connected with the development of archaeology and anthropology in the rest of the world and with specific processes in the historical, political, and social configuration of Mexico. During the twentieth century, archaeology related directly to the political and ideological needs of the Mexican national state. Starting with the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, which was ended by a revolution in 1911, and continued by subsequent postrevolutionary movements, the monuments of the pre-Hispanic peoples have been utilized as an ideological base for an ethnic and cultural identity to fortify the growing nationalist sentiments needed by the new groups in power. Since the nineteenth century, Mexican nationalist governments have promoted a series of laws and regulations to conserve and protect historical and archaeological patrimony, and these laws and regulations were truly advanced for the time. The first of these, a law prohibiting the export of antiquities, dates to 1827, shortly after Mexico’s independence from Spain.

Nationalist movements have largely determined and defined one of the major traditions of archaeological research in Mexico: archaeology centered on the exploration, restoration, and reconstruction of ancient buildings and monumental sites or “zones.” This tradition started at the end of the nineteenth century, and although there have been changes in key concepts, techniques, and goals, it is still the major type of archaeology today, stimulated and maintained by the state because of the political and ideological functions of archaeological monuments.

The Beginnings of Archaeology in Mexico

The beginning of archaeology in Mexico can be divided into two periods: the first starting around 1840 and ending in 1880; the second extending between 1880 and 1910, during which time there was a notable increase in the number of scholars interested in the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico.

The most influential scholarly work that mentioned ancient Mexico and was published before the first initial period were the studies of the naturalist and philosopher Alexander von Humboldt (1814). Other important contributions were the books recording visits to maya ruins written by john l. stephens (1841) and illustrated by frederick catherwood. These do not indulge in speculations typical of the time proposing migrations of peoples from the Old World to explain the origins of American civilizations. Both Stephens and Catherwood attributed the ruins of Yucatán, Chiapas, and Central America to the ancestors of the contemporary Maya, and this conclusion helped change the interpretations of many scholars in the Americas and Europe concerning the cultures of pre-Hispanic Mexico.

Between 1840 and 1870, the French priest Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg established himself as the first general Mesoamericanist. His contributions were mainly in linguistics and ethnohistory, but he also advanced archaeological knowledge considerably through his effort to establish ties between contemporary indigenous peoples and pre-Hispanic cultures using Spanish colonial documents and native histories from the sixteenth century. He learned several Maya languages, made some of the first attempts to translate Maya hieroglyphs, and edited the first published edition of the Popol Vuh (the most important surviving Maya epic cycle). He also discovered and edited an encyclopedic sixteenth-century account by Bishop Landa of Maya culture in Yucatán at the time of the Spanish conquest. The Landa manuscript contains descriptions of some of the hieroglyphs that eventually made possible the first successful phonetic translations of ancient Maya writing.

During the same period, early syntheses of ancient highland Mexican history were made by Garcia Icazbalceta and Orozco y Berra. Their work is especially important because, in some cases, it is based on native codices and other original manuscripts that have since disappeared. In 1858, the geographer García Cubas published a geographical and statistical atlas of Mexico that included a number of archaeological sites, and in the 1870s, he produced important descriptions of teotihuacán and Tula.

The French archaeologist-explorer Désiré Charnay arrived in Mexico in 1858 and continued his investigations there until the 1880s. His contributions include the introduction of photography to record monuments in the Maya area