In 1951, Quest for the Lost City was published in the United States. Reviewed in The New York Times as ‘a sort of overland Kon-Tiki’ – in reference to Thor Heyerdahl’s recent Pacific Ocean adventure – the book was an instant success and remains in print today. In 1955, it was released as a documentary film by Sol Lesser, producer of Tarzan films. The film’s poster displayed the book’s authors, husband and wife Dana and Ginger Lamb, stripped down for adventure clutching weapons, gazing through the Mexican jungle at an ancient-looking city, saying: ‘We walked 1,000 miles through the hostile jungle… to make this incredible discovery!’
Although the Lambs have been widely derided as charlatans and their story as fiction, Dana undoubtedly made one vital archaeological discovery at a Maya site in Guatemala that he never explicitly located. To quote his journal for April 1950: ‘There are two beautifully carved temple stones here. The best I have ever seen. … We spent all day exploring around and moving the stones so we could get pictures of them. … This ruin is completely unknown so we decided to name it the Place of the Carved Stones, in Maya it is Lashch Tu Nich.’ Unfortunately, the stone lintels were later looted from the site, probably in the 1960s, sold, and disappeared. Having reappeared on the US art market in 2013 and 2015, they disappeared again.
These historic photographs taken by the Lambs form the focus of Mayanist Stephen Houston’s intriguing, beautifully illustrated academic study of Laxtunich and its significance for Maya studies, written in collaboration with four other specialists in the field: Charles Golden, Andrew Scherer, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. The lintels are replete with dynastic and cosmic information. As Houston comments at the beginning, the ‘monograph focuses on a carved lintel dense with ancient Maya meaning’.
