The Pursuit of Ruins joins the growing historiography on the cultural politics of the Porfiriato, the 40-year period straddling the turn of the twentieth century that ended decades of civil strife and enlisted the sciences to achieve a strong, unified, modern Mexico. The study of Mexico's pre-hispanic past benefited directly from the particular alliance between the state and state-sponsored archaeology, and produced a regime of management – collection, conservation, display – of pre-hispanic vestiges which endures to this day. Bueno's book goes beyond the more teleological narratives of Mexican archaeology in the service of national identity both to ask new questions about archaeology's more canonical figures and cast light on the forgotten agents, human and non-human – caretakers at the ruins, villagers, politicians, foreign collectors, speculators, railway trains, mould and photographs – that were involved in the making of the Mexican archaeological object.

The first part of the book offers a somewhat sweeping panorama of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarianism, for which Bueno relies mostly on second-hand sources, albeit with little acknowledgment of recent Mexican scholarship on the topic. Bueno highlights the more sensationalist episodes of Mexican archaeology (French explorer Desirée Charnay's petition to export Mexican antiquities and the ensuing confrontation over whether Mexicans or foreigners were best suited to study Mexico's past; US consul Edward Thompson's dredging of the Sacred Cenote at the Maya site of Chichén Itzá). And she reduces the complexities of collecting into neat binaries (historians vs. archaeologists, museum professors vs. field explorers, with an obvious bias against the former, who are described as reading the pre-hispanic past in ‘almost-mystical’ and ‘ethereal’ ways (p. 70) or as spending their days fecklessly arranging objects in the National Museum). Still, Bueno does make some important points here, mostly concerning the emergence of Mexican antiquities as objects of science and of national politics. This process was predicated on the insuperable divide between the enlightened ancient inhabitants of Mexico and their descendants in the nineteenth century and implied the transformation of the regimes of use of pre-hispanic remains (their uses in religious ceremonies or as construction elements were rejected in favour of their use as evidence in a science of Mexico's past), their displacement and centralisation (from the field to the National Museum), and their new legal status as ‘property of the nation’, which prohibited ‘anyone from exploring, touching, and restoring them without permission from the government’ (p. 81).

Enter Leopold Batres, the Inspector of Monuments, a military man by profession and a friend of Porfirio Díaz, who created the post expressly for Batres, in 1885, despite the latter's limited training in archaeology. Batres's duties were conceived broadly: he created and supervised a network of guards, monitored the work of individuals who had been granted government contracts to excavate, and oversaw the centralisation of pre-hispanic objects under the authority of the Mexican state. Yet, despite Batres's undeniable sway over the archaeology of the Porfiriato, most histories of archaeology make little room for his looming presence (his ‘archaeological dictatorship’, p. 80) and few concessions to his ad-hoc and improvised ways of working. Bueno's book comes to remedy that absence. Drawing richly on both private and public archival material (one can only wish she had been more forthright with her references), she tells the story of Porfirian archaeology through Batres, the in-between who was geographically ubiquitous (he seems to have been at the same time in Xochicalco, Mitla and Yucatan) and whose comings and goings put him in contact with characters from all over the social scale.

Delving into Batres's personal archives, Bueno casts light on forgotten characters, such as the guards, some of whom – the members of the Verazluce family in Morelos, for instance – went beyond the call of duty (to care for the site) to become students of Mexico's past and to participate in archaeological explorations. If being guard-in-chief put Batres at the centre of a dynamic of power which reproduced Díaz's own clientelist politics, his relations with explorers of ruins played out colonialist tensions at the heart of the collection and study of Mexican artefacts, which were perceived as being better served by foreign scholars and collectors. Batres tried to ensure such was not the case, which brought him face to face with men and women better trained in field techniques and methods. Marshall Saville, Zelia Nuttall and Manuel Gamio (Mexico's first PhD in archaeology) all saw their work obstructed by Batres at one time or another.

Batres's dogged attempts to centralise Mexico's pre-hispanic material legacy in the museum in Mexico City were another source of tension: displacing massive stone objects, such as the Teotihuacan Chalchiuhtlicue or the Chacmool from the museum in Mérida, as well as the failed attempt to secure La India of Xochicalco, allow glimpses into the ways Mexico's ancient past implicated regional and national politics. Local resistance to Batres's pursuit of ruins undermines the widely accepted claims that the Porfiriato had achieved national unity, by making manifest that there was never absolute consensus that the remains of Mexico's past belonged in a museum in the capital. Still, as Bueno quips, ‘the most important mechanisms for getting artifacts into the Museum were the train and Batres’, (p. 177) even if this meant it took the statue of Chalchiuhtlicue five months, at a snail's pace of 200 metres a day, to arrive in Mexico City. Batres faced no task as titanic as that of reconstructing the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, on the occasion of the first centenary of independence in 1910, a task which required diverse types of expertise: the capacity to negotiate with the peasants to sell their land to the government; the efficient organisation of the archaeological camp at Teotihuacan, which he ran like a military camp; his audacity to imagine the pyramid (‘How does one reconstruct a pyramid?’ (p. 195), Bueno pointedly asks). The final product looked different from the ‘original’ (after all, what was at stake was not authenticity but turning the ruins into ‘an official site to showcase Mexico as a great, modern nation with a prestigious ancient past’ (p. 208)) and some dynamiting was probably involved in its ‘reconstruction’.

Questionable practices such as these have caused Batres not to be taken seriously by historians of archaeology. Having ended up on the wrong side of the political spectrum, at the moment of the Revolution of 1910, and of the scientific divide, after the coming of age of a generation of university-trained archaeologists, Batres came to be regarded as little more than an amateur. There is no denying that he was an amateur, just as there is no denying he did embody a way of doing science at the height of the Porfiriato. Bueno's book is an important contribution to the history of science and to cultural history by making a case for the centrality of non-professionals and amateurs, like Batres and his collaborators, to the very shaping of scientific disciplines.