There are many stories told in The Market for Mesoamerica, all bringing us to the current situation: there are thousands of objects in dozens of museums and in a far larger number of private collections, objects that bear few clues to their origins or, at the very least, few clues that provide secure knowledge of origin rather than a history of ownership. The essays in this volume recount different pieces of the larger story, by and large about Maya works but also about Mesoamerica at large. Yes, there are international agreements, starting in 1970 with the UNESCO agreement that the United States would sign in 1983, and yes, there are laws that have been effective in the United States, beginning with the 1972 law banning importation of monumental stone sculpture and architectural works into the United States from archaeological contexts in Mexico. There have been careful studies and memoranda of understanding built around individual categories of objects, and significant objects have been returned to countries of origin—most specifically in terms of ownership, if not possession, of various Maya stelae to Guatemala, one of which is discussed by James Doyle in this volume. As Donna Yates, one of the editors of the volume, notes in the final essay, laws and MOUs have worked to stem the market of the monumental pretty effectively: the supply of stone monuments and painted murals coming into U.S. and European collections came to a quick end early in the 1970s, only to lead to prolific looting of Maya tombs, and so the small-scale and often hand-held object, made of ceramic or shell or jade, has continued to enter the market, the collection, and the museum. As a result, sites look like moonscapes of collapsed structures, yet often marked by clean trenches made by workers left without legitimate employment when archaeological projects come to an end. The history of looting is marked by one unintended consequence after another.

This review cannot address the story of the loss of prehispanic art, culture, knowledge, and so much more during the viceregal period in Latin America, especially during the sixteenth century, when most idolatrous books and images were burned and smashed, allowing only a few curiosities to survive. Starting in the eighteenth century, in an independent Mexico, diplomats from around the world made collections that they took back to their countries, including Joel Poinsett, the first U.S. minister plenipotentiary to Mexico in 1825. John Lloyd Stephens, commissioned as a diplomat to Central America by President Van Buren in 1839, brought his extensive collection to the Smithsonian, where it was consumed by the fire of 1865. We know the drawings by Frederick Catherwood of his travels with Stephens in detail, but because Stephens's materials were physically brought to the United States, they were never recorded, or if they were, those materials were lost at sea along with Catherwood himself in 1854. Later in the century, archaeologists would bring back materials through “partage,” a practice that continued in some countries until relatively recently, as Christina Luke points out in her informative essay that addresses the way that foreign investment in Latin American infrastructure intersected with archaeology. The large section of the Copan staircase at Harvard, now installed at the Peabody Museum, spent some 20 years at the Fogg—recognized as a seminal work of art—before being deemed too ethnographic and returned to the Peabody in the 1930s. Before World War II, Mesoamerican art was indeed largely the province of the natural history museum and the private collector, and it remains well represented there today. Few art museums even dipped their toes into the works of Mesoamerica before 1940. Those that did, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, made purchases and then changed their minds; the Met sent their prehispanic materials off to the American Museum of Natural History across Central Park.

These idiosyncratic histories gave way around 1940 to a new global commerce in Mesoamerican art. Principally known publicly today through the sales at Sotheby's in New York, works ripped from archaeological contexts in Latin America and spirited to Europe and the United States became part of modern commerce. But the Sotheby's sales, the subject of Cara Tremain's essay, are only a small part of the story: the Stendahl Gallery of Los Angeles would capitalize on the closed shipping lanes during World War II and an emerging market in Hollywood to change the market forever, developing the business that delivered the greatest volume of Mesoamerican art to private collectors and museums, as well as forging new relationships with art museums. The Stendahl Gallery is now closed, but the unrelated website arteprimitivo.com conducts a volume business in a marketplace that asks few questions. Now that Sotheby's—which has reopened a formal precolumbian department after having shut it down for some years—has discovered the sheer dollar value of provenance, the firm examines the history of ownership with due diligence. An Aztec female deity figure acquired in 1937 by the Albright-Knox Museum and then deaccessioned yielded about 10 times the auction house estimate when it was sold in 2007 for $1,216,000.

The authors of this volume contribute valuable individual narratives, largely based on individual objects. There is a way in which the essays are like a certain kind of archaeological process itself, sinking what archaeologists call “telephone booths” into the earth, recovering strategic but limited information, especially given the pains that were taken to keep the framework under wraps. A version of the big picture was told in 1993 by Michael D. Coe, in “From Huaquero to Connoisseur: The Early Market in Pre-Columbian Art” (in Boone, ed., Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past, 1993), a documentation of the collaboration that the market required among in-country nationals, runners, and U.S. dealers from 1940 onward but cited in this volume only by Martin Berger and Rosemary Joyce; other essays would have benefited from consulting it. The early days, as the business to the United States took hold in the late 1930s and 1940s, focused on the Valley of Mexico, following the lead of Mexican looting and collecting, with particular attention to Teotihuacan and Tlatilco, areas of interest to Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias, to name just two of the prominent Mexicans who amassed large collections. Over the course of the 1950s there would be heavy looting across Veracruz, and on the Maya Island of Jaina, a source for collectors since the mid-nineteenth century; yet these were also years in which many (preexisting) collections across Mexico would be sold to middlemen and then on to Europe and the United States and in which many carved stones at unguarded or undocumented sites were picked up by the trade. But these sources tapped out, and the Veracruz ceramics, as Nancy Kelker points out, became the subject of forgery and pastiche, which Adam Sellen previously noted for Oaxaca. A key claim by Kelker remains implausible and unsubstantiated: according to her essay, Brígido Lara attests to having made 40,000 Veracruz-style objects (really, 40,000?), including the famous wind god ceramic (also known as Ehecatl [1978.412.27,] illustrated on p. 160) at the Met—but Nelson Rockefeller had purchased that very sculpture by 1957, when Lara was 15. It's a fishy story.

There is far more work to be done, both in mapping the big story and in the granular detail. But The Market for Mesoamerica takes a new step for others to lean on and to build from as the story comes into sharper focus in the next few years.