Crossroads Roundup: PhD Student Finds Lost Maya City, Bram Stoker Story Re-Discovered, and a Totally Bananas Auction
Need a break from politics? Read this instead! The latest in art, archaeology, culture and more.
A PhD student accidentally found a Lost Maya city:
Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in New Orleans, was scrolling through Google when he came across an intriguing link. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC. The area surveyed was near Xpujil, a town in the Mexican state of Campeche.
But Auld-Thomas is an archaeologist, and he noticed something that others had missed in the images: the LiDAR survey revealed the ruins of an ancient Maya city buried under centuries of jungle. The city is estimated to have been home to 30,000-50,000 people at its peak in 750-850 A.D.
Longtime patrons of the Gazette will be familiar with LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging: a remote sensing technique that uses light pulses to scan the Earth. This technology has revolutionized the archaeological field, as it allows researchers to survey vast areas of land and detect hidden structures. Thanks to LiDAR, we now know that the first Polynesian cities are centuries older than once believed, the Iron Age hillfort Bodbury Ring is actually much larger than previously known, and a valley of ancient cities existed in the Upper Amazon that, like the site at Xpujil, rested in secret beneath a blanket of foliage.
I look forward to learning more as investigations continue, and I hope this helps Luke Auld-Thomas secure a tenure-track position at a fabulous institution.
Before Dracula, the Irish author Bram Stoker published a short story called “Gibbet Hill” in the Dublin Daily Express. For 130 years, the story was forgotten…
Brian Cleary, a clinical pharmacist in Dublin, was browsing the National Library of Ireland when he stumbled upon an advertisement in an 1891 edition of the Dublin Daily Express. The ad referenced a short story by Bram Stoker that the magazine had published the previous year.
A big Stoker fan, Cleary eagerly searched for the older edition that contained the story. “I was just gobsmacked,” Cleary told Sarah Lyall of the New York Times. “I went and checked all the bibliographies, and it was nowhere. I wanted to turn around and shout, ‘Guess what I found?’ but there were proper researchers and academics there, and I was just an amateur.”
Fortunately, Cleary pressed onward. The story doesn’t appear in other Stoker archives, and no literary critics have written about it. Cleary truly rescued the tale from the eternal paper shredder.
“Gibbet Hill” is an autumnal story about a man who visits the gravesite of a murder victim and encounters three very odd children. What ensues is a surreal narrative in which Stoker explores the gothic horror that would later make him famous with Dracula (1897).
The story will be republished with new illustrations by the Irish artist Paul McKinley. All proceeds will go to the Charlotte Stoker Fund, which supports research on deafness in newborns. The fund is named after Bram Stoker’s mother, who was an advocate for the deaf community. Cleary himself has a cochlear implant, and the library was his refuge while undergoing intensive auditory therapy. As he told Lyall, “I was like a baby learning to hear again. A lot of things wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t suffered from hearing loss.”
I’m certainly grateful for his determination. You can read “Gibbet Hill” in full here.
“A Letter from Tuscany”:
In every Roundup, I will be profiling a different essay by a fellow Substack writer. This week, I’m sharing “A Letter from Tuscany,” published in Beautiful Things. Travel writer Jodi [ jodi {fiftybeautifulthings} ] takes us on her journey through Tuscany, in the footsteps of Henry James.
I especially enjoyed learning about the contradas of Siena. In Jodi’s words:
The contradas (contrade, in Italian) of Siena are, technically speaking, neighborhoods: seventeen of them. They are neighborhoods, though, with very strict boundaries. Each contrada has a name, and a mascot, and a flag… and its own church and fountain. They were developed in the middle ages, and are taken very seriously to this day. You are a member of the contrada where you are born, regardless of where your parents live, or if you move. Babies can become members of their parents’ contradas if they are baptized in the fountain that represents that particular district. From what I understand, Sienese babies are baptized twice - once in the church, and once in the contrada’s fountain.
As with all of her essays, expect to be swept away on a lovely adventure, with stunning photos to accompany you!
An a-maze-ing man (sorry, I couldn’t help myself):
I really enjoyed this profile of Adrian Fisher, who has designed over 700 mazes in over 43 countries. Along with Don Frantz, Fisher is credited with creating the world’s first corn maze in 1993 in Annville, Pennyslvania. He has designed mazes great and small, from the Singapore Changi Airport to his own home garden in Dorset, England.
And finally, a truly, bombastically, bananas art auction.
You may recall the “banana artwork” that took the Internet by storm in 2019.
(If that feels like a lifetime ago, it’s because of the pandemic. Talk about time distortion! Sometimes, I still feel like I’m twenty-two, until I speak with actual twenty-two year olds, and then I remember that my weekend plans didn’t always consist of the farmer’s market, an art walk, and chamomile tea before bed.)
(I am relieved to no longer be twenty-two.)
Anyway, this particular artwork—or gimmick, depending on who you ask—was brought to life by Maurizio Cattelan. Cattelan was born in Padua, Italy in 1960; he does not have formal training as an artist, and his work often interrogates social hierarchies and norms. As you can see below, he also has a sense of humor.
Of course, bananas will spoil over time. Comedian, which first premiered in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, is a conceptual piece made from a new banana and piece of duct tape for each installation. As Cattelan told the Art Newspaper in 2021:
To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value. At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules. I can’t say how people will react, but I hope these new works will break up the normal viewing habits and open a discussion on what really matters. We are surrounded by conversations based on immaterial structures, social values and hierarchies that we created, but usually we prefer to forget this; it’s like being anaesthetised.
It’s an interesting argument. But would something like this sell?
Apparently so. In 2019, two people with way too much money on their hands bought their own “editions” of Comedian for $120,000 each. This month, an edition of the work will go on sale again, and it’s expected to fetch $1 million to $1.5 million. The sale will come with a fresh banana, duct tape, and instructions to install Comedian in one’s own home.
And I have to wonder, who is the butt of the joke? Is it the art world for elevating such foolishness? Is it the billionaire buyer, rich in cash but poor in taste? Or is it the public? The United States had an election this week (I won’t get into politics too much, I swear), but the greatest issue at the forefront of voters’ minds was inflation. The majority of Americans are struggling to pay for basic necessities: groceries and rent are simply unaffordable. And yet, someone this month might drop a million dollars on a banana.
There is one thing I take comfort in—the person who stands to win from this sale is not a tech billionaire, or a hedge fund manager, or (God help us) a political consultant: he is an artist. And I will never begrudge an artist for taking home the bacon. Or should I say, the swiftly-ripening banana.
Anything about megalithic structures in the Maya story? I am midway through Hancock’s season 2.
Loved the maze tale. I'm constructing my personal monastery of the mind to seek refuge during the dark ages coming to the US. I think I can find a way to fit in a maze where I can get lost.