Graduate Student Profile - Victoria Lyall
Art History

The palace at Monjas in the northern Yucatan, more than a millennium old, was the last field site of Victoria Lyall’s Fulbright-sponsored trip, and the weather had marooned her and a worker in a small room on the second floor. "I had to hang out on the scaffolding because it was raining so hard I couldn’t go down the stairs," she says, "and I was really bored. I started playing around with my spotlight, and I thought I saw some figures." Moving a bit closer, "I found a whole scene that I thought had been lost." A heavy layer of calcite from dripping water had formed a mineral veil over the picture of trumpeters in a procession through the woods. "You can’t see in the daylight, but when you shine a light on it, you can see what’s underneath," she says.

This is the kind of moment Fulbright scholars dream of, but it wouldn’t have happened without the less widely discussed and certainly less appealing ground work associated with some trips: Figuring out where to get scaffolding and how to mount it, how to find the workers and what to pay them, and in the case of sites that have been ignored for decades, "hiring somebody to help you clear a path so you can get there and see the mural," she says. The Fulbright offers no guidance in this regard.

Victoria began her ground work by making a six-week, pre-Fulbright trip to the Yucatan. "I walked the peninsula," she says, doing a survey of sites, figuring out the logistics of how to study them, and making "indispensable" contacts among the archaeological conservators in the state of Yucatan. These contacts among Mexico’s archaeological conservators provided references for her Fulbright application and helped her to resolve many of the tactical problems, becoming "my angels." In return for their help, they got copies of all the photographs Victoria made during her time in Mexico, which may suggest a government agenda of future projects to restore and conserve murals there. "Hopefully, these shots will be the before," Victoria says.

Victoria’s road to the Yucatan began when she was an undergraduate at Yale University, studying anthropology and art history with a focus on the Mayan culture. Her dual major continued through a master’s degree at Tulane University, but when it came to doctoral work, she settled on art history. She had discovered that "all the questions I wanted to answer came from visual analysis," Victoria says. "I was really just interested in the pictures."

She has plenty of those now: 37 gigabytes of digital images among the data she collected in a trip that ended this summer. In addition, her visit to Ichmac has suggested a possible answer to an old puzzle about the Mayan culture. While a lot is known about the Southern Mayan culture because of its many texts, Victoria says, "in the northern part of the Yucatan, we have very few texts comparatively, so the history for that part of the region is hit or miss." Scholars have pondered the lack of inscriptions.

When Victoria got to Ichmac, a relatively little known or photographed site, "I was floored," she says, because "it was beautifully preserved, and there were texts. . . On each wall, there were captions like a comic book." It was another Fulbright moment: "I spent three days floating."

Later, she began to wonder if the inclusion of text could have been "a political choice." People generally "express themselves in a way that is going to resonate with a certain audience," she says. If the audience is bilingual or even multilingual, "you might use images instead" of inscriptions. In fact, the northern Mayan murals could well be "alternative histories," depicting rulers and warfare. Her hypothesis, however, still needs proving, she says. "I’m just beginning to scratch the surface."

Published in Fall 2008, Graduate Quarterly