{
  "id": "del-rio-palenque-report-1787",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Antonio del Rio's report on the ruins near Palenque (1787), printed at London in 1822",
  "summary": "A royal order of 1786 sent an artillery captain into the forest of Chiapa to examine a ruined city, with a draughtsman, a requisition of Indian labourers and instructions to dig. He cleared it by felling and burning, broke open every chamber, crated the finds and wrote a numbered report. Printed in English thirty-five years later, it put a Maya city into European print - and wrapped the correct inference about Yucatan in a conjecture about the Phoenicians.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "archaeology",
    "maya",
    "chiapas",
    "exploration",
    "enlightenment",
    "books",
    "eighteenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alzate-gacetas-de-literatura-1788"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "clavijero-disertaciones-1780"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "bru-garriga-esqueleto-1796"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "malaspina-expedition"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "villasenor-theatro-americano-1748"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "garcia-de-palacio-relacion-de-1576"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who first excavated Palenque?",
    "What did Antonio del Rio do at Palenque in 1787?",
    "How did the ruins of Palenque become known in Europe?",
    "Did the Spanish crown order archaeological work in the Americas?",
    "What damage did the first excavation at Palenque cause?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The work was commanded, not stumbled upon. The report opens by reciting \"the resolution of his Majesty, communicated by his royal order, bearing date May 15th, 1786, relative to another examination of the ruins discovered in the vicinity of Palenque, in the province of Ciudad Real de Chiapa, in New Spain\", and the desire of the governor and commandant general of Guatemala, Jose Estacheria, expressed on 20 March, that del Rio should proceed thither. The word \"another\" is on the page: this was a second, better-resourced attempt, not the first visit.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The dates and the local name are recorded exactly. He arrived on 3 May and on the 5th went out to the site \"which is there called Casas de Piedras (stone houses)\". A fog so dense that the party could not distinguish each other at five paces hid the principal building on that first attempt, and sent him back to the village.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The labour was requisitioned from an Indian town, and the report says so without embarrassment. An order went to Tumbala \"requiring two hundred Indians who should be provided with axes and bill-hooks\"; \"none, however, arrived until the 17th, and then only seventy-nine in number, furnished with twenty-eight axes\", twenty more axes being found in the village. The felling was completed on the 2nd and \"followed by a general conflagration\". The clearing of Palenque was compulsory indigenous labour, under-supplied and under-equipped, and the shortfall is recorded because it delayed the commission rather than because it was thought a wrong.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "His method was total and destructive, and he states it as an achievement. Convinced that excavation was indispensable, and working with a supply reduced to \"seven iron crowbars and three pick-axes\", he reports that \"by dint of perseverance I effected all that was necessary to be done, so that ultimately there remained neither a window nor a doorway blocked up; a partition that was not thrown down, nor a room, corridor, court, tower, nor subterranean passage in which excavations were not effected from two to three yards (varas) in depth\". A modern reader should count this as damage; the report counts it as thoroughness, and both readings rest on the same sentence.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The description that follows is measured, not rhapsodic. He situates the site two leagues from Palenque, \"the last town northward in the province of Ciudad Real de Chiapa\", by the little river Micol; gives the palace its portico of thirty-six varas on plain rectangular pillars without bases or pedestals; notes the stucco shields drawn as figures 1, 2 and 3, the medallions whose traceable heads he takes for \"the busts of a series of kings or lords to whom the natives were subject\", the range of niche-like windows \"some in form of a Greek cross\", the court entered by a flight of seven steps, and the tower of sixteen yards in four stories with an interior tower inside it.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "He removed sculpture from the walls and says which pieces. \"To convey a satisfactory idea of the stucco used in forming these, as well as the other medio relievos, and in order to afford a clear notion of the ability possessed by the ancient inhabitants in the art of sculpture, I have transported from this chamber the head of the sufferer, fig. 8, and the foot and leg of the executioner or sacrificer, fig. 11, which pieces are numbered 4 and 5.\" The stated motive - to demonstrate the ancient inhabitants' skill - and the act - detaching reliefs from a standing building - are in the same sentence.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "What he sent back was a numbered, provenanced collection, which is what distinguishes this from treasure-hunting. Beneath a circular stone in the centre of an oratory a cylindrical cavity held a flint lance, two small conical pyramids, a heart in dark crystallised stone \"known by the name of challa\", and two covered jars with small stones and a ball of vermilion, transmitted \"being numbered 13, 14, 15 and 16\", with jars from the inner angles numbered 17 and 18; a second oratory yielded objects 19 to 22; a broken vase with challa blades became 23 and 24; a pot of small bones, grinders and teeth from the same excavation, number 25; and samples of the lime, mortar and burnt brick from number 26 onward, brought away \"for mature examination\".",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "One inference in the report is both original and right. He observes that the edifices were \"unknown to the historians of the new world, by whom no mention whatsoever is made of their existence\", and concludes that \"the identity of the ancient inhabitants of Yucatan and Palenque, is, in my opinion, evidently proved by the strong analogy of their customs, buildings, and acquaintance with the arts\". He also reads the buried deposits and reliefs as a place where \"they venerated, as sacred objects, the remains of their greatest heroes\", the inscriptions being \"intended to eternise their names\". Cultural continuity across Yucatan and Palenque, and inscriptions that name rulers, are where Maya studies eventually arrived.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The same report also denies the builders their own achievement, and this object prints that next to the previous claim rather than after it. From the bas-reliefs of the third oratory he concludes \"that the antient inhabitants of these structures lived in extreme darkness\", sees in their superstitions the idolatry \"of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans and other primitive nations\", and conjectures that one of those nations \"pursued their conquests even to this country, where it is probable they only remained long enough to enable the Indian tribes to imitate their ideas and adopt, in a rude and awkward manner, such arts as their invaders thought fit to inculcate\". The diffusionist conjecture was wrong; it was also the century's common property, and it is why the survey's real observations travelled inside a false frame.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "He knew he had exceeded his brief and admits it, which is a small but real sign of a man doing research rather than filing a return: in conveying an idea of the country he has \"deviated a little from the instructions contained in my commission, to which, perhaps, I ought to have strictly adhered\". He also declines to describe the northern buildings \"as they are now nearly destroyed\". The report closes with the claim that during the examination \"no circumstance worthy of notice, has been omitted\", and is signed and dated \"ANTONIO DEL RIO. Palenque, June 24, 1787.\"",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The route by which the report reached the world is itself the caution. What survives in general circulation is not the Spanish manuscript but an English translation printed at London in 1822 by Henry Berthoud and by Suttaby, Evance and Fox, dedicated by the publisher \"BY PERMISSION TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD HOLLAND\", thirty-five years after the report was written, and issued as the front half of a volume whose second half is Paul Felix Cabrera's Teatro critico americano - a treatise advertising that del Rio's monuments are \"analized and compared with those of the Egyptians and other Nations, proving that a connexion has existed between them and the AMERICANS\". Every claim above is read from that translation. The Spanish original was not opened for this object, and no claim here rests on Cabrera.",
      "sources": [
        "del-rio-descripcion-palenque-london-1822",
        "cabrera-teatro-critico-americano-1822"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of Palenque begin with Stephens and Catherwood in 1839, and where del Rio appears at all he is a vandal in one clause or a precursor in another. This object opens the 1822 volume and puts the whole operation on the record from the sheets themselves: the royal order of 15 May 1786 that commanded a second examination, the two hundred Indians requisitioned from Tumbala of whom seventy-nine came with twenty-eight axes, the felling and the general conflagration, the crowbars and pick-axes, the boast that no partition was left standing and no chamber undug, the two stucco reliefs cut from a wall and shipped as numbers 4 and 5, the numbered and provenanced finds from 13 to 26 - and, in the same voice and with equal weight, the inference that the ancient inhabitants of Yucatan and Palenque were one people, which was correct and early, and the conjecture that Phoenicians or Greeks had taught them their arts \"in a rude and awkward manner\", which was neither. It also names what the reader is actually holding: a commercial London translation bound with a treatise about Egypt.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-10",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/del-rio-palenque-report-1787",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/del-rio-palenque-report-1787.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Antonio del Rio's report on the ruins near Palenque (1787), printed at London in 1822",
    "description": "A royal order of 1786 sent an artillery captain into the forest of Chiapa to examine a ruined city, with a draughtsman, a requisition of Indian labourers and instructions to dig. He cleared it by felling and burning, broke open every chamber, crated the finds and wrote a numbered report. Printed in English thirty-five years later, it put a Maya city into European print - and wrapped the correct inference about Yucatan in a conjecture about the Phoenicians.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/del-rio-palenque-report-1787",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-10",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Description of the ruins of an ancient city, discovered near Palenque - the report of Captain Antonio del Rio to Jose Estacheria, dated 24 June 1787",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=XuUqAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Teatro critico americano; or, a critical investigation and research into the history of the Americans - the title page of the treatise printed after del Rio's report",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=XuUqAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA23"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Antonio del Rio's report on the ruins near Palenque (1787), printed at London in 1822"
  }
}