[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_0559.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tThe cultural minister of Guatemala has begun the process to reclaim a 1,200-year-old stone lintel that was repatriated from the United States to Mexico in mid-April, according to a report in the Art Newspaper<\/em>. <\/p>\n \n\tThe object was initially brought to the Mexican consulate in New York by an unidentified American businessman, who presumably realized that it had been illegally removed from its country of origin at some point before he or she acquired it.<\/p>\n \n\tThe lintel depicts ritual acts involving the sun god and Cheleew Chan K\u2019inich, a late ruler of the ancient Mayan city Yaxchil\u00e1n, and was made around 600-900 CE. It is signed by the carver known as Mayuy, one of the only artists in the ancient Americas to sign his sculptures. \u201cHe was extraordinarily inventive,\u201d Stephen Houston, an anthropology professor at Brown, told TAN<\/em>. \u201c[Mayuy fused] in his carvings relationships among gods, the ordering of the cosmos and dynastic machinations.\u201d (Houston is the author of the 2021 book A Maya Universe in Stone<\/em>, which examines the history of Mayuy\u2019s ancient carvings.)<\/p>\n \n\tThe lintel in question was first documented by American explorers Dana and Ginger Lamb, who traveled in the tropical forests of northern Guatemala and southern Mexico in the 1950s. At some point later the artifact, along with other stone carvings by Mayuy and other artists, was removed from an area of the jungle that Dana Lamb referred to as Laxtunich, and entered the legally murky antiquities market.<\/p>\n \n\tThe confusion surrounding its rightful ownership stems from the fact that its original location is in the area surrounding the Usumacinta River, which covers both present-day Mexico and Guatemala. Houston\u2019s research, however, pins the initial discovery to the Guatemalan side of the river.<\/p>\n \n\tAn article published by Cultural Property News<\/em> points to this mix-up as an example of how \u201cpolitical spectacle and rushed cultural-property enforcement\u201d can lead to these kinds of restitution snafus. The article also points to ongoing scholarship (by Houston and others) questioning whether Laxtunich is in fact in Guatemala rather than Mexico, and questions why there was little attempt to research the history of this specific lentil before swiftly repatriating it to Mexico, given that Guatemala filed a claim for it just hours after its repatriation to Mexico.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/1200-year-old-limestone-lintel-repatriated-mexico-guatemala-1234786237\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_0559.jpg?w=1024″] The cultural minister of Guatemala has begun the process to reclaim a 1,200-year-old stone lintel that was repatriated from the United States to Mexico in mid-April, according to a report in the Art Newspaper. The object was initially brought to the Mexican consulate in New York by an unidentified American businessman, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1946425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1946425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1946425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1946425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1946425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}