Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-04, Section: A, page: 0984.

Directors: Mary E. Miller; Edward S. Cooke, Jr.

The rediscovery of Mesoamerican antiquity following Mexican independence in 1821 initiated the New World's second great period of exploration. At a time when ancient geography, Biblical history and the source of human origins itself were being seriously questioned, the ancient cities of the Maya provided a blank slate upon which new theories of cultural history were written. Whereas the first European scholars believed that Mesoamerican antiquity had descended directly from Classical European culture, explorers and writers from the United States perceived this past as a distinctly New World tradition, arguing that it represented an alternative, distinctly "American" brand of Classicism.

Examining archaeological engravings and lithographs produced in Mexico during the last years of Spanish rule, Chapter One treats the textual and cultural context in which these works appeared in the 1820s. The second chapter is devoted to the writings of John Lloyd Stephens, whose series of travel narratives, written in the 1840s and illustrated by Frederick Catherwood, established North America's territorial and historical connections to the ancient Mesoamerican past. The prophetic visions and divinely-inspired writings of Stephens' contemporary Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, form the basis of Chapter Three--which analyzes the Mormon Church's belief in the ancient Israelite foundation of Central America. Covering the period between the 1850s and early 1880s, Chapter Four concerns the work of the Franco-American explorer Desire Charnay, who proposed an ethnic alignment between ancient Mesoamerica and the European-derived populations of the United States. Finally, this project considers the confirmation of this adopted "American" antiquity at the World's Fairs of 1893 and 1915, and in the early twentieth-century Maya Revival style.