https://mujeresconciencia.com/2025/01/16/adela-breton-la-copista-arqueologica-que-dibujo-los-tesoros-mayas/ Publicada en Mujeres Con Ciencia. Adela Breton copiando un fresco maya. Wikimedia Commons.

RAI 36208. Miss Adela C. Breton sketching in the ruins, Mexico. Photographer unknown, c. 1890s © RAI. Not to be re-used without the permission of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. 

  It isn't easy being a woman in a man's world and it was surely more difficult 100 years ago when the height of social ambition for a woman of good standing was a fine husband and a life of domesticity. Adela Breton took a different path. At 50 years old, written off to spinsterhood, she set sail for Mexico to record the Mayan ruins in accurate and exquisite detail. 



By all contemporary accounts - and by her own admission -Adela was quite the independent woman. Edward Thompson, US Consul to the Yucatán, wrote to the director of the Peabody museum stating: "To tell the honest truth she's a nuisance. She is a ladylike person but ill of whims, complaints and prejudices."1 He did, at least, acknowledge her skill as an artist. The Americanist Alfred Tozzer remarked that Thompson was "very jealous of her work and especially now as she is doing something that he has already done and doing it very much better."2 Tozzer formed a great friendship with Adela and marvelled at her resilience, saying "You look at Miss Breton and set her down as a weak, frail and delicate person who goes into convulsions at the sight of the slightest unconventionality in the way of living. But I assure you, her appearance is utterly at variance with her real self."3

 

Had she been a man, history would probably have celebrated her work and recognised her valuable contribution to the mesoamerican archaeological record. Instead, like so many other trowelblazing women, she became a historiographical footnote. Adela - thank you for being, as Tozzer once described you, "the eccentric Miss Breton"; solitary, stubborn, independent - and an inspiration.

  Written by @drkatedevlin

Edited by Tori

References:

Thompson to Putnam, 5 April 1900, UAV 677z40, Harvard University Archive

Letter 26, 1st April 1902, Harvard University Tozzer Library

Adela Breton & Pablo Solario in Mexico, ca. 1890s-1900s. Image (EA11507) copyright Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Used here with kind permission- this image is not for re-use elsewhere.

In 1900, Adela Catherine Breton, a fifty-year-old Victorian gentlewoman from Bath, began her journey around Mexico on an archaeological quest to make detailed watercolour records of the Mayan ruins.

Adela Breton’s travels in Mexico are unveiled through her diary and the series of letters written by and about her. They describe a way of life far removed from her comfortable upbringing: hunger, heat, fever and insect bites plagued her as she worked.

For the final 23 years of her life, Adela dedicated her time to recording the subtle nuances in colour found in the frescoes of Chichén Itzá and other notable sites. Camping among the Mayan ruins, she worked tirelessly and, according to her contemporaries, somewhat obstinately. She was an extraordinary woman who broke the stereotypes of a Victorian spinster and became a traveller, an explorer, an archaeologist and an artist whose paintings have endured where the ruins have not.

Adela died in Barbados on 13 June 1923, aged 73. She bequeathed her archive to the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Her paintings are the sole record of the vibrant colours that once adorned the temples and are still used today, most recently as a source of information for the Maya Skies project. History may have all but forgotten her but her legacy lives on.

Written by Kate Devlin (@drkatedevlin)