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Research Frontiers in Spanish Central America

Posted: November 3rd, 2014

Friday, November 14, 2014 10:00 a.m. Speaker’s Corner, Stauffer Library.  Presentation by W. George Lovell (Geography, Queen’s), Christopher H. Lutz (CIRMA, Guatemala), and Wendy Kramer (CIRMA, Guatemala) in recognition of the Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies Collection at Queen’s University.

CIRMA, the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, was co-founded in 1978 by Christopher H. Lutz and William R. Swezey (1933-1989) in the old colonial capital of Central America today known as Antigua Guatemala. The acquisition for CIRMA, through the good offices of Dr. Oscar H. Horst (1924-2010), of the library of Dr. Franz Termer (1894-1968), one of the twentieth century’s greatest scholars of Mesoamerica, was a landmark event. Armed conflict in Guatemala in the 1980s, alas, meant that the Termer Collection had to be housed, for safe keeping, at Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies (PMS) in Vermont until a peace accord was signed in 1996, whereupon it was moved to CIRMA (www.cirma.org.gt), its permanent home. Some of the collection, however, stayed behind at PMS, including also parts of the personal library of Dr. Horst. The remaining titles from both these libraries, a generous gift that we acknowledge today, now form the Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies Collection at Queen’s University.