and the use of plaster molds to produce accurate copies of monuments (Graham 1971). In Tula, Hidalgo, the site of the ancient toltec capital Tollan, Charnay made some of the first extensive excavations of ancient residential architecture in mesoamerica. He was also the first to notice and publish similarities between the art and buildings of Tula and chichén itzá in Yucatán (Charnay 1885).

The thirty years from 1880 to 1910 saw a great increase in the number of scholars studying pre-Hispanic Mexican cultures. Three important Mexican investigators of this period were Del Paso y Troncoso, A. Peñafiel, and Leopoldo Batres. Although the first two were principally historians, Del Paso y Troncoso was also director of the national archaeological museum and published studies of ancient ceramics and monuments. Subsequently, he spent years editing colonial texts from archives in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, and these are invaluable sources of cultural information for both historians and archaeologists. Peñafiel made some of the first systematic studies of ancient Mexican ruins, which were published in Spanish in Berlin (Peñafiel 1890). He also produced analyses of toponyms and other linguistic topics useful to archaeologists.

Batres’s work is still controversial because of his role as the “official” archaeologist for the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship. He excavated key sites including monte albán, Mitla, Xochicalco, and tenochtitlán and is best known for the massive restorations at Teotihuacán that were made in preparation for the 1910 celebration of the centenary of Mexico’s independence from Spain. Batres’s archaeological work in general was not as bad as many of his critics have maintained, and his programs have historical importance because they marked the beginning of the tradition of direct intervention by the Mexican state in the exploration and restoration of ancient monumental sites.

The end of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth witnessed basic contributions to Maya studies, especially in epigraphy. The first corpus of inscriptions from major Maya centers, many only recently discovered, was published by Maudslay and Maler, and their reports also contain photographs of monuments that since have disappeared or have been damaged. The quality of Maudslay’s photographs and his drawings of inscriptions set the standard for decades and is superior to that of American sylvanus morley’s (1938) publications. The first decipherments of dates in Maya texts were proposed by Forstemann, Goodman, and Bowditch, and their chronology for the Maya area served as the basis for correlating relative chronological sequences in other regions of Mesoamerica.

During the 1890s, the American Edward Thompson did fieldwork in northern Yucatán, including a regional study around Labna and excavations at Chichén Itzá. His removal of subaquatic items from the cenote or “sacred well” of Chichén caused serious problems between the Mexican government and Harvard University because Thompson clandestinely sent many of the items to the peabody museum where they remained for several decades before being returned to Mexico.

william h. holmes of the smithsonian institution made basic contributions in several fields of archaeology, and his famous 1886 study concerning the origins of ceramics in the Americas included data from Mexico, and some aspects of it are still valid. Shortly afterward, Holmes made a pioneer study of architectural planning in Teotihuacán and several other ancient Mexican cities. He promoted the systematic analysis of lithic, shell, and other archaeological materials and was the first to excavate pre-Hispanic obsidian mines in Mesoamerica, producing an outstanding report on the quarries of the Sierra de Pachuca, Hidalgo, in 1900. Another pioneer investigator was the Czech ales hrdlicka. His main contributions were to physical anthropology, but he also did archaeological work on the northern periphery of Mesoamerica at La Quemada, Zacatecas, and a series of centers that would later be used to define the Chalchihuites culture.

Without doubt, the most important Mesoamericanist during the decades before 1910 was the German scholar Eduard Seler, and his vast works are still necessary reading in many fields. He made the first systematic studies of ancient Mexican and Maya iconography, and his analyses