Revealing Ancestral Central America - Smithsonian Latino Center ...

Fig. 107
While constructing Costa Rica’s first railroad,
Minor Keith introduced wildly popular
bananas into the American diet. When his
completed line lacked paying riders, Minor
used it to export more and more bananas
from his nearby fields (which helped feed his
workers) until a new industry was born. Keith
ultimately merged his successful banana
importing business with Andrew Preston’s
Boston Fruit Company in 1899 to form the
United Fruit Company. Along the way, Keith
had married Cristina Castro, the daughter of a
former Costa Rican president. At the time of
his death in 1929, Keith was one of the most
influential U.S. citizens in the region, the
“uncrowned king of Central America.”
In 1916, Minor Keith served as a founding
trustee of the Heye Foundation museum.
His relationship to the museum may be
attributed in part to the colossal 16,000-item
private collection he amassed from ancestral
cities like Las Mercedes (Figure 108), near
Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, during the
railroad construction. Approximately onethird
of that collection now forms the nucleus
of the Central American collections at the
National Museum of the American Indian,
Smithsonian Institution.
Fig. 107. Jesús Alpízar
worked for Minor Keith
and excavated archaeological
sites on United
Fruit Company lands. He
also assisted Museum
of the American Indian
staff member Alanson
Skinner during excavations
at Las Mercedes in
Limón Province, Costa
Rica. Photo by Alanson B.
Skinner, 1917.
Fig. 108. Central
Caribbean/Costa Rican
Atlantic Watershed
tripod vessel with jaguarpelt
design and effigy
handles, AD 800–1500.
Las Mercedes, Limón
Province, Costa Rica.
Pottery, clay slip, paint.
Collected or excavated
by Alanson B. Skinner,
1916–1917.
Fig. 108
73 minor keith