Copán Stela H

Stela H was dedicated in 730 CE by Waxaklajuun Ub'aah K'awiil, known popularly as 18 Rabbit, the thirteenth king of Copán. He had himself carved wearing the netted skirt of jade beads belonging to the young Maize God, caught mid-dance at the moment of Creation, a costume meant to blur the line between the king and the god he embodied. The claim to divinity did not hold for long. Eight years after this monument went up, on 27 April 738, 18 Rabbit was captured by K'ak' Tiliw Chan Yopaat of Quiriguá, a former vassal, and beheaded six days later. Copán raised no major new monuments for roughly eighteen years.

The stone itself is now going the same way. Copán's volcanic tuff contains smectite clays that swell when humidity rises, cracking the surface into scales half a millimeter to three millimeters thick that eventually spall off. Comparing photographs of the Hieroglyphic Stairway taken in 1895 and 2004, researchers found that roughly a century of open-air exposure erased more detail than the thousand years the stone spent buried. Biocides and acrylic sealants both failed. Conservators are now testing a stranger remedy, feeding bacteria that already live in the stone so they precipitate calcium carbonate and cement the crumbling surface from within.