The first important investigation in the colony was carried out in 1896 by Thomas Gann, an Anglo-Irish physician posted to the colony in 1893 and initially stationed at Corozal Town, close to the Mexican border in the north. The mounds of Santa Rita lay on the outskirts of Corozal and were even then being mined for building stone. Gann’s curiosity was aroused, and he began a career of amateur digging that continued until shortly before his death in 1938. His methods were crude, and his laborers were often left unsupervised for days at a time, but his records are the only ones extant for many sites, especially around Corozal, that are now vanished. His initial work at Santa Rita was done with care and included the recording of a set of polychrome murals in the “International Style of the Late Postclassic” (Robertson 1970); these were published by the society of antiquaries of london and again by the smithsonian institution (Gann 1900), and Gann’s tracings have proved both accurate and of enduring value.

Gann also developed a descriptive typology for Maya mounds, distinguishing house-platforms, courtyard groups, and temple-pyramids; he explored the ruins of Lubaantun in the south of Belize, Xunantunich in the far west, Laguna de On in the north, Wild Cane Cay, and other coastal islands, and in the 1930s he worked at Nohmul and finally at Louisville. His reports on these sites (including a series of five or six popular books—see the bibliography in Hammond 1983b, as well as Pendergast 1993a), though not of professional quality, led to subsequent scholarly investigation of all of them, and he was noted for encouraging archaeologists to visit the colony.

Among the expeditions stimulated by Gann’s initial discoveries were those to Lubaantun by R.E. Merwin in 1915 (which resulted in the identification of the first classic period ballcourt in the southern lowlands) and those of the british museum under T.A. Joyce in 1926 and 1927. In the latter year j. eric s. thompson joined the museum staff, carried out useful stratigraphic tests, and disproved most of Joyce’s treasured notions on the great age and architectural uniqueness of the Lubaantun ruins. The discovery of Pusilhà, with its numerous well-preserved stelae that were removed to London, diverted the museum’s attention from 1928 to 1930, after which formal British involvement in the archaeology of British Honduras was suspended for four decades.

The British Museum expeditions were among the first of the institutional period (1924– 1970), during which Maya archaeology was dominated by the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Division of Historical Research, under the direction of sylvanus g. morley and then alfred v. kidder. Carnegie personnel working on numerous projects in the Peten, especially the long-term excavations at Uaxactun, gained access through Belize, but the only Carnegie work carried out in the colony was done by Eric Thompson. Having investigated the small center of Tzimin Kax in the Maya Mountains for the Field Museum of Chicago, Thompson was recruited by Kidder and continued his important work at San José, intended as a study of a “typical” small Maya site to balance the major Carnegie projects at Uaxactun and Chichén Itzá. Thompson (1939) brought in Anna O. Shepard to carry out paste analyses of pottery—a pioneering application of archaeological science perhaps stimulated by the broadband approach employed by the Carnegie Institution in Yucatán.

When World War II caused a temporary cessation of major Maya projects, less than a dozen sites in Belize had been professionally investigated, and no local administration of archaeology existed even though good legislation had been passed in 1924. After the war Hamilton Anderson, a colonial civil servant who had carried out the initial exploration of Caracol in 1938 and been the governor’s informal adviser on archaeology became Belize’s first archaeological commissioner in 1957. Anderson invited