picture of Maya social and political relationships between larger and smaller cities and challenged the prevailing view of conquest and absorption of smaller cities into the larger cities in the region. The research conducted at Pusilhá began in 1927 and continues to this day.
Baking Pot is a Maya archaeological site located in the Belize River Valley on the southern bank of the river, northeast of modern-day town of San Ignacio in the Cayo District of Belize; it is 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) downstream from the Barton Ramie and Lower Dover archaeological sites. Baking Pot is associated with an extensive amount of research into Maya settlements, community-based archaeology, and of agricultural production; the site possesses lithic workshops, and possible evidence of cash-cropping cacao as well as a long occupation from the Preclassic through to the Postclassic period.
The extensive trade networks of the Ancient Maya contributed largely to the success of their civilization spanning three millennia. Maya royal control and the wide distribution of foreign and domestic commodities for both population sustenance and social affluence are hallmarks of the Maya visible throughout much of the iconography found in the archaeological record. In particular, moderately long-distance trade of foreign commodities from the Caribbean and Gulf Coasts provided the larger inland Maya cities with the resources they needed to sustain settled population levels in the several thousands. Though the ruling class essentially controlled the trade economy, a middle merchant class supervised import and export from cities and trade ports. Not much is known of the Maya merchant class; however, merchants of royal lineage are sometimes represented in the iconography. Notably, a canoe paddle often accompanies the royal merchant depictions, signifying their association with marine resources.
Chetumal, or the Province of Chetumal, was a Postclassic Maya state of the Yucatan Peninsula, in the Maya Lowlands.
The Preclassic or Formative period of Belizean, Maya, and Mesoamerican history began with the Maya development of ceramics during 2000 BC – 900 BC, and ended with the advent of Mayan monumental inscriptions in AD 250.
The Classic period of Belizean, Maya, and Mesoamerican history began with the advent of Mayan monumental inscriptions in AD 250, and ended with the decline of these inscriptions during the Classic Maya Collapse in AD 900.
