Along the north side of the primary structure Gann found 41 stucco heads
(Figure 1) and two torsos, and noted that they had been carefully detached
and buried face down in marl dust to preserve them. He described the
idiosyncratic features of several specimens, and concluded that the ensemble was a 'portrait gallery . . . for the first time we see men and women of the various classes exactly as they were in life when they lived and loved', although the (to him) closed eyes and protruding tongue-tip suggested death masks (Gann 1938: 254-8 and unpaginated plates). There were also numerous fragments of non-figurative sculpture, including glyphs (Figure 2) and architectural mouldings (Figure 3).
Gann deposited some of the stuccoes in the British Museum, the rest
at Tulane University's Middle American Research Institute (MARI) in New Orleans. But he kept no field notes beyond the diary subsumed into the book,
which he barely lived to see published, and the onset of World War II left
the collections almost forgotten. In 1936 Gann had submitted a prompt article, 'A Maya Portrait Gallery', for Maya Research, a subsequently discontinued MARI journal; in 1943 MARI published it as a four-page pamphlet, retitled Painted Stucco Heads from Louisville, British Honduras, and much more heavily edited by Robert Wauchope than his prefatory note of 'routine corrections' suggests. Significant omissions were a paragraph summarizing the stratigraphy, and a long passage describing some of the heads
and essaying a date 'between the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. . . . from the
end of the ninth, or the early tenth Bactun', which present evidence suggests was spot on. Wauchope also altered the word 'mouldings' to 'heads' (Gann 1943: 14, line 2), thereby adding sculptures to the interior of the building, where Gann had found none.
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