I'm Jago Cooper, I'm the head of the Americas, here at the British Museum
and welcome to my corner.
In the middle of the 19th century Alfred Maudslay was an extraordinary explorer.
At the age of 22 he quit his life as a colonial official and then dedicated the rest of his life to
exploring the jungles of what is now Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.
What was unusual about Alfred Maudslay was that he was obsessed with the captured image
he took tons of equipment on mule trains through the jungle
and developed the first glass plate photographs of many of the very famous sights that we know today.
Ancient Maya sites like Tikal, Palenque, Jasha lon and Keira Gua.
He also physically wrapped up giant monuments in plaster
and created huge plaster casts some of these standing 33 feet high in size.
He would then chop up these plaster casts into sections
so we have one stela, stela E from Kiera Gua, which is 33 feet high and is taken into 31 casts.
What's important is that Maudsley's casts from the 1880s
represent the best preserved image of this monument
because the actual monument is snapped in half in the 1920s by some errant archaeologists.
He sent back by sea crate boxes of glass plates of which we have more than 800
and more than 400 plaster casts that we have in the stores of the British Museum.
For a 130 years these glass plate photographs and fragile casts
have remained in the stores relatively unseen.
Because Maudsley was a pioneer in using the technology of his time to capture image
we made a pitch to Google, who are currently the pioneers of new digital technology
and so using their equipment we have digitised both the objects in the British Museum
and also the landscapes in Guatemala and created a whole series of experiences
where people can go on journeys to the ancient Maya sites
travelling through time using the historical photography.
We took 360 panoramic imagery using street view capture
of all of the archaeological sites in Guatemala and then we could place the old photographs
exactly where Maudsley stood in the 1880s back into those landscapes.
The ancient Maya had some of the most complex and sophisticated cities of their time
sprawling through the subtropical forests of Central America
these large cities had huge pyramid complexes and spread out residential areas
what I particularly like about the ancient Maya is that they provide a different example
of how to live an urban lifestyle; many of the ideas that are popular today
like guerrilla gardening, green cities, careful water management thinking about how waste is recycled
these are ideas all develops very successfully by the ancient Maya thousands of years ago.
How we live with our landscape is a fundamental question for our species
and the ancient Maya developed a really interesting way of living with their ecology
they saw Humanity as directly linked with the environment around them
and that concept of ecology of relationships between people and environment
is something we can learn a lot from the Maya.
What I love about this project is that it allows us to access parts of the collection that are not
normally on display the use of image today in collaboration with Google arts and culture
can provide a platform in which people can experience not only the objects
but re situate them in their landscape,
for me that's quite a transformative thing for the British Museum
to think about objects within landscape, their original landscape.
So often at British Museum we see objects in a building from the 1860s
and so thinking about context and how these objects might have been originally seen
is a very interesting idea.
In many ways these sort of glass plates and plaster casts are objects in their own right
we've registered them as British Museum objects
and they capture not only the image of the original
but their own legacy, their own biography of a story that is Alfred Maudslay's work.
If you'd like more information about the project then click on the link below
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