Archives conceal as much as they reveal, and what they hold and exclude is a reflection of power—the power to preserve, order, make available. The voices of the past lie buried, and it takes a patient and knowing guide to make them heard.

Christina Bueno is such a guide. Her wonderful new book, The Pursuit of Ruins: Archaeology, History, and the Making of Modern Mexico, expertly brings a rich and archivally complex story to light, telling the story of Mexico's Porfiriato era (1876–1911) not through industrial development or other schemes of modernization, as is often the case, but through its deep entanglement with the indigenous past. This is a book about material culture but also about much more. Like the archaeologists she brings to life, Bueno takes us ever deeper into the layered meanings of the past, unfolding the roles of high officials and common people alike, and in the process weaving a highly readable account of one of the most important eras in Mexican history.

It was during this period, she explains, that Mexico witnessed heightened interest in its rich archaeological history among foreign savants. Alfred Maudslay, Edward Thompson, Désiré Charnay, Zelia Nuttall, and many others from France, Britain, and the United States came to Mexico to explore, dig, study, and at times pillage. Many priceless objects, such as the Yaxchilan lintels (now at the British Museum) departed from Mexico's shores and ended up in foreign collections, at times, sadly, with the complicity of corrupt or greedy Mexican officials. Abroad, the prestige of Mexican archaeology rose. At the same time, Mexican officials under President Porfirio Díaz sought to harness the study of the indigenous past to specific national narratives of Mexico's greatness. Museums were modernized; laws were passed to prevent the exportation of artifacts; regional efforts were tied to centralized systems of control; massive digs were launched, at Teotihuacan, for example; vast new bureaucracies, along with newly invented government positions, were put in place; and participation in world's fairs and international exhibitions was encouraged. Artifacts from all across Mexico were collected, transported, stored, inventoried, displayed, and analyzed. Driven by the scientific positivism of the Porfiriato, this massive coordination of archaeological activity represented an unprecedented mobilization of the power of the state to order and control the past. The ensuing focus on an Aztec-centered vision of the Mexican past had explicit ideological aims: it “legitimized the power of the Mexican state by giving it an existence that stretched back to Aztec times, one that reflected the elites’ perception of the nation and their place within it” (p. 42).

Bueno begins her analysis of these developments by surveying the work of foreign archaeologists and savants and analyzing the discipline they helped to establish: Americanism. Driven by a logic of racial superiority, foreign scientists such as Maudslay arrived in Mexico with fixed ideas about the hierarchical ordering of peoples. They combined an interest in the aesthetic artifacts of the ancient priestly castes with a studied disdain for the local people living around the monuments, whom they regarded as degraded. Local people were useful to the extent that they could serve as bearers of heavy archaeological equipment or as laborers who cleared monuments in preparation for photography. Influenced by French scientific racism, Charnay denied that the Mexican “Indians” had progressed at all over the centuries, while Maudslay and his wife, Anne Cary Maudslay, complained bitterly that the local people were full of superstitions about treasure, even as they removed artifacts themselves under questionable auspices. Bueno's treatment of the foreign context, if familiar from the work of other scholars, is crisply done and provides a necessary foundation for her greater subject, the uses of archaeological inquiry among Mexican elites.

Here is where Bueno shines. Rather than retell her story from secondary works on the history of archaeology, Bueno digs into the personal and professional papers of her subjects, which are in the national archives (Archivo General de la Nación de México), the National Museum of Anthropology, and most importantly, the archives of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). Her archival work is extensive, rich, and detailed—a granularity that sets this work apart in the field.

The main focus of this close-grained approach is Leopoldo Batres, the Inspector of Monuments, a powerful and flawed figure at the center of this entire history. His position, which would eventually evolve into the director of what we now call INAH, gave him enormous power to shape the narrative of the Mexican past that was unfolding in this period. As Bueno formulates it, the specification of a common indigenous past “was thought to endow the country's diverse population with a common origin. It also gave Mexico, a nation marked by centuries of colonialism, an ‘authentic’ and prestigious past, one that challenged its inferior place within the global order” (p. 92). Using his enormous, centralizing power, Batres mapped Mexico's archaeological sites, directed their cleaning and restoration, ordered the removal and relocation of large monuments, and, most importantly, bestrode the still-controversial excavation of Teotihuacan, which he promulgated as an essential embodiment of Mexican greatness.

Bueno's treatment of Batres and other officials who vied alongside him for prestige and influence is notable for not succumbing to the “great man” theory of history. She is unusually sensitive to minor voices—the ordinary people whose stories are still too infrequently told in works such as this one. Again, we owe these poignant stories to Bueno's hard intellectual labors in the archives. To be sure, these are voices that speak from the margins. They could easily be overlooked. Bueno makes them not only accessible but also indispensable to the history she tells.

Written in an appealing style suitable for readers from the undergraduate level and up, The Pursuit of Ruins is an important and compelling book. By means of laborious work in the primary materials of the Mexican state, Bueno tells a fresh story of the extent to which that state, during the Porfiriato, employed the indigenous past to craft a vision of itself as a modern nation.