9 minute read
Archaeology Takes Wing
In October 1929, fiftyyear old Philadelphia banker and lawyer Percy C. Madeira, Jr., tracked with great interest Charles A. Lindbergh’s progress across northeast Guatemala, British Honduras (Belize), and the Yucatan peninsula with archaeologists Alfred V. Kidder and Oliver Ricketson.
Mesoamerican culture now stimulated his curiosity more than banking, and to satisfy that intellectual itch, Madeira had just enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate archaeology program. By providing a bird’s-eye view of the culturally rich but remote Yucatan, Madeira thought Lindbergh and Kidder might revolutionize Central American field archaeology.
After financing and accompanying a longer exploration thirteen months later, the “Central American Expedition of the University Museum” led by American Section Curator J. Alden Mason, the experience and expense gave him pause, but his initial instinct was correct: by 1932 airplane travel was established for scientific investigation around the world— which cannot be imagined without it today.
The Plane at Yaxha, North Central Guatemala. PM Image 202712.
Alfred Kidder flew with Lindbergh on that trip from October 6–10, 1929, to see “what the Maya country really looks like,” having worked for decades in areas “so stifled by … vegetation, that it has been impossible to gain a comprehensive understanding of … this territory.” He believed “all people, ancient and modern, are largely products of their environment. Hill and plain, watercourse, and arable land shape the destinies of nations more powerfully than do kings and battles.” Lindbergh granted Kidder’s wish, and across those five days they identified five Maya ruins and confirmed sites reported but not plotted.
These results drove Percy Madeira to replicate Lindbergh’s project, an endeavor he could afford to organize and finance. Thirteen months later and seated on the Board of Managers of the Penn Museum (then known as the University Museum), he launched the Central American Expedition of the University Museum. Dr. J. Alden Mason, Curator, American Section; Gregory Mason, writer and archaeologist; and Robert A. Smith, the aerial photographer, joined Madeira aboard a Pan American Airway’s Sikorsky S-38 airplane leaving Miami for the Yucatan Tuesday afternoon, December 2, 1930.
Over the Yucatan: December 3–14, 1930
After a night in Havana, Madeira’s team left for Pan Am’s Cozumel station at 7:42 am Wednesday, December 3. Responding to passenger eagerness, Captain William Ormsbee, assisted by co-pilot and radio operator William Carey, bypassed Cozumel, flew to the Yucatan’s northern tip, and circled the Coba ruins before the Museum team splashed down at Pan Am’s Cozumel base at 4:50 pm.
After seven hours seated in the Sikorsky S-38 the Museum team was initiated fully into the days to follow. Because cloud shadows distort observed differences in ground elevations, Ormsbee had skimmed palmtops to help his passengers look for vegetation-encapsulated buildings. Madeira, however, found such flying “too hard on the nerves to continue for more than a limited space of time.” And with little soundproofing, the team stuffed their ears with cotton balls to dampen the engines’ deafening roar. Amidst the cacophony, Madeira made a note to recommend a headset-intercom system so future aerial explorers could coordinate in-flight adjustments with their pilot.
Over the next eleven days the team flew thirteen flights (37 hours and 11 minutes of flight time totaling more than two thousand miles). Some retraced the Lindbergh-Carnegie Expedition north-south Yucatanaxis routes; others crossed unassessed western and southwestern regions. Each day was eventful, if not productive.
Madeira’s expedition report reads at times like a tourist journal ticking off major Maya sites: Coba, Chichen Itza, Yaxuma, Labna, Uxmal, Piedras Negras, Yaxchilan, San Clemente, Tuluum. He hoped to spot an unknown Maya site beside a lake on which Captain Ormsbee could land and then fly support runs as the team initiated exploratory fieldwork. Unfortunately, no such site presented itself, although the team assessed several lake-side possibilities. Still, the team did identify four unmapped Maya ruins: two northeast of Uaxactun-Tikal, one on the Belize-Mexico border, one in north-central Yucatan parallel to Cozumel Island, and confirmed Lindbergh-Carnegie Institution expedition reports of other new sites.
The Personnel and the Plane, at Miami, Florida. Left to right: Dr. J. A. Mason; William Carey, co-pilot; Frank E. Ormsbee, chief pilot; Robert A. Smith; Percy C. Madeira, Jr; Gregory Mason. PM Image 28425.
“Hard on the Nerves”: Eleven Days, Thirteen Flights
Over eleven days, from December 4–14, 1930, the team flew thirteen flights (37 hours and 11 minutes of flight time totaling more than two thousand miles). Some retraced the Lindbergh-Carnegie Expedition north-south Yucatan-axis routes; others crossed unassessed western and southwestern regions. Each day was eventful, if not productive.
Appendix to the article “An Aerial Expedition to Central America” by Percy C. Madeira, Jr. in The Museum Journal, Volume XXII No. 2. Left: December 3 and 4 entries in Captain William Ormsbee’s Flight Notes; Right: The team’s sketch plan of the San Clemente Ruins.
Postcards collected by Percy Madeira during the 1930 Aerial Expedition. Top: Ruins of Chichén Itzá, Temple of the Warriors. Center: Ruins of Chichén Itzá, El Castillo. Bottom: Ruins of Uxmal, The Governor’s Palace (seen from the Nunnery Quadrangle).
On Wednesday, December 6, the team’s fourth day flying, they left Carmen on the Yucatan’s west coast and flew south down the Unsumacinta River toward the Piedras Negras site that Dr. Mason was preparing to excavate, and Yaxchilan ruins further south. Neither site was visible from the air, although Captain Ormsbee flew by at fifty feet above the river. Madeira reported that “The tropical vegetation, trees, vines and creepers, formed so dense a curtain that not a single portion of the ruins, nor the slightest vestige of any masonry could be seen… even when we knew exactly where they were, not more than a hundred and fifty feet away.” Dr. Mason was impressed that they reached this site in one hour, however; one year earlier, in 1929, the same CarmenPiedras Negras trip took him five days.
The Museum team did not spend all thirteen days airborne. Between fiestas and fetes hosted by local dignitaries at each stop, Madeira had Captain Ormsbee fly west on Tuesday morning, December 9, from Belize City to drop off the Museum team at the Yaxha Lake area in Guatemala’s Petan region. There, after hiking 12 miles west and pitching camp, Percy and his colleagues spent Wednesday and Thursday mapping and photographing the San Clemente ruins east of Tikal.
Captain Ormsbee returned three days later at noon to pick up a dirty, hot, tired, and insect-bitten group. After the team reveled in the sandwiches and iced beer that the Pan American Airways team provided, they tested dropping supplies by parachute (from about 500 feet) before returning to Belize City to pack for the next morning’s return to Miami. Reflecting on the expedition’s Saturday exit from Central America, Madeira wrote, “At six o’clock in the morning of the previous day we had broken our camp in the heart of the forest of north central Guatemala, and at six o’clock that night—36 hours later— we were comfortably settled in the Columbus Hotel in Miami, Florida; a most extraordinary transition, possible only with a modern airplane as the magic carpet.”
Taking Stock, Assessing Results
Six months after the Central American Expedition of the University Museum returned, Percy C. Madeira, Jr. published his post-trip report in the June 1931 issue of The Museum Journal (Volume 22.2). In addition to summarizing the expedition’s activity, observations and accomplishments, Madeira dedicated several pages to describing possible roles for aircraft as midcentury archaeological tools. Some of his observations acknowledged basic facts: “The airplane can cover in one hour a stretch of country which takes a week to travel by mule or on foot.” Some reflected Central American geographic reality: “it is nearly impossible to find from the air any new sites in a country of a broken and densely forested character” even with an airplane. Practicality framed some of his other suggestions: “Until some sure method can be worked out to guide a land
East Coast of Yucatan, looking north. PM Image 18916.
The map created by the team led by Madeira of the aerial expedition to Central America.
Tuluum. PM Image 18969.
party through virgin jungle to the site of ruins located from above, finding more new sites by airplane in the vast tropical forests of the Maya country appears to be of very little scientific value.”
Madeira could see a number of roles that airplanes could play to support scientific teams if terrain was suitable for building airstrips adjacent to archaeological sites. Aircraft could ferry personnel and supplies in and artifacts out; in emergencies they could evacuate sick or injured team members, potentially saving lives. Madeira was also intrigued by possible uses of “autogyros” (helicopters) to access archaeological digs situated in rough terrain and along precipitous ridgelines—assuming, of course, that the still-developing technology matured. Regardless of these many benefits, Percy Madeira concluded that for the moment, based on his experience (and his expeditionary financial outlay), airplanes might “more properly be classified as a fascinating although somewhat expensive sport.”
Yet, by the time Madeira published his assessment of aircrafts as scientific tools, another expedition affiliated with the University Museum—the Matto Grosso Expedition (see Expedition Vol. 60, No. 3, 2018)—had leased a Pan Am Sikorsky S-38 to support its fieldwork in western Brazil. Other institutions soon followed the University Museum’s lead, and by 1932 airplanes had established a niche for themselves in scientific endeavors around the globe, and have not relinquished that role.
Eric Hobson, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of English at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He previously published an article in Expedition on the Matto Grosso Expedition and is writing a book on the subject.
FOR FURTHER READING
Deuel, L. 1969. Flights into Yesterday: The Story of Aerial
Archaeology. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hobson, E.H. 2018. Brazil from Above: General Rondon and the Matto Grosso Expedition. Expedition
Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 3 https://www.penn. museum/sites/expedition/brazil-from-above/
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum. Madeira, P.C., Jr. 1931. An Aerial Expedition to South
America. The Museum Journal XXII, No. 2 https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/9316/
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum.
