These Ruins you see

Mariana Castillo Deball

Ciudad de MéxiCo

2008

This publication is part of the project These Ruins you see, it includes the project’s research, realization, and a series of specially

commissioned essays.The project has manifested in different exhibitions, publications, and lectures.

These Ruins you see was exhibited at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil from

November 8, 2006 to February 28, 2007.

© 2008 Mariana Castillo Deball,Sternberg Press, the authors

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Texts by Jorge IIbargüengoitia © Joy Laville 2008

Editor: Mariana Castillo DeballCopy Editing: Courtney Johnson,

Maia Fernández MiretGraphic Design: Mariana Castillo Deball,

Manuel RaederTypeface: Pastiche by Manuel Raeder

with Hannes GloorPrinting: Vier-Türme GmbH,

Abtei Münsterschwarzach

sternberg PressCaroline Schneider

Karl-Marx-Allee 78, D-10243 Berlin1182 Broadway #1602, New York, NY 10001

www.sternberg-press.comISBN 978-1-933128-46-7

instituto nacional de Bellas ArtesISBN 970-802-048-6

CONSEJO NACIONAL PARA LA CULTURA Y LAS ARTES

President: Sergio Vela

INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE BELLAS ARTES

Director: María Teresa FrancoSubdirector: Ricardo Calderón Figueroa

National Coordinator of Fine Art:Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros

Communication and Public Relations Director: José Manuel Rueda

MUSEO DE ARTE CARRILLO GIL

Director: Carlos AshidaSubdirector: Sylvia Navarrete

Exhibitions coordinator: Leonardo RamírezProduction: Israel de León,

Curatorial department: Marisol Argüelles, Graciela Kasep

Communication: Dulce María Alvarado, Minerva Jalil

Design: Ernesto SolísEditorial department: Verónica Aguirre

ASSOCIATION OF FRIENDS MUSEO DE ARTE CARRILLO GIL

Honorary President: Carmen Carrillo TejeroPresident: Ester Echeverría

Coordinator: Verónica Santamarina

Thanks to:Familia Arellano, Familia Cirett, Joy Laville,

Alex Davidoff, Adriana Deball, Evelia Riveron, Maia Fernández Miret, Martha Hellion, Luis

Alejo, Libertad León

This publication has been made possible thanks to the support of: Fundación Colección Jumex, Aldabarte, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil

These Ruins you see

Mariana Castillo Deball

Ciudad de MéxiCo

2008

156 157

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTIONJesse Lerner

161

ESTAS RUINAS QUE VESMariana Castillo Deball

165

THE LANGUAGE OF STONESJorge Ibargüengoitia

167

THE PRE-HISPANIC PAST IN NATIONAL CULTUREVolume I: El Monitor Republicano (1877–1896), Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz. INAH, México, 1994.

174

IT RISES OR FALLS DEPENDING ON WHETHER YOU’RE COMING OR GOING. IF YOU ARE LEAVING, IT’S UPHILL; BUT AS YOU ARRIVE, IT’S DOWNHILL

Mariana Castillo Deball179

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF RELICSJorge Ibarguëngoitia

187

BECOMING PETRIFIED: THE MAKING OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSONHOOD

Sandra Rozental193

THE CONSUL OF DECEPTION:THE GREATEST ARCHAEOLOGICAL FAKER OF

THE TWENTIETH CENTURYAdam T. Sellen

225

158 159

Fig. 51

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DEBRIS INTHE LAKES OF CHAPULTEPEC PARK

Guadalupe Espinosa235

BRIGIDO LARA, POST-PRE-COLOMBIAN CERAMICISTJesse Lerner

247

NOTES CONCERNING A SCIENCE OFCREATIVE DESTRUCTION

Gabriela Torres-Mazuera255

MUSEUMS AS ADVENTUREJorge Ibargüengoitia

265

EXHIBITION VIEWS124

LIST OF FIGURES268

BIOGRAPHIES271

161

INTRODUCTIONJesse Lerner

In much of Mexico, as in Italy, Greece, most of the Middle East, and many other sites of prolonged human settlement, the archeological record has a way of regularly insinuating its way into everyday life.

As we change from one subway line to another at the Pino Suárez sta-tion, we pass a subterranean Domino’s Pizza franchise, a donut stand, and a restored Aztec altar. In the Mexican countryside, contractors building a foundation or an outhouse commonly unearth tepalcates (ancient ceram-ic fragments) in the course of their excavations. Their quotidian presence ought not make us immune to the extraordinary qualities of these ancient objects, nor should they blind us to the multiple ways in which this past and its material remains have been deployed here in Mexico toward a va-riety of ideological, aesthetic, and social ends.

Mariana Castillo Deball’s multifaceted project, entitled Estas Ruinas Que Ves, consists of a museum exhibition, a supplementary audio guide, the revision of several institutional archives, and this companion publi-cation. The aim of all this is not the display and elucidation of ancient Mesoamerican cultures or their ruins; for that, we have the National An-thropology Museum in Chapultepec Park, a host of smaller site museums, and other archeological institutions. This project, in contrast, centers on a meta-exhibition, an exhibition about the protocols and underpinnings of display, or, more metaphorically, the negative space that surrounds the exhibited objects. To gather materials for this exhibit, Castillo has ex-cavated not amid the ancient ruins, but in the warehouses, attics, and basements in which museums house their outmoded didactic materials, obsolete replicas, crates, cases, dusty models, broken casts, and dirty se-crets. Similarly, the exhibition catalogue is in part a collection of found objects and exhumed artifacts, bringing together a number of texts and illustrations—some of them contemporary and others historical—on the history of collections and exhibitions of pre-Cortesian objects, as well as the manufacture of replicas, the shadowy world of forgers, the relocation of key objects, and related themes. The objective of all of this excavation and collecting is to bring into sharp relief the ideological baggage and the range of museographic practices that always and inevitably frame our perception of these objects. As mute stones, whose messages are inde-cipherable to the vast majority—if not all—of today’s viewers, the ruins

Fig. 52

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ible—to anecdotal accounts of the discovery, excavation, or transport of noteworthy artifacts, also not on display. The production of these audio segments perfectly mimics their less conceptually adventurous counter-parts at other museums, in scripting, the narrators’ delivery as well as the musical choices.

From the portable quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape decks, introduced in the 1950s, to contemporary versions delivered through a visitor’s cellular phone, the audio guide has often been criticized as a flawed popularizing strategy, one that prescribes a fixed meaning to the art on display rather than making the art more accessible, and that encourages the visitor to passively listen to rather than to look at, think about, and engage with the work. In the case of Estas Ruinas Que Ves, however, the objects we hear about in the audio guide are largely absent, and the upbeat and expressive voices of the anonymous (but seemingly knowledgeable) narrators take us through what initially is a phantom exhibition involving a series of empty display cases. In fact, one is nearly halfway through the exhibition when one comes to the first physical object that unmistakably references the pre-Columbian: a series of empty polyurethane resin molds for casting synthetic Chac Mols and other duplicates. Once again, it is the negative space, not the object itself, that is displayed.

The stories that emerge from this negative space are multiple and com-plex. They speak to issues of cultural patrimony and politics, of the histo-ries of archeology and of institutions, and of struggles of the control and interpretation of material artifacts from the past.

In Mexico, these objects have most typically been deployed in the con-text of the nationalist project, providing mute testimonials of a noble past that serves as precursor to the modern state, and in the case of objects from pre-Cortesian Tenochtitlan, that implicitly justify an enduring centralism. But at the edges of the dominant national project are a vast number of other narratives that contest this centralism, some sampling of which Castillo Deball has presented here.

Local communities are not necessarily flattered or pleased to have their treasures carted off to take their honored place in the capital city’s show-places of national patrimony, and may actively fight to retain or recover these objects, as is the case with struggle of the village of Coatlinchan to recover (and subsequently, to replace with a facsimile) the Tlaloc statue now stationed outside the National Anthropology Museum. The contents of the museum may include both replicas, like the ersatz penacho of Mon-tezuma, standing in for the original which is located in Austria, and forg-

serve as the ideal blank screen upon which all sorts of fantasies may be projected. These may be nationalistic, imperialistic, or pan-Americanist in their politics, quixotic or rational in their validations, esoteric and mys-tical or empiricist and sober in their tone. But in all of these instances, the end results tell us little about the ruins or their builders, and much about the needs, concerns, and ideals of those engaged in these projections. In the case of this exhibition, our attention is directed toward this practice of projection and its workings and apparatuses and toward the mechanics of the past’s construction—an ideological task typically veiled, denied, or disguised under the shroud of supposedly elucidatory objectivity.

Museums are the crucibles in which any number of these usable ver-sions of the past are forged, and for this reason Castillo Deball focuses her attention on these productive sites. In previous projects, this artist has worked within other repositories of information, narratives, and frag-mentary artifacts from the past, such as libraries and antique shops. But museums present a special set of concerns and challenges. Shored up by complex networks of unequal social relations, at times contested by a host of social actors, and disguised as paradigms of objectivity, museums are always complex sites of power dynamics and politics. Within academia, the emergent field of museum studies has recently begun to systemati-cally explore these rich and knotty scenes of display, preservation, and interpretation, while within contemporary art, a wide range of practitio-ners, from the Guerrilla Girls to Louise Lawler, and from Andrea Fraser to Michael Asher, have taken the museum as muse, to borrow the title of an exhibition showcasing some of this work. These critical practices, both scholarly and artistic, aim to scrutinize the conventions, histories, and fundamental assumptions of the museum, its collections, practices, finances, and exhibitions. The particular circumstances and concerns of this project, however, make it stand out as something quite new and dif-ferent, in part because of the specific focus on archeological objects.

One of the central devices Castillo uses in developing and presenting her critique is the audio guide, that disembodied voice emerging from the hand-held electronic wands rented or loaned at the entrance of so many museum exhibitions. Unlike the museum installation itself, well docu-mented in this publication with photographs, the audio element of the exhibition is not represented here, and for this reason a fewwords specifi-cally describing its role and content are in order. The content of the indi-vidual recorded segments varies from the factual register of information about assorted archeological objects—objects that are not themselves vis-

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ESTAS RUINAS QUE VES Mariana Castillo Deball

Mexico’s relationship with archaeology is a complex one. In ad-dition to studying the distant past through its material ves-tiges, it is deeply engaged in more recent aspects of politics,

education, national identity, and public works. The various layers of our historical past are forever present, giving rise to continual interpreta-tions, reconstructions, demolitions, and annexations. Mexico’s archaeol-ogy is resolved in the present and our history is being modified like city landscapes, public policies, and textbooks. The project, Estas Ruinas Que Ves, shifts between politics, history, heritage, and identity in an attempt to find, in the present, the vestiges of archaeological practice.

Some very prominent archaeological objects have had an unsettled life, shifting between courtyards, cellars, pedestals, display cases, museums, touring exhibitions, and private collections. The representation of archae-ology has been spread through copies, illustrations, textbooks, models and souvenirs. The meaning and the authenticity of archaeological material are involved in this chain of infinite representation.

Victor Buchli defines the “archaeology of the contemporary past,”1 as an archaeology engaged with the here and now. Traditionally, in this field there exists a separation between archaeology and the object of study; in the archaeology of the present, to the contrary, this distance disappears and the archaeologist is exposed to a dynamic context and engages quite directly with the object under study.

Estas Ruinas Que Ves, is a project investigating the various parts that constitute archaeology’s context. The piece features an empty museo-graphical environment, an archive of documentary images, an audiogu-ide, and a publication. The various objects, texts, and images forming part of Estas Ruinas Que Ves revolve around an anthology of stories, which include, among others, the deciphering of the Mayan language by a Rus-sian linguist who never visited Mexico; a sighting of the Virgin in the cor-ridors of the subway; the story of how it began to pour when the rain god (the Coatlinchan monolith) reached the city of Mexico; the forger who requested a piece of clay in prison to prove his artistry; the president who believed himself to be the reincarnation of Quetzalcoaltl; the patrol that landed on the base of a pyramid; the archaeologist who protected his dis-coveries with dynamite and a sign to warn of the danger; etc.

1 Buchli, Victor and Gavin Lucas, eds., Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, 2001.

eries, manufactured by individuals with motivations that range from the banal (greed, profit) to the arcane. These and other narratives of archeo-logical research, foibles, and missteps provide Castillo Deball with a rich array of fragments to unearth, scrutinize, restore, and exhibit.

Mexico CityOctober 2006

Fig. 53

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THE LANGUAGE OF STONESJorge Ibargüengoitia

1

I might be accused of associating with only a select minority, but so far I haven’t met a single Mexican who yearns, or, less ambitiously, who would vaguely like to have his remains wind up in the Rotunda

of Illustrious Men (the hallowed cemetery housing the mortal remains of famous Mexicans). I have always found this idea perplexing, because it is obvious that hero worship and the frequent erection of monuments in their honor are on the upswing; they are transforming our cities and they come from a sentiment of emulation, or at least they ought to.

The fact that making monuments to heroes is one of the main indus-tries of a country where no one wants to be a hero should be looked into further. I have not had time to do this, so for the time being I am going to stick to irrefutable evidence.

A few years ago in San Miguel Allende, a Spanish doctor gave a talk in which he stated that this country had always been inhabited, since the remote past, by people who tended to undertake large, labor-intensive construction projects, and so far no one had been able to determine their practical purpose. His words were not only interesting, although a little insulting, but they were also prophetic, because, precisely in San Miguel Allende something has just happened that is a good example of this trend: the city market was torn down so that a statue of Independence hero Al-lende could be put up. The vendors had to set up shop in the street, turn-ing traffic into a nightmare, and the rats now live in private homes.

When I was a boy and used to spend time in Acapulco, I thought that when construction of that city was finished and one would no longer have to navigate around mounds of dirt, it was going to be very beauti-ful. Thirty years went by and I went back to Acapulco and I still had to navigate around mounds of dirt. Why? Because the buildings that used to be there—the pride of Mexican architecture at that time—had collapsed from old age, and also because they are building a monument to Indepen-dence heroes on the pier.

This monument does have some very interesting features; it has a tri-angular stone base with a bust at each of its corners. The one highest up is a bust of Hidalgo, three times natural size, represented with a pronounced convulsive smile. To his left, to the viewer’s right, there is a smaller bust

Fig. 54

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put up a monument to Hidalgo, the uproar would have been even greater. Surely, someone would have protested about erecting a monument to a figure that they were not even sure had been born in the state. And someone would have commented, “He was an intruder who came to ruin everything.”

El Pípila, we have to admit, is a perfect hero. His origin is obscure—about as clear as the place where he was born. Since his last name is not known, there is no danger his descendents will appear demanding pen-sions. His role in history was brief, eloquent, and decisive. His words, non-existent. This last attribute gave the then governor of the state a chance to put one of his own phrases on the base of El Pípila’s statue: “There are still granaries to be burnt down.” The phrase made the owners of the ha-ciendas of the time tremble, and if it were to appear in a dialogue in a movie, it would be seriously considered by the Cinematography Office as a candidate for cancellation. When the mines in Guanajuato petered out, ceasing to be the main industry of the town, and were replaced by tour-ism, they decided to make a monument to the miner.

With this objective, one of the nicest parks in town, and probably in the entire Mexican Republic, was ruined. The fountain that used to be in the middle was removed, and a pedestal was set up, one that seemed very original at the time, but now, after having watched the Olympics, we can see it as a bad imitation of a diving platform, or perhaps a rudi-mentary prototype of one. On this pedestal was placed a bronze figure of a Guanajuato miner, with a naked, slightly deformed torso and a helmet, of the kind no longer used, on his head. He holds in his hands and resting on his hip, as though growing out of his pants at a thirty-degree angle, an enormous jackhammer that seems, untiringly and perpetually, to attack nothingness. The monument is rounded out by a number of protuberances that arise from ground level and that are each topped by a bronze bust, sculpted from a postage stamp-sized photograph of the person depicted, whose name is on the pedestal. The principal defect of this part of the monument is that no one knows who these men were, because the names don’t ring a bell with anyone, although by inference one can suppose these busts represent men who paid with their lives for the carelessness, or stin-giness, of some mining company. Every time I go to Guanajuato and see this monument, it occurs to me that in time, say in two hundred years, when tourism has petered out, a monument to the hotel owner will be set up. I want to take advantage of this opportunity to suggest he be sculpted in formal attire with a carnation in his lapel, and presenting a bill.

of Morelos, twice natural size, easily recognizable because of the familiar bandana tied about his head. At the third corner, there is a bust of an un-known or, better said, unidentifiable person with a military uniform from the beginning of the nineteenth century, who could easily be Guerrero, Allende, Iturbide, or even Calleja.

One gleans two lessons from viewing this monument—one for the sculp-tor, and one for the viewer whose ambition is to become a hero.

The sculptor must understand that an observer who is not well versed in matters of baroque art sees the difference in size among the three busts on the same monument not as a difference in category of the individuals depicted there, nor as the magnitude of their respective enterprises, but simply as a difference in the size of their heads, and, from simply gazing at the monument, one might think that some of the figures represented there had huge heads, while some were microcephalic.

More interesting, and perhaps more useful, is the lesson this monument offers to the budding hero: if one is not bald or does not habitually wrap a cloth about his head, one must cultivate something that will give him an unmistakable stamp of originality, like, for example, wearing square eyeglasses, growing an unusual beard—very bushy, or very stringy, or very long—or covering an eye with a patch, because no one really looks at facial features, and a hero without an “image” is a hero who might as well not exist. At the entrance to Chilpancingo there is an extraordinary monument—extraordinary because of its originality. It is a rectangular block of stone, simply polished stone, without any decoration. It doesn’t even have a sign. I tried to find out what this monument is dedicated to, but no one was able to tell me. I kept thinking and thinking about what a rectangular block of polished stone could represent until I finally came up with the answer: it is a monument to a rectangular monolith, or per-haps it is the monolith itself.

2During the Cárdenas regime, the monument to El Pípila was built in

Guanajuato. When it was finished, everyone in Guanajuato said it was a monster, that it was badly proportioned, that El Pípila was not like that but was consumptive, that they called him “Pípila” because he had the face of a turkey, and so on. Who would have dared to say that after some time El Pípila would become Guanajuato’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower? And yet, nowadays, thirty percent of the postcards sold in Guanajuato have El Pípila on them. It is possible that if, instead of honoring El Pípila, they had

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gazing at the child she is holding, who evidently is her son, and is unaware that behind her an enormous bird—some say an eagle and others say a tormenter bird—is getting ready to devour her along with her offspring. A new monumentalist trend has appeared. It consists of representing ab-stract ideas by means of abstract forms; that is, they represent nothing but a lot of attention, because this is very important, plus some signs, which look like the name of a street, but which in reality are the expres-sions of the abstract idea they want to have represented. For example, no one would realize the monuments on the Route of Friendship had any-thing to do with friendship if the street on which they are placed was not so named. But that is its name, and, therefore, these monuments are monuments to friendship.

Nowadays the trend is moving toward even greater abstraction. In the future there will probably be no monuments, for buildings will be so expressive that merely seeing them will be enough for one to realize the aspirations of the people. Notable examples of this are the metro stations that express the desires of all Mexicans to achieve a better and higher standard of living. The entrance, paradoxically, leads downward, toward the bowels of the earth, where subway trains hurtle passengers, without mishaps, to, for example, Balbuena.

Translation: Debra Emy Nagao Ogawa

3Just as animal species apparently evolve according to the needs im-

posed on them by their environment, monuments go through an evolu-tion according to the needs of the governments that have them built. For example, the most important monument we have from the colonial era is the equestrian statue of a king, who probably never was a very good rider, who never dressed as a Roman except at breakfast or to go to a costume ball, and whose actions, history tells us, were one injustice after another. But he was a king. Period. End of story. They made him a statue, which today is called “el caballito,” or “the little horse.” Porfirio Diaz’s regime got involved in digging up heroes, some unknown and others famous, and representing them in a realistic style at decisive moments in their heroic career. Columbus, for example, holding in one hand a model of the earth as he conceived it, the other hand at his forehead, his gaze fixed on the horizon probably exclaiming to himself on seeing a line on the horizon: “America!” Or, perhaps, ignorant of the injustice that was going to befall him: “Columbia!”

Father Hidalgo, waving a banner, paying no attention to the golden an-gel above him who is shamelessly stealing the show is, undoubtedly, saying what they say he said that day: “Viva Mexico! Viva Ferdinand VII! Let’s go kill Spaniards!” The heroes of our sad wars are represented, or should be, falling into a void, wrapped in a flag, or with a broken sword out of its hilt, saying to the invader; “If we only had some ammunition!”

With the postrevolutionary governments, a new trend appeared on the horizon of Mexican monuments: successive attempts to represent abstract ideas in realist style. For example, a shirtless man, wiping his brow with one hand and holding a useless mallet, represents Work. (If we want to look for metaphors, the lack of a shirt might mean not only work, but also poorly remunerated work.) A woman with a child in her arms represents another abstract idea: Motherhood.

At the base of the Monument to Motherhood, in gold letters, there is an inscription that reads: “To the one who loved us before she met us.” Could you ask for anything more abstract? By the way, that phrase has always seemed to me to be incomplete. It ought to say, “To the one who, in some cases, loved us before she met us and to the one who, usually, after getting to know us, spoiled us rotten.” In this way the phrase is a little longer, but more precise, I think.

Social Security is another idea that has been represented by realist me-dia, in the following way: a woman, evidently a mother, is absorbed in

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MAYA GODS AND DYNAMITENewspaper El Monitor Republicano, July 31, 1878El Eco del Comercio of Mérida published two long letters from Dr.

Le Plongeon, in which this gentleman refers to the marvelous ancient Maya artworks that he has just found in the Uxmal ruins; we are go-ing to copy here the most important paragraphs from those letters: “I deplore, more for Yucatán than for me, the strange opposition to my scientific research, that I have suffered at the hands of the current pro-prietor of the monuments; that prevents me from declaring to the world all that the reading and interpretation of the inscriptions have revealed to me.

“For this purpose, and to prevent what happened to the bust of Cay from happening to the Chac-Mool statue, its brother, although there is little risk for the moment, since it is located in a spot apart seldom fre-quented even by the inhabitants of the hacienda, I have thought it conve-nient to return to close up the shrine where it was for many centuries.

“And to prevent the sacred antiquity of the monument from being vio-lated, or at least so the violator be punished, I have placed two charges, each one of two ounces of dynamite, in places convenient to defend the bust of Cay. So whoever dares touch the pieces, without my directions or instructions, will pay with their life for their daring.”

Fig. 57

THE CHAC-MOOL STATUENewspaper El Monitor Republicano, March 30, 1877The people of Yucatán have enthusiastically thrown a party in honor

of the movement of the above-mentioned statue to Mérida.The official newspaper of the State describes the figure in the following

terms: “Yesterday morning, the Jaguar-King effigy made its entry with the committee, which under the orders of Juan Peón Contreras, director of the museum of Yucatán, had gone as instructed by the governor and military commander in search of it in the forest next to the town of Pisté. An immense crowd of people filled the road that led from the Hacienda Multuncuc to this capital. When the statue reached the point known as ‘Galvez’s Cross,’ the military band broke into joyous notes, performing a warrior march compatible with the festivity.”

NOW IT CAN BE SEEN...Newspaper El Monitor Republicano, May 11, 1877“The crate containing the Chac-Mool statue, which is discarded in the

Plaza of Santo Domingo, has a broken board and the curious flock to see the Chac-Mool. It would be grand if the minister of Development put that statue to use. These things are of vital importance.”

Fig. 56

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Fig. 58

THE AzTEC CALENDARNewspaper El Monitor Republicano, December 20, 1887“That is to say the stone located at the foot of one of the towers of the

cathedral, because now it is not a matter of discussing whether it is a calendar or not: whichever it may be, the case is that the piety of it [the stone] is becoming a true focus of infection, for several owners of the shacks within the chains, and many of those who come to that site go there and do as they wish. Do the police understand us?”

ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERYNewspaper El Monitor Republicano, August 10, 1889The following was sent to the Federal Register for publication: “We

concur that to illustrate the nation’s history it would be a good idea to conduct excavations in the atrium of the Cathedral and Main Plaza, but it would be very bad for the public, for once the excavations began, they would be endless.

It would run the risk that the Town Hall, which tends to preserve, would preserve the holes and the rubble resulting from the research.”

THE WATER GODDESSNewspaper El Monitor Republicano, August 13, 1891“Mr. Leopoldo Batres has now started the work to bring to Mexico the

colossal monolith called Chalchiuhtlicue or the water goddess, which has remained in oblivion for centuries next to the pyramids of Teotihuacán. This stone is four meters in height and its weight is calculated to be eight hundred quintales [100-lb or 46-kg units].

To bring it, it is necessary to plan a provisional railway to reach the rails of the Veracruz railroad, some four kilometers. The enterprise of that route has generously offered help to move the curious monolith; Mr. Braniff Foot and Mr. Cuoto have offered the important elements that are available to give our Museum that monument.

The Minister of War lent a battalion of sappers and their intelligent arsenal workers.

The movement will last three months, because not only is the weight of the statue enormous, but it is also necessary to dig it out, for close to half of it is sunk in the earth.”

Translation: Debra Emy Nagao Ogawa

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IT RISES OR FALLS,DEPENDING ON WHETHER YOU’RE COMING OR GOING.

IF YOU ARE LEAVING, IT’S UPHILL; BUT AS YOU ARRIVE, IT’S DOWNHILL1

Mariana Castillo Deball

A series of interviews with antique dealers in the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat in Amsterdam develops into a journey throughout different periods of time and place. The antique dealer is a peculiar character who can le-gitimate what is valuable, what should be kept, and how an object can become a status symbol. This narrative is mixed with a particular event in Mexican archaeology: the the movement of the colossal stone statue of Tlaloc, a rain divinity, who lay for centuries in a dry stream bed in the village of Coatlinchan, thirty miles from Mexico City. On April 16th 1964, he was removed and transported on the back of a giant, specially built trailer to his present location, the entrance to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

1 It is raining in Mexico City. Tlaloc, the rain’s divinity, is entering the capital. The storm is not comparable with the ones of the rainy sea-

son. This shower is a punishment from Tlaloc to the people who dared to move him from his original place.

Tlaloc, the gigantic monolith weighting 167 tons, stayed lying on his back for fifteen centuries in a dry streambed in the village of Coatlinchan, thirty miles from Mexico City. The sculpture, built between the fourth and sixt centuries AD—the biggest monolith in the Americas—always attract-ed the attention of curious people, tourists and foreign researchers. It was at the beginning of the nineteenth century when archaeologists defined him as Tlaloc, the divinity of rain.

2“Can you send me that one in a fax, please? It’s the same number as this... yes, ok... It’s very difficult to get new pieces, but when you are in

Amsterdam, come and visit my shop (...) So, there is a lot of talking about ancient cultures, but people are not thinking very well; they think that I first go to Egypt, to dig, to do the stuff, and then I go to Mexico with my shovel, and then I go to Peru, you know. And then you hear the stories

1 Sentence taken from Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo.Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2005.Fig. 59

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6“My clients are getting old and they stopped buying, and young people are not interested, they buy fake furniture which looks nice,

and they have a big apartment where they hang huge paintings from the wall, or prints or whatever with no value, but it looks nice; and they like to travel—that’s how young people spend their money—they travel to faraway horrible countries (...) I know eight countries: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, zanzibar, Cameroon, Gabon (...) I travel not that much, the dealers send me the pictures and I say ‘bring it to me’ and if I don’t like it I ask them to take it back, so the traveling is not that impor-tant as it was before. You can actually buy items through the Internet; if you buy a sofa it is possible, but if you want to buy a cupboard it’s very hard because you need to see it, you need to stand in front of it. They make very nice, beautiful pictures, but reality is not always so beautiful.”

7Because the resistance continued, in a couple of days they built a school and a health center. The headlines read: “Tlaloc raising a

thunderstorm.” The testimony of one of the inhabitants reads: “It is pos-sible that through the veins of many of us, there is still blood running from our ancestors, people who made the sculpture. I understand the im-portance of archaeology and all that, but Tlaloc belongs to us.”

8“The real interest, that’s gone: twenty, thirty years ago you had sons of doctors—for example—and the father collected Rotterdam silver,

so they collected it as well, and they knew everything about it; but that’s a little bit gone, now they want to have one piece, one decorative piece, and they don’t really—they don’t recognize it anyway because that takes a lot of time—but they can’t imagine that the piece comes from the eighteenth century, for example, and that it was on the Louis XVI or Louis XV peri-od, and that it was used for something quite different than now. So that’s gone, the history idea. But it can be helped! Because they don’t even learn when Napoleon lived (...) I think life is influenced by so many different things, that we need to force ourselves to stand still and look at things carefully. Everything seems to be fading out. I was already in my thirties when I recognized or understood what history is, so I am not sure if young people understand how short history is. Now we think that 2,000 years is very much, but if you count, 2000 years is nothing but thirty times your father and his father and his father and his father. So if you speak about the seventeenth century, it’s just eight grandfathers before you! History still gets burned every second (...) They don’t learn anything at school in

from the museums, that all is illegal. They say that, but I want to know the real story about those things, because I don’t know that and I am in the business. Something happens always, but it’s not a lot; maybe here and there something is happening, but not as people believe. Because where is it, where is the stuff? I don’t see it (...) That’s not stealing, we were called amateur archaeologists, and we were digging, and we had a lot of fun with it—maybe that’s why I became an antique dealer—but not for the money, because it was a lot of work, and we never found treasures, just pottery and this and that. And a lot of the things I found are now in the museums, go to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen at the archaeological depart-ment, half of the things you will see there, come from my hands.”

3On Thursday, April 16th, 1964, it was moved to the museum of an-thropology in Mexico City. The authorities negotiated the statue for

a school, a health center, a local museum, and a replica of the divinity. Four decades later, it’s clear that almost all of those promises remained unfulfilled.

4“The real feeling for art is, art can be very much on the street (...) Not on the street, not on the street, if you are in the business for

many years you know where to go, I buy from private people, at auctions, from colleagues (...) Mainly through auctions, collections or people inherit-ing, and who have themselves nothing; occasionally through Africa, but there is not much left, already when I started you could find just third- or fourth-quality objects (...) There are always families who want to sell objects they have at home, and we see if they have any valuable items, and then we buy them and restore them.”

5There were several attempts by previous governments to move the monolith, but it was at the end of 1963 when the machinery started

to arrive. This time, the government came for the stone. After a big ma-neuver, the sculpture was lifted, ready for the move.

At that moment, the rebellion started. The inhabitants of Coatlinchan tried three times to prevent it from being moved. They broke the metal structure holding the enormous monolith so it fell again in its original place. They stopped and hit, in vain, the trailer and drivers. They also damaged the wheels of the platform; the children were lying on the mid-dle of the road to stop the vehicles. The day after, the army occupied the town, staying until the end of the operation.

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“And they look at me with a strange gaze, and I say, ‘Why it should be always better for you, why it can’t be better for me?’ Then they smile and they are funny, and usually they buy it.

“So, that’s the relationship I have with my clients.”

11The inhabitants of Coatlinchan, in the middle of the cutting morn-ing cold, said goodbye in silence to the god that stayed with them

for centuries. There were no incidents, but rather an atmosphere of cer-tain melancholy within and around the inhabitants of the region.

12“If they can feed their family for one month selling a piece of wood that they have somewhere in the corner, they will sell it,

because they just believe half in the things anymore. They are not stupid —if ten people want to buy something like this, they will make you things like this. This means, the things that Europe has considered as beautiful or strong. It is maybe not how they perceived it, but Europe wants it, so let’s make it.

“There is a borderline—minimum fifty years—because already in the 1950s, everything started to become ‘modern,’ that means that Europe had more influence.

“In the cities already before, but in the villages it started around that time. So everything after the fifties, I call it a ‘question mark.’ Is it used, is it not used? Is it authentic?”

13The transportation was realized slowly, throughout the six-kilo-meter road that was made especially for the deity.

It was night when Tlaloc arrived in Mexico City, yet 25,000 people awaited him in the main square zócalo. The city was prepared as if for a fiesta; lights were on everywhere, traffic was stopped, and the streets were thronged. Ironically, the arrival of the rain god was greeted by the heaviest storm ever recorded for this ordinarily dry season.

Since the monolith has been gone, it stopped raining in Coatlinchan; the clouds become heavy and grey, but that’s all. On the contrary, in the capital, even the streets get flooded.

14“In education, they should tell people to listen much more to their own taste, to be convinced about their own way of living,

and not just follow what the rest is doing (...) Anything I like is my spe-cialty, I am interested in the things I like, and the things I don’t like I don’t

Holland anyway—they don’t know anything about history—if you men-tion famous Dutch people from the seventeenth century they say, ‘Who’s that? Never heard of him.’ So they are not interested in the items either. Sometimes when they see it they say, ‘Oh, how is it possible that you can still buy these things, from the seventeenth century?’ They don’t realize what’s going on in the world; they want just music and drugs.”

9At 6:00 a.m. on April the 16th, 1964, the journey of the god began. Op-eration Tlaloc lasted close to to twenty-four hours. Under the custo-

dy of one hundred soldiers in line, lead by a real army of anthropologists, engineers, and mechanics, transporting the gigantic monolith started. The experts responsible for moving the sculpture weighing 167 tons lifted it on top of a powerful transport with seventy-two wheels, with tires spe-cially designed to hold the tremendous pressure of this colossal mass.

Two powerful trailers with diesel engines of great horsepower consti-tuted the moving force, and a powerful bulldozer also made a great push forward, to achieve a speed of five kilometers per hour.

10“The view has changed—many of the old collectors traveled for a special reason to Africa: as social workers, in the army, with the

church, or whatever; but they had a personal relationship with Africa, and started like that to collect.

“So there is no way to build up a relationship, I always say ‘Good morn-ing Sir,’ and the next time they come I say, ‘Good Morning Sir.’

“‘What’s your name?’ “‘My name is Nick.’ “‘My name is Hank.’ “...and then they go again. The relationship with my clients, I always

keep distance; the moment I get friendly with them, I am the one who is in the bad position, because then I need to give them everything very cheap. At an auction, they say, ‘I want that, so don’t beat on it’, but then I am their slave and I don’t want that. When I am at an auction and there is something I like and you like it too, I don’t know you, at that auction I don’t know you. But they get angry, ‘I told you, I wanted it!’ and I answer back ‘I wanted it also.’

“‘How much is it?’“‘300 euro.’“‘Can you give me a better price?’“‘350 euro.’

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care for them (...) It is always when you really have achieved something, when you have done something, it gives you a good feeling, of self respect: I am someone, I can do something, but people, they feel bad, they feel they miss something, they don’t know what, they are not capable of doing any-thing, and they lose themselves in... shit, too much.

“I think it is... it is generally a decline in behavior.“So, what you see is that people are always profiling, showing their pro-

file. They are in a party, with a glass of wine and they say ‘I have just being to the Van Gogh Museum, and I like it so much!’ That’s what they say, and when you come into their houses there is absolutely nothing! And that is what I hate so much (...) There is always a risk, you can’t predict anything—it is also a luxury to buy things you like—so if the economy is bad, that’s a risk too, but if things are going all right again? I can’t look in the future; I can only do my best.”

15There is a growing migration. Young men started to leave, one by one, to “the other side.” Nowadays, just women, children and old

people remain in town. The locals affirm that there are people from “the outside” arriving. People who don’t remember the times when everything was green and the landscape was full of trees. People from “the outside”, don’t understand the importance of Tlaloc. Not only because it gave some money to the community, in the sense that plenty of tourists were visit-ing, but it also in the sense that made them feel important, unique, with an identity.

16“Officially, everything older than fifty years, that is brought to Europe after 1973, needs papers from the country where it comes

from. But... who can say now that this has come in 1970 or in 1990? If somebody wants the shit, he will just put two names in between: collec-tion this, collection that.

“The law exists, but the law is not checked, not for us, not for them.”

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TAKING ADVANTAGE OF RELICSJorge Ibarguëngoitia

These lines are dedicated to the municipal presidents of towns where there is nothing to see, where illustrious visitors have to be entertained by a rodeo, a popular parade, or a country feast. All

of these expedients are difficult to organize and are costly. Isn’t it more convenient—I ask—to have a historic spot in the town where the visitor can be taken, can be given a speech, can respond with another speech, followed by ritual embraces (abrazos), then it’s over? In addition to con-centrating the visit and giving it an objective, the historic site has the advantage of providing the subject of the speech.

Because the municipal president will say:“Welcome to the Cradle of So-and-So (or the Tomb of Somebody-or-

Other, or the exile of What’s-His-Name),” etc.And the visitor will reply:“For me it is the source of special honor to finally have the opportunity

to contemplate these fortunate stones where, etc.The urgent need of municipal authorities to discover historic places in

their region and to give them importance and treatment they deserve was patented a short time ago when it was discovered that the house where Diego Rivera was born and spent his early years is currently occupied by a modest painter—of posters!—and that it is not possible to visit the house because the new occupant exercises his trade in the patio and he’s made a mess there. There must be no hesitation, and the task must not be left for tomorrow. It’s necessary to launch into checking archives, con-sulting with scholars, determining the historic site, acquiring it, reuniting the dispersed relics, ordering commemorative plaques, building a vaulted niche where the eternal flame will burn and that will be lit at the right moments, and so on. The thing is urgent. If someone tells me that noth-ing has ever happened in his town, I would say to him that based on the probabilities, that is impossible. Our history is replete with heroes, and all have had a highly full life. There is no town where some of them have not passed, or triumphed, or fled. Wherever the treaty was not signed, the political plan was signed, or a death sentence was signed. Wherever a bat-tle never occurred, someone was executed in front of a firing squad, was born, or formed a provisional government. In the worst of cases, someone spent the night there. When, due to public indifference, the event has been

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lost in the oblivion of time, it should be recalled that culture is an ex-tremely rich lode. There is always an unknown painter, an obscure poet, a forgotten historian. They just need to be salvaged. One must search the house where they lived and worked, acquire it, clean it, paint it, put up a plaque, and open it to the public. If it is a painter, one must seek a collec-tor, ask him to donate the work to the town, and give him credit. If it is a poet or historian, one must search for his manuscripts in his grand-daughter’s chest.

Later it’s a good idea to visit the relatives of the illustrious dead person and to ask for photographs. To go to the room of things and to rescue the old-fashioned frock coat, the top hat, the table where he worked, the chair that he used, the implement with which he wrote. If he is a writer, to seek among his published works the most relevant passages, to cut them out, to frame them, and to hang them on the wall. If there is a harsh criti-cism, to frame it, accompanied by a clear refutation. Here it should be recalled that there is no irrefutable criticism, although yes, there is much that deserves to be overlooked. Finally, in towns where the historic event was forgotten and no individual appeared, there is at least folk art. In this case, the solution is even simpler. They build a regional folk art museum. Where they do not make serapes, they make pots, and where they don’t make pots, they made marquesote. A house is bought; artisans are asked to contribute their pots, a pre-Hispanic specimen is sought out linking modern production with antiquity; an art critic is asked to write a short work on local crafts, which is transferred into gold letters and put onto the wall; and there it is: we have a museum. Two pesos for admission.

These small history, personal, and art museums have many advantages over monuments, in addition to the previously mentioned serving as a goal to visitors of illustrious figures. They are cheap, they do not produce an eyesore in the city, and they do not interrupt traffic or require the opening of new boulevards. On the other hand, since they are not visible, they lead the gullible to think that there is something very interesting inside; at the moment they are officially inaugurated, they go on to form part of the city’s tourist holdings, as one must pay a fee to see them, etc. Finally, for those who say to me that houses where historic events or the births of illustrious figures have occurred are difficult to acquire, because the owners believe that sheer fact makes them worth a huge amount, I must answer that the solution is in plain sight. One buys the house next door and changes the plaque. In the end, the ones who really know are already ten feet under.

Translation: Debra Emy Nagao Ogawa

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BECOMING PETRIFIED: THE MAKING OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSONHOOD

Sandra Rozental

Metamorphosis is defined as “the process of changing in form, shape, or substance; especially transformation by supernatu-ral means.”1 In this text, I am concerned with a particular kind

of metamorphosis—one that involves the transmutation of stone, an in-animate substance, into a living, animate substance with personhood2—as well as with the reverse process. The transformation into stone need not be a physical or biological fact, but can simply imply a metamorphosis of substance in metaphorical terms. Petrification is described as a “conver-sion into stone or stony substance,” but since 1678 it has also been associ-ated with “the action or process of hardening or immobilizing (a person or thing); a hardened or immobile condition, especially a state of temporary paralysis brought on by extreme fear.”3 The linguistic association between the substance of stone, immobility, and an emotive state of fear and anxi-ety is echoed by the many myths that plot being turned into stone as di-vine punishment: Niobe in Greek mythology and Lot’s wife (salt being a type of stone) in the Old Testament, as well as the Scandinavian trolls pet-rified by sunlight. In myths, the ability to turn others into stone, like that of Medusa, is cast as a dangerous and privileged power. The substance of stone, associated with coldness, hardness, and fixedness, is, therefore, the direct opposite of life, warmth, and flexibility; it is something to be avoid-ed at all costs, or to be used strategically against our worst enemies.

The world of myths and legends is peppered with stories about persons being turned into stone and about stones with person-like characteris-tics, yet my interest here is not in myth, but in a particular historical case that I hope will illuminate the relationship between personhood and stone, as well as describe a specific process of petrification. This case

1 Oxford English Dictionary, online version, s.v. “metamorphosis.”2 Although there exists a literature within the discipline of anthropology, especially prolific in the 1970s and 1980s, that has explored personhood, in this essay, I base my understanding of personhood on Marcel Mauss’s essay “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self,” in which he shows that the person is a social and relational position, hence his interest in naming, kinship terms, and roles or personnages (1985). I also understand personhood as involving a power, a potential to will and act in and upon an environment, an agency that implies the capacity to move and shape worldly circumstances.3 Oxford English Dictionary, online version, s.v. “petrification.”

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in both space and in the social imaginations of a multiplicity of actors—intellectuals, scientists, cultural bureaucrats, and the inhabitants of Coatlinchan—by following Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai’s invita-tion to look to “the social life of things” (1988) to understand objects’ bi-ographies in motion, condensing different stages in a progression defined developmentally as a “life.” However, “life” here is not merely a metaphor for a biographical cycle, but a characteristic moment (or moments) within a biography where a thing, a stone, metamorphoses from something into someone. This metamorphosis turns stone into an agent with personhood, a god capable of making skies thunder and rain, a being able to feel emo-tions and experience loss, a male or a female, a social actor with kinship ties and social responsibilities.

The information and stories that follow are based on data gathered during preliminary fieldwork done in Coatlinchan in 2006, as well as dur-ing several research trips to the town and archival research undertaken in Mexico City in 2006 and 2007 as part of my dissertation project for a PhD degree in anthropology from New York University. I have collected sources that describe the object, produced by archaeologists, engineers, historians, and museum curators, both in Mexico City and Coatlinchan, as well as press clippings and newsreels from the time of its removal. I also interviewed different groups mobilized around the object and recorded their stories and memories. Through these various, often overlapping, often contradictory versions, I will describe how this stone, inalienably linked to a community and a place, acquired personhood through its entry into the world of science as it was excavated by the discipline of archaeol-ogy, then through its removal from Coatlinchan to the museum, and now through a doubling process involving copies and replicas generated in the midst of the uncertainties brought about by a neoliberal system.

Although further ethnographic fieldwork needs to be conducted to un-derstand how life emerges out of and within this object, this paper is an initial experiment. Using theories of material culture, gifts, and fetishes in anthropology, as well as Sigmund Freud and D. W. Winnicott’s psycho-analytic understandings of, respectively, the uncanny and transitional objects, I will try to hint and evoke, rather than conclude, possible ways of looking at this puzzle. I will first map the changes in substance under-gone by the monolith in its “social life” through its circulation in space, but also in and out of different regimes of value. I will anticipate that the metamorphosis of the substance of stone into that of a person, and vice versa, are in fact reactions to historical circumstances that produce

concerns an object of colossal proportions made out of stone. Carved by humans in Teotihuacan times (roughly AD 100 to AD 850), the monolith of Coatlinchan, a 167-ton figure mentioned in sixteenth-century colonial accounts, was discovered by archaeologists in the late nineteenth centu-ry, and then, in 1964, removed from its original location—the village of Coatlinchan in the State of Mexico—to Mexico City where it still stands today as a monument in front of the National Museum of Anthropology.

Even though the Coatlinchan monolith’s matter is stone, its substance oscillates between the inanimate and the animate, shifting and morphing in response to particular circumstances. Having been described as per-son-like because of its anthropomorphic form in archaeological studies predating 1964, the object seems to have literally acquired the attributes of personhood, rather than merely representing them metaphorically, af-ter it was removed and exchanged for a yet-to-be-fulfilled promise of mo-dernity: a school, a clinic, water, and a road, none of which were ever fully completed. Recently, the object’s personhood has been summoned again by another yet-to-be-fulfilled promise of progress, this time not made by a protectionist state interested in modernization through centralized poli-cies, but by a neoliberal state promoting laissez-faire development.

The 1964 Mexican state was very much a patrimonialist state in the Weberian sense, coopting heritage and cultural production for politi-cal legitimacy and national unity (Lomnitz 1999; Aitken et al. 1996). The current state is also concerned with heritage, but as a commodity to be exploited through tourism as a for-profit development strategy taken on locally in a decentralized manner. My argument is that it is precisely this neoliberal model that is making local communities like Coatlinchan use and lay claim on pre-Hispanic objects and the past they contain, con-structed as national history and heritage by the Mexican ancien régime. It is also neoliberalism that provokes new states of anxiety in a society that is changing with the times, making pre-Hispanic objects like the Coatlinchan monolith take on new lives and personhood to face uncer-tainty and soothe fears. Thus, in the midst of a crisis prompted by the increasing economic inviability of living from an agrarian economic model in Mexico, local authorities and cultural activists in Coatlinchan have worked together to build a life-size replica of the monolith that, as of March 2007, stands in the main square of the town, brought to life by the villagers’ hopes and expectations that it will bring new prosperity to a depreciated region.

In this essay, I will explore the trajectory of the Coatlinchan monolith

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for neat resolutions and clear-cut boundaries among things and between persons and objects” (1998:2). Fetishes are, thus, always a hybrid category condensing the human and the non-human. They are a product and con-sequence of encounter. They are inherently unstable, located in an un-certain moment of history that is precisely what makes them destined to metamorphose from objects with personhood to inanimate objects of art or curiosity once the waters of change are appeased. The fetish is a tran-sitional category (Spyer 1998:36).

The “inalienable possessions” described by Mauss and Weiner are also not neatly categorized as simply things, nor are they really people; they condense both the attributes of things and the attributes of personhood because they tie together a group’s past, present, and future, making these objects undetachable from their owners. Fetishes, however, in addition to their hybrid nature, are imbued with the tension of certain historical mo-ments of encounter between systems of signification, also becoming in-alienable because they come to signify a community’s survival. It is their destiny to metamorphose because they soothe moments of transition by generating continuity. As Webb Keane shows in his chapter in Border Fe-tishisms, they are “the silent guarantors” of the continuity of one system’s past, into the future of another (Spyer 1998:18).

If inalienable possessions contain the possibility for reproduction, and fetishes contain the possibility for continuity through change in their hybrid status, what happens when, and how do, inalienable objects or fe-tishes change from being inalienable to being alienable, and vice versa? What happens when the inalienable—inalienable because the object’s ma-teriality can’t be detached from its owners—is severed and taken away in the midst of a process of change? What happens when new types of objects are generated by processes of encounter, or by new technologies? Marilyn Strathern’s work on human embryos (1998), as well as the inter-est demonstrated by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Loic Wacquant (2003), and Margaret Radin (1999) in the commodification of body parts seem to be driven by precisely this question: looking at how the human body—life—the inalienable par excellence, has been turned by new reproductive and surgical technologies into a detachable object that can be exchanged, sold, and claimed through legal frameworks.

I am also interested in the making of a new detachable object where there was none, but not because the object was considered entangled with substances that are alive and human—persons—but because it was not detachable from place, a place that fosters the identification of per-

states of anxiety ensuing from rupture and change. In the midst of social change and transition from one social system to another in Mexico, from a protectionist system to a neoliberal one, the substance of stone seems to generate a particular type of person, an “archaeological personhood” that becomes a mechanism for social and cultural continuity and creative endurance, connecting people to land and community in ways no longer available to all Mexican citizens.

inalienable Possessions and the FetishThe idea that persons and things are interlaced is not a recent discov-

ery. In the discipline of anthropology, particular kinds of objects have been studied as blurring the line between the human and the non-human. The objects that have received most attention in this literature are taon-ga, a Maori term that condenses this blurred category in particularly en-lightening ways. Taonga are embedded in intricate networks of exchange, where they come to crystallize social relationships, ancestors, and parts of people in ways unimaginable in the world of commodities. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss frames these objects as inalienable because they contain the personhood of their owners, something given away in exchange of a future reciprocity necessary to lubricate social relationships (1923–1924). In her studies of Melanesian systems of exchange, Annette Weiner com-plicated Mauss’s sense of inalienability by showing that, beyond reciproc-ity, these objects or possessions in fact guarantee the reproduction of the group, its immortality, its potential to or possibility of a future (Weiner 1985).

Other objects that blur the categories of the human and the non-human have been explored in a different, yet related, literature on “fetishes,” a term created to contrast Western colonial powers’ interest in objects as trade goods and colonial subjects’ seemingly supernatural relationship to objects (Pietz 1985). The attachment to these objects as beings that are alive and have the attributes of personhood was framed as irrational by the colonial authorities. In the collection of essays Border Fetishisms, the authors further tie the history of the fetish to the history of colonial en-counter: it is a “composite, border phenomenon,” a “hybrid” that pieces together heterogeneous elements (1998:1). Perhaps most importantly, as Patricia Spyer states in the introduction: “Gesturing as it does toward a beyond that guarantees its own futurity as well as toward a posited past moment of origin, the fetish more generally is never positioned in a stable here-and-now and thereby confounds essentializing strategies that aim

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The Body of the KingOn April 16th, 1964, at 6:13 a.m., a colossal body moved across the

landscape of the Valley of Mexico, with a cortege of followers walking and running in its wake. The figure, a pre-Hispanic rain deity carved in stone, lay on the platform of a custom-made truck designed especially by a team of engineers to carry its mass at three miles an hour, on the thirty-five miles of dirt roads and asphalt highways that connect Coatlinchan, a town in the Texcoco municipality, to Mexico City. In one of the most well-known images of this procedure, highly covered by both the written press and the audiovisual media, the figure appears lying on its back on top of the truck with seventy-two wheels, strapped in a Gulliver-like fash-ion with steel cables, in the midst of a rural backdrop, and followed, like the body of a king, by a slowly moving procession numbering thousands of beings of Lilliputian proportions, of faithful pilgrims parading along with the monolith, throwing firecrackers in its wake. This image cannot but invoke a montage: the juxtaposition and reversal of scales, as well as the transformation of a stone into a body, and of an engineering feat into something like a religious procession.

Once it arrived in Mexico City, another memorable image was cap-tured, at 10:38 p.m.: the giant body traversing an urban landscape this time, the central plaza of Mexico City’s historic district, with the Nation-al Palace and the Cathedral ceremoniously illuminated for the occasion. A crowd of tens of thousands gathered to welcome the regal figure to its new urban abode in the midst of a torrential storm. By 1 a.m., the rain god had reached its destination: a fountain at the entrance of the National

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sons and, therefore, contains them. The transformation of land from an inalienable possession into something that can be sold and exchanged is perhaps the best example of such a process (Verdery 2006). However, al-though land can be objectified and sold as a commodity, it can’t be turned into a movable or portable object (yet). The original French term used by Mauss to describe the inalienable: biens immeubles, means literally “im-mobile” or “immovable,” a term also used in French to refer to buildings or large constructions that are indeed not mobile, and that are indistin-guishable from the place where they are built, yet not really the place itself. Given this definition of inalienable as immovable, what would en-sue from a process that made what was indistinguishable from place—the immovable—movable, detachable, and mobile? What if immovable stone embedded in landscape was turned into portable matter?

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until then, and what still is today, a marginal town (a point I will come back to later in this essay), a backwater that is too close to the city’s ex-panding mass to be called rural, and that is too close to an agricultural landscape to be deemed urban.

The scientific specimen: Distance, scale, and MobilitySince 1964 and to this day, the monolith stands watch over Mexico City,

greeting visitors to the museum as well as casual passersby. Still and si-lent, it seems to be waiting patiently for something to happen. The only trace of its provenance is a metal plate standing inside the fountain in the middle of which the monolith stands. This plate was placed there only re-cently to explain that the object was found in the vicinity of Coatlinchan, whose inhabitants “generously gifted” it to the museum in 1964. The plate functions as a museum label, dating and describing the object: “The monumental sculpture is unfinished and represents the deity of water, a fundamental element in the life of the people of Teotihuacan, a city that was dedicated to agriculture, and whose inhabitants sculpted the figure. Teotihuacan Culture, Classic Period (AD 100 to 850)” (my translation). Through the label, the rain god has been transformed into an artifact with human makers, a museum object that is part of the National Mu-seum’s collections5, but also a gift given by a marginal town to a national whole.

The monolith has been morphed by the National Museum of Anthro-pology into an inert and inanimate carved stone, a manmade, datable, and transportable object, maybe even an object of art, a museum piece and scientific specimen labeled and framed as such through specific mu-seological “keys.” However, it has not always had these characteristics. The monolith is not part of an archaeological find, since it was not dug out of the ground in its entirety by archaeologists. It was always partially

4 Pedro Ramirez Vazquez reveals that the negotiation included free and perpetual access to the museum for all inhabitants of Coatlinchan (other Mexican citizens must pay a fairly elevated entrance fee, except on Sundays when the museum is free for all). This element of the negotiation has so far never been mentioned to me by the people of Coatlinchan to whom I have spoken. The inclusion of an official replica (the governmental body that is in charge of archaeological heritage, the INAH, has to authorize all replicas in Mexico) has been mentioned to me by some inhabitants of Coatlinchan, but I have so far not been able to locate a document or an official statement confirming that free entrance to the museum was indeed part of the deal.5 The relationship between the object and the museum is especially interesting given the fact that the monolith is the only object that is part of the National Museum of Anthropology’s collection that is not physically inside the museum or on loan to another institution. It is outside, exposed to the elements, and is merely labeled as belonging to a collection through this museological device.

Museum of Anthropology that was going to be inaugurated in September of that year. Because of its unequal proportions (it is the largest monolith or single carved stone in the Americas) the rain god was chosen to an-nounce and highlight, as a monument and a marker, the magnitude of the museum, the most important public cultural project of that era.

In his account of the process, the architect of the museum, Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, frames the taking of the object as an exchange, placing it in metaphorical terms as a gift from Coatlinchan to a larger whole: the Mexican nation. He cites the negotiations with the local schoolteacher and the latter’s way of convincing the rest of the town’s inhabitants: “Look muchachos, ‘la piedra’ (the stone) is like the grass of a lake: the grass at the edge and the grass at the center are all grass from the same lake” (Ramirez Vazquez 2004:47; my translation). This organic, living analogy transforms the stone into a live part of an organic whole—the nation— but it also makes the stone equivalent to any other part, one of the many shoots of grass that emerge from a rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). Thus, the stone morphs into a citizen like any other of a national body, rather than a distinct, located, and local object.

This metamorphosis gave the inhabitants of Coatlinchan access to an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983), certainly an important aspect of some of its inhabitants’ acceptance of the terms of exchange. However, more than belonging to a greater national whole is at stake: the object was removed by the power of science and technology—the custom-made trucks and trusses designed by specialized engineers as part of the state’s investment in progress—but it was also exchanged for the power of sci-ence and technology. After heated negotiations between unequal parties, the community of Coatlinchan accepted the exchange of an object from its landscape—a part of its sense of place—for a school, a clinic, a road, and two wells. The echoes with the very core of what was defined as “modern” at the time—education, healthcare, and infrastructure—are evident. To further convince the town’s inhabitants, the state (or, rather, the govern-ment officials sent to Coatlinchan), offered them free and perpetual ac-cess to the National Museum of Anthropology, an institution historically linked to Mexico’s strategies to become a modern nation capable of dis-playing its own heritage (Garcia Canclini 1989; Morales-Moreno 1994). According to some versions, an official replica of the object was also promised.4 Those in charge of the negotiations on behalf of Coatlinchan clearly acquiesced to the demands of the state and gave away the object in exchange for the promise of modernity and progress, in what had been

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identity, gender, and body parts. Alfredo Chavero, one of Mexico’s first scholars on Mexican antiquities, got into a heated argument with Batres about whether the deity was Tlaloc (a male rain god generally represent-ed with fangs and goggle eyes) as Batres believed, or Chalchiuhtlicue (a female water deity generally represented wearing a jade skirt and a char-acteristic headdress) as Chavero argued (Batres 1903, 1904, 1905; Chavero 1904). Chavero’s article in Mexico a Traves de los Siglos, is the first pub-lished source where the object is described as a person, having a gender and a body:

Unfortunately, her hands are destroyed and her face is ru-ined, and she dwells lying in the ravine, mistreated by the waters of which once upon a time she was the goddess. She has the headdress that the goddess wears traditionally (...) the upper part of the head’s decoration presents an excavation in the shape of a tub about 50 cm deep that served to gather rain water (...) In addition, the immense monolith bears an instru-ment in its hands, that seems to have sounded when blown into...” (1958 [1889]: 663–664)

Chavero’s description has morphed the stone into a female being with body parts: hands, head, and a face. Moreover, this being is mistreatable, and therefore capable of emotional engagement.

Although Chavero seems to have been correct according to the more re-cent archaeological studies regarding the figure’s gender (Noguera 1964; Arrizbalzaga Tobon 2005), Batres’s Tlaloc interpretation prevailed; he was a good friend of President Diaz and a much more established schol-ar in the nascent field of archaeology. Despite Chavero’s many attempts to make the stone into Chalchiuhtlicue, Batres won the battle in the last and final exchange, and the stone was cast as Tlaloc, a male deity, and henceforth referred to with the male pronoun “he” (Batres 1905). For gen-erations, the monolith has been known as Tlaloc by scholars and Mexico City inhabitants, allotting it a male gender and a male name, as is made evident in most of the publications (mostly popular, rather than schol-arly) where the figure is mentioned after 1905 (Covarrubias 1957, Tovar Santana 1966, 1993; Garcia Ramos 1982, Ramirez Vazquez 2004).

Since its “discovery” in the late nineteenth century as a scientific speci-men, although much has been published on the object’s removal, very little scholarship has been produced about the object itself. In the 1960s,

unearthed, as detailed by sources from the sixteenth century that mention its existence as an idol in the vicinity of Texcoco (de Mendieta 1980). In the late nineteenth century, a boom in scholarship on Mexican antiquities initiated by European explorers and scholars, including Baron Alexan-der von Humboldt (Pratt 1992), led scholars to be interested in the figure. It was framed as a scientific “discovery” by the explorers—including De-sire de Charney, who described it in 1881, and Leopoldo Batres, the father of Mexican archaeology and known for his work in Teotihuacan (Bernal 1980)—who dug it further out of the ground in 1903. A portrait of the fig-ure was published in 1889 as an etching by one of Mexico’s most acclaimed nineteenth-century artists, Jose Maria Velasco, and was included in an edition of the widely read encyclopedic work Mexico a Traves de los Sig-

los (1959 [1889]). The early scholarship on the figure, its further extraction from the soil, and its portrayal in a published source as a standing figure began a new stage in the life of the object, an object now cast as a specimen in the world of science.

In a gesture that further anthropomorphized the mono-lith, the etching made the object into a figure standing on its “feet,” rather than a carved stone lying on the ground (the position it had assumed until 1964). More important-ly, the portrait of the object by Velasco reduced its scale, from a colossal figure lying on the ground, partially im-mersed in the soil with no possibility of being fully viewed

from above, to a standing figure, completely unveiled and the size of a thumb—a size that is digestible on human terms,

and maybe the first representation that allowed the figure’s anthropomorphic form to be fully appreciated. Bruno Latour argues that reduction in scale is a form of generating the scientific distance needed to act upon events, places, and people (1985). Like Latour’s examples of the cartographers that reduced the size of the world to paper folds, and the botanists that mapped nature in Kew Gardens to ensure visual domina-tion of all plants on earth, Velasco’s reduction of the scale of the monu-ment allowed it to be mobilized and grasped. After this initial appearance in a published source, the object was mentioned, described, and represent-ed in many more.

The scientific work around the object in the late nineteenth century seems to be the first instance where the object’s personhood is openly dis-cussed, albeit on scientific terms. Archaeologists publicly fought over its

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lava to be porphyritic, pilotaxitic, pryoxene andesite with resorbed hornblendes. About 25 to 30% of a typical sample consists of phenocrysts of labradorite-bytownite that show intense oscillatory zoning... (1963:96)

Thus, regardless of whether it represents a male or a female, whether it is movable or not; and whether it is finished or not, in the eyes of science, the monolith is essentially a stone.

Piedra de los Tecomates: stone Place, stone Canvas, stone PlugIn Coatlinchan, none of the scientific names given to the object by schol-

ars has ever stuck: the voice of science failed. This failure seems to have to do with a prior, more resonant voice, heard and retold among the inhabit-ants of the town. For them, for as long as they can remember—and this is a fact recorded by Batres in his 1903 publication, but also mentioned on multiple occasions by my informants, the monolith is known as la Piedra de los Tecomates, or the stone with tecomatl, a reference in Nahuatl to the two rows of six perforations that line one of the monolith’s features.7

Both elements that compose this name are of interest. Piedra refers to the material, stone, the matter out of which the object is made, but also a word that is feminine in Spanish; and tecomatl in Nahuatl translates into “cups” or “containers,” placing the object necessarily in a horizontal position where the perforations would indeed become containers (of rain water, or perhaps of offerings).

The name Piedra de los Tecomates fits nicely with the stories that I have heard from the elder Coatlinchan inhabitants who have never re-ferred to the object as a person or as having person-like attributes. They have told me that they remember the Piedra as an object that they used to

7 Naming is clearly important to Coatlinchan’s inhabitants. In a publication generated for Mariana Castillo Deball’s exhibition Estas Ruinas Que Ves at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City in 2006, I cited one of the first interviews I conducted in Coatlinchan, a conversation with one of the vendors on the town’s main square, who had called the monolith Tlala because he claimed that it was not Tlaloc, but in fact a female goddess. Over a year later, having given people the community hundreds of copies of the publication as part of a donation by the artist, I was told by some of the cultural activists that I was mistaken—that this was never the name given to the object, and that whoever had told me this was either pulling my leg or an outsider. The object was and had always been known as La Piedra de los Tecomates. In a recent strategy to reclaim the object, some of these same culture brokers organized a week of festivities in honor of the replica of the Piedra that was being built on the town’s central square. In the publications surrounding this event, the object was returned the identity given to it by Chavero, the female rain goddess, but respelled in a Nahuatlized fashion as Xalxiutlicue.

right before the monolith was extracted from the ravine where it lay in Coatlinchan, geologists Robert Heizer and Howel Williams published an article about the monolith’s weight. They showed that the object was made out of a colossal boulder of andesite (lava)6; their calculations showed that, at the time it was made and given the technology available, it would have required two thousand to four thousand men to move (1963:97). This leads them to argue that the object was left unfinished by its makers when they realized that it was neither transportable nor raisable, and thus not mov-able to a ceremonial site. This explains why the object’s form is rough and unpolished, having been abandoned, left to history as a perpetual work in progress (1963). The discussion on the object’s movability points again to Latour’s work on the distance shrunk by science to make the unfamil-iar familiar. For Latour, one of the ways that science sought to act at a distance on events, places, and people, was by rendering them “mobile, so that they [could] be brought back” (1987:223). Heizer and Williams’ article antedated the transformation of the object into a mobile mass that could be “brought back.” It was not until 1964—despite an earlier attempt by Porfirio Diaz in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to have the monolith brought to Mexico City by railway, which did not succeed because the necessary technology to move it was not available—that this object became portable and therefore potentially alienable.

Regardless of its person-like form, human attributes, and mobility, the scientific understanding of the monolith as an anthropomorphic repre-sentation made out of a particular material by craftsmen keeps the fig-ure as inanimate. Although “he” or “she” lies on “his” or “her” back, has hands, and is abandoned and mistreated, “his” or “her” substance is al-ways stone. Heizer and Williams in fact use science and technology—a lens and a microscope—to describe this substance in intricate detail:

The Coatlinchan andesite is coarsely porphyritic, vesicular, pale gray lava characterized by many phenocrysts of dull white feldspar, most of them between 1 and 5 mm. long. Dark minerals are relatively scarce. A few pyroxene prisms can be detected with the aid of a hand-lens, and so may a few black pseudomorphs after hornblende. The microscope reveals the

6 Heizer and Williams explain its large size: “The boulders in the alluvial fans that descend to Coatlinchan and Texcoco are unusually large because they were derived from a very thick flow of massive lava on the steep slopes of Mount Tlaloc, a high eroded Pliocene volcano whose summit lies 13 km east-southeast of the unfinished monument” (1963:95).

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Coatlinchan, the object was not stone at all, but a mass that condensed either economic advantages or supernatural powers. Planned for Febru-ary 20th, 1964, rather than April 16th, the transportation of the mono-lith—also known as “Operation Coatlinchan,” a denomination with clear military overtones8—was delayed because of unrest among the people of Coatlinchan. They had agreed to give up the object once the government had fulfilled its promised exchange. On February 20th, none of the mod-ern infrastructure and institutions that were promised had been built.9

Thus, when the truck arrived to take the object away, the villagers threw stones at its windows, punctured its gigantic tires, and poured dirt into its gasoline tank. They also destroyed the structure of cables that was sustaining the monolith in a hammock-like contraption so that the truck could slip under it and carry it away without having to lift its enor-mous weight off of the ground. The sabotage of the engineering exploit was answered by a convoy of one hundred military cadets sent to the site to guard the god from further damage by its own vassals, the people of Coatlinchan. Although initially the authorities claimed that the 20th of February was merely a trial run (“Movilizando a Tlaloc” 1964), in a 1968 publication made ironically by a publishing house called Editorial Tlaloc, the architect of the museum, Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, finally admitted that the operation had failed due to local resistance.

The act of resistance was attributed to two factors in official sources: the loss of a very meager income from tourism described as consisting only of a woman selling soft drinks at the side of the monolith, and a su-pernatural relationship between the community and the object (Ramirez Vazquez 2004).10 Ramirez Vazquez explains that the community did not have a ritual relationship to the object, but that its people did have an “an-cient superstition” that the removal of the object would deprive them of

8 The military echoes in Mexican archaeological practice and its publications has been eloquently studied by Luis Vazquez Leon (2003:198–205).9 I have so far been able to collect various versions from informants in Coatlinchan regarding this non-compliance to the terms of exchange. Some say that the school and the clinic were built, but the road was left unfinished and the wells were never created; others say the buildings were erected, but neither teachers nor health technicians were brought. Those in charge of “Operacion Coatlinchan” tend to think that their part of the bargain was fulfilled, and that the people of the town just wanted more than they had negotiated originally. Until further research is done, it is unclear why the state, in an era known as the PRI’s (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the leading political party) apogee, did not keep their promise given that its cadres were busy keeping promises in the rest of the country as part of the party’s large-scale cooptation and consensus-making strategy.10 In an interview I conducted with him in June 2006, Pedro Ramirez Vazquez confirmed this by telling me a very similar narrative.

play with when they were children, going to the place where it lay on fam-ily excursions, and playing games with it, one involving throwing smaller stones into its perforations. Others have referenced the fact that people carved their initials on the object, making their relationship to it tangible by the act of etching. For my informants, the Piedra, when it was still in its original location, blurred the lines between object and place, and between place and time, working as a link to a not-so-distant past—to a childhood memory of home and family. This points to the object being essentially a stone, a stone imbued with memory and place, but an inani-mate stone nonetheless. The article that appeared in The New York Times in 1964, when the monolith was taken to Mexico City, confirms this:

Tlaloc, in the last century or so, has provided a trysting place for young people of the village of Coatlinchan (...) Townspeo-ple who had thought little of the monolith except as a stone on which young couples scratched their initials suddenly came to the realization that its removal would stop the trickle of tourist traffic which had to pass through the pueblo to reach the idol (April 12 1964).

The Piedra de los Tecomates was an object, a stone; it was an identifica-tion marker, a mass that placed Coatlinchan on the map. It was an object, which even if considered merely matter, and maybe even because of this, mattered.

One of the reasons for the object’s removal given by archaeologists, as well as by the makers of the museum in 1964, is that it was abandoned (see Chavero’s description cited above). The etchings made on the rock are of-ten given as evidence of the community’s lack of interest in and respect for the object, defacing it with graffiti rather than preserving it as a heritage object. The state, and archaeology as its privileged science, cast itself as the saviors of the god, rescuing it from the mistreatment and abandon to which it had been subjected by the inhabitants of Coatlinchan. My argu-ment reverses this claim: the inhabitants of Coatlinchan etched their ini-tials on the object precisely because it did matter to them. The initials make their identification with the stone tangible. However, their presence does point to the object’s substance being stone, and not an animate life force. After all, the etchings are referred to as etchings, not as scars or wounds. When the object was taken from Coatlinchan in 1964, the press and the official bodies in charge of its extraction claimed that, for the people in

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Tlaloc or monolith, hidden in the mountain that towers over Coatlinchan, never to be revealed so that the state won’t remove it. It is said to be “lone-ly” because its “wife” has been taken away. I have sometimes heard the lack of rain in Coatlinchan since 1964 attributed to this real double’s lone-liness and sadness, rather than to the removal of the monolith itself. The latter is thus capable of having social relationships, but also of producing them. A local group of dancers interested in and promoting their pre-His-panic roots refers to the monolith as abuela or “grandmother,” a kinship term that gives the object the possibility of reproduction and of engender-ing offspring for multiple generations.

The doubling of the object is not just present in storytelling among Coatlinchan’s inhabitants. Images and physical reproductions of the monolith pepper the town’s landscape: the image of the monolith is paint-ed on houses’ walls, has been transformed into the logo of the local taxi stand, and has prompted some people to have miniature copies made to decorate their home patios or to buy miniature clay reproductions sold in both local and nation-wide craft markets.11

In all of these representations, the shape of the object has been slightly altered to accentuate its anthropomorphic features. Although the original is missing a hand and a foot,12 and is largely disfigured, the miniatures all have complete bodies, and have been altered to have a clearly marked face: two cavities as eyes, a protruding nose, and the rows of perforations, ac-tually believed to be a pectoral by archaeologists, have been transformed into a mouth with daunting teeth. As Erving Goffman shows, having a face is more than an anatomical fact, which in this case allows us to state that by making the object have a physical and tangible face, the artisans of these miniatures have given it personhood. Rather, Goffman invites us to think about having a face as an intrinsically social phenomenon that does certain types of work:

One’s own face and the face of others are constructed of the same order; it is the rules of the group and the definition of the situation which is to determine how much feeling one is to

11 Since its placement outside of the National Museum of Anthropology, the monolith has become part of a greater family of objects that are emblematic or iconic of the Mexican nation, and that are constantly iterated in various formats and representations. The monolith, like the Piedra del Sol or Aztec Calendar, the Cuatlicue, a stylized Chac-Mol, and a stylized Olmec Head, are the most common objects represented on logos, letterheads, postcards, key chains, T-shirts, and jewelry.12 Some people in Coatlinchan have told me that the missing hand was cut off by the Revolutionaries during the second decade of the twentieth century. They allegedly cut it off because they believed that it contained gold.

water. The object, in this superstition, was not cast as a rain god, a person-like entity with meteorological powers, but as a plug to a water source, which if removed would close access to water forever. Another version of this story has emerged recently. In an article published in a prominent Mexican newspaper, a local schoolteacher is interviewed, and she explains retrospectively that when she found out the object was going to be taken away, she exclaimed: “What do you mean they are going to take it away? We won’t let it happen! If they move that stone, it will be the town’s doom.” At that time, a legend was told stating that the stone was the plug to the ocean and that if it were to be removed, everything would be flooded (Rivera 2002). Still, the monolith is a stone, a canvas with etchings, a plug: an inanimate object that can be acted upon, and that can only then en-gender consequences. It does not yet have personhood, or a will of its own, or the capacity to act upon persons and things.

From stone to Meteorological Agent to social BeingFour decades after the monolith was removed from Coatlinchan, the

substance of the rain god has somehow been transformed. The object is still mostly referred to as La Piedra, but its person-like attributes are no longer merely representational. My informants no longer speak of it as a stone, but rather in terms that point toward affective and human qualities. First and foremost, the object is thought to have certain powers, namely meteorological abilities that allow it to give or take away rain. Some say that it stopped raining in Coatlinchan the day that the Piedra was taken away, and that its presence in Mexico City is the reason for the constant rain and flooding that plague the city even during the dry sea-son. Members of the community’s belief that the object has meteorologi-cal powers is echoed by the 1960s press reports that marveled at the fact that the heaviest rain ever recorded in Mexico City until then befell on the city the day the rain god was transported to the museum. The head-lines read: “Llego Tlaloc y hubo lluvia” (Tlaloc arrived and there was rain) (Excelsior, April 17, 1964).

Beyond its meteorological prowess, one of the most interesting qualities spoken about in reference to the object is its capacity to have and engen-der kinship ties. In the village, the object, generally cast as female given the feminine quality of “piedra,” has a husband or a partner, a double that is hidden and secret. Of the people I have interviewed, only one con-fessed to ever having seen this double, yet nearly everyone I have spoke to acknowledges its existence. This object is often referred to as the “real”

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tion and location, seems to have preserved the original’s aura, or rather to have invoked and absorbed it, precisely through reproduction. The copy contains the powers of the original by being in the right place and made out of similar matter.

The second double was not made in situ, or placed in the same posi-tion as the original. The recently completed replica made by an artist and paid for by the State of Mexico government is standing on its feet in the middle of Coatlinchan’s main square, inside a fountain similar to the one in front of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Yet, the finished object is completely indistinguishable from the original formally. This double functions more like a clone than a twin, being the product of a seven-year study of the original monolith’s shape, texture, and even its faults and deterioration, conducted at the museum by the artist. Despite its clone quality, this exact replica is the result of a process that, though partially hidden by a plastic drape during the rainy season, was publicly visible to anyone passing by the central square of Coatlinchan. First an iron structure with the shape of the monolith was erected, looking very much like a fleshless skeleton referred to by locals as “bones”; then, the structure was filled with cement; and finally it was covered by a textured mix of river sand and concrete, referred to by both the artist and the workers hired to construct the replica as “skin.”

I would like to pause on the use of the word “skin” to describe the fi-nal layer of matter that was placed on the monolith’s clone, but also to refer to the original’s unpolished texture. This skin was described to me by the artist as “rough” and “grainy,” difficult to depict in color terms because each surface was slightly different. In a similar way to Goffman’s account of face as a social phenomenon, Turner, in his study on Kayapo body adornment, shows that skin is a social category: “the frontier of the social self” (1980:112). Having skin is not only having a boundary between the self and the physical environment, but also between the self and other selves. By describing the monolith’s surface as “skin,” the object is not only being further anthropomorphized, but also is being transformed into a bounded and distinct social self.

The skin-covered replica is a double of the original monolith, but it has also become a clone that is grafted into the social landscape of Coatlinchan as if it were the original. Despite the fact that everyone knows that it is a copy, and that it is made of an iron structure and cement, and that it was created and crafted by an artist and a group of workmen in 2006–2007, it has somehow morphed into the original. Al-

have for face and how this feeling is to be distributed, among the faces involved (...) the person’s face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter and becomes manifest only when these events are read and inter-preted for the appraisals expressed in them.” (1955:820).

Having a face is the equivalent of having social ties made tangible. In being represented with a face, the object—the stone—morphs into a social being.

Copies, Doubles, and Clones: The Transference of substance and AuraThe monolith’s personhood is not only reproduced through formal

means, but seems to also be generated through substance and place. About a decade ago, a group of danzantes13 carved a version of the origi-nal monolith on a stone located in the ravine where the original came from. They surrounded the copy with a stone path delimiting the shape of the original, and built a ceremonial spot to make fire and burn copal incense next to it. More recently, an artist has been commissioned by the Texcoco municipality to construct an exact replica of the monolith for Coatlinchan’s central square. Some of the artist’s models have been bought by townspeople to decorate their restaurants, gardens, and even the town’s administrative headquarters.

Of the copies made of the monolith, only two really correspond to the notion of a “double”—an object containing the substance of the original—rather than merely to a representation. The first copy created on site by the danzantes was carved out of a similar, albeit much smaller, stone that probably came from the same rock source as the one the original monolith was carved from. Lying on its back, it is made to resemble, but does not emulate the original. However, its ceremonial framing points to a doubling that is not based on form, but on something like what Walter Benjamin describes as “aura,” a substance in art generated by the unique-ness of an original that is destroyed through reproduction (1936). In this case, a reproduction carved by hand, a copy made in the original’s posi-

13 This term refers to several groups of dancers in Mexico that claim pre-Hispanic heritage and that perform dances as public performances and rituals. For more on these, see Francisco de la Pena’s study Hijos del Sexto Sol: Un Estudio Etnopsicoanalitico del Movimiento de la Mexicanidad (INAH, 2002).

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arrived before the clone: the leader, a Nahuatl teacher and spiritual guide invited to perform the ritual, demanded that the drape be removed, since the ritual would be moot, or even punished, if the figure could not see it. Although many in Coatlinchan knew that they might get in trouble with the Texcoco municipal authorities for unveiling the replica before the of-ficial inauguration, they decided to temporarily uncover the replica’s eyes so that it could at least watch the ritual enacted in its honor.

The object’s personhood is also echoed in its capacity, both as origi-nal, and as cloned double, to have agency, or the power to mobilize social networks and assemblages, to use Michel Callon’s Actor Network Theory premise. The monolith of Coatlinchan does not just have personhood, but it also the capacity to produce a particular type of person. Michel Callon is known for his insistence on understanding agency as a power to engen-der social networks and, consequently, new social actors. In addition to the networks of explorers, archaeologists, engineers, government agencies, the press, and different groups within Coatlinchan itself, the monolith has the power to give birth to new social actors that emerge from these new networks, associations, and assemblages. This process is reminiscent of Callon’s analysis of “the simultaneous production of knowledge and con-struction of a network of relationships in which social and natural enti-ties mutually control who they are and what they want” (1986:6). These new actors come to acquire another particular substance, a product of a link to the object’s materiality—stone—that allows them to become what I will call “archaeological persons.”

The Making of Archaeological PersonhoodMexico’s imagined community is built around archaeology in a way

that makes archaeological personhood central to being a part of the na-tion. Scholarship generated by historians and anthropologists explores the relationship between archaeology and Mexican nation building in depth (Brading 1985, Tenorio Trillo 1996, Matos 1998, Lomnitz 2001, Vazquez 2003, Nalda 2005, Breglia 2006). The entangled relation between archae-ology and the nation is made tangible by the fact that one of Mexican post-revolutionary nationalism’s foundational texts, Forjando Patria, was written by Manuel Gamio, a student of Franz Boas, who was the first archaeologist to use stratigraphic excavation techniques in Mexican soil (1916). Thus, archaeology is the basis of citizenship in Mexico where the national flag contains an image—the serpent eating a snake on a cac-tus—that comes from an archaeological object now housed in the Na-

though the replica is made of metal and concrete, and not of stone, it is imbued with the same substance as the monolith that is still in Mexico City. The headline of an article that came out in the Mexican press when the replica was completed is revealing: “Luego de 43 años, regresa Tla-loc a Coatlinchan” (“After 43 years, Tlaloc returns to Coatlinchan”). In March 2007, a local inauguration of the replica, or rather a week of fes-tivities was organized by a local group of cultural promoters called the Grupo Cultural Coatl-I-Chan.14 This event showed that the replica is not just metaphorically thought of as a return of the object, but that it has ac-tually acquired its substance. Perhaps one of the most obvious of the ways in which this transference is evident is in that the name used to refer to the replica is again La Piedra, even though the fact that the replica is not made out of stone is well known. Beyond naming, the replica was allotted certain powers believed to be possessed by the original: the power to make it rain. During the ceremony in honor of the replica, graniceros (a special kind of healers) from nearby highland villages were invited to perform a rain petition ritual in front of the replica. When in the later afternoon it started to rain, many people exclaimed that the rain was caused by the assuaging and return of the Piedra.

Perhaps the most revealing moment of the metamorphosis of the rep-lica into a clone of the original, therefore containing the exact same sub-stance and personhood, was a gesture that clearly pointed to the towns-people’s relationship to the monolith as a person that has stone eyes that can actually see. Having choreographed an entire ritual around the rep-lica—complete with a procession around the town’s pre-Hispanic layout, dancers donning ceremonial dress, playing jaranas, and beating huehuetl drums, headed by a woman dressed in white and carrying a miniature representation of the monolith like a baby in her arms—the inhabitants of Coatlinchan were determined to have the replica view their ritual. The completed replica was partially unveiled for the occasion, but still had a white drape covering its front, awaiting the official inauguration in May in order to be fully revealed. Beginning the ritual sequence with this drape on the replica, the ceremony suddenly came to a halt when the procession

14 An inaugural ceremony spread out over three days was held in Coatlinchan on March 9–11 2007. Because an “official” unveiling was going to take place once the whole fountain and main square renovation, and not just the replica of the monolith, was finished, the Grupo Cultural Coatl-I-Chan, an organization that has been very active in promoting Coatlinchan’s history and culture, was careful to remind all present that this was not an inauguration, but merely a week of cultural events (semana cultural) in honor of the monolith. The official inauguration took place in May 2007.

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logical personhood” proves unfounded, it is possible to see how being an archaeological community might allow for benefits that a marginal town like Coatlinchan would not have access to under normal circumstances: both federal and state funds to develop a cultural preservation program, and planning and infrastructure related to tourism that would give the depreciated town an alternative income base.

Becoming Petrified: Coatlinchan in TransitionCoatlinchan’s inhabitants seem to want to become “archaeological per-

sons” in the twenty-first century so as to participate in national progress and modernity, echoing but also countering their “acceptance” of shed-ding their archaeological personhood in 1964 for the exact same promise. Another parallel between these two moments has to do with the meta-morphosis from stone to person, and vice versa. Before 1964, although the object might have been understood as representing a human or person-like figure, and an extremely important one for the community’s iden-tification with place, as suggested above, it remained a stone. Since its removal in exchange for the promise of progress, and now that it has been cloned to concretize the promise of progress in the midst of economic and social crisis, the object’s substance has metamorphosed from stone into a living, seeing, and feeling social being.

Traveling from twentieth-century Coatlinchan to seventeenth-century Loudun in provincial France might be a surreal jump, but certain common threads unite the two in enlightening ways. In his account of the posses-sion of the Ursuline nuns in Loudun during the 1630s, Michel de Certeau argues that the nuns were possessed with ancient demons as a reaction to the anxiety provoked by deep political change: from a system based on the power of religion to one based on the power of the centralized state, science, and reason. In the first page of his work, de Certeau poetically sets the stage:

Normally, strange things circulate discreetly below our streets. But a crisis will suffice for them to rise up, as if swol-len by floodwaters, pushing aside manhole covers, invad-ing the cellars, then spreading through the towns. It always comes as a surprise when the nocturnal erupts into broad daylight. What it reveals is an underground existence, an in-ner resistance that has never been broken. Thus lurking force infiltrates the lines of tension within the society it threat-

tional Museum of Anthropology. In another more current example that actually includes the monolith from Coatlinchan in a national drama, the partisans of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-wing PRD candi-date to the presidency in the 2006 elections, who were demanding a ballot recount in the months following the election, hung a banner in front of the object that read “Tlaloc Clama: Gota por Gota, Voto por Voto, Casilla por Casilla” (Tlaloc demands: drop by drop, vote by vote, voting booth by voting booth). In a country where all are taught to be archaeological citizens, only few actually come to embody this category as “archeologi-cal persons” by living on or near, or owning, archaeological sites—land where archaeological objects are buried or found. This land, according to Mexico’s legal system, is not expropriated by the state (although it can be), but is rather placed under a liminal category where ownership can remain in private or communal hands, but the state regulates what the land can actually be used for, generally forbidding construction. This leads me to speculate that the claiming of archeological personhood by certain groups such as the Grupo Cultural Coatl-I-Chan is related to the particular geo-political position and socio-economic circumstance of the town.

Indeed, Coatlinchan is made up for the most part by arable land (both private plots and communal ejido), but in the recent decades, this land has been gradually abandoned as a source of income through agricultural practice. The most important economic generators in Coatlinchan in the recent past have been the cattle and milk industry, as well as sweatshop labor for the nearby textile giant of Chiconcuac. Since Mexico’s economic crisis of the 1980s and its entry into full-fledged neoliberalism with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s, even these local industries fail to provide opportunities, largely surpassed by imported milk and by textiles made in East Asia. The fact that most of the town’s inhabitants own cattle, but do not regularly drink locally produced milk, but rather an industrial “fortified” milk subsi-dized by the government (Liconsa) is revealing. In addition to the eco-nomic stagnation that shadows over Coatlinchan and that might have led it to seek and nurture archaeological personhood, this strategy, linked to the reclaiming of the monolith and the building of a replica, began pre-cisely in tandem with the much disputed project of building the largest airport in Latin America, and with a possible expansion of the Bordo Poniente, Mexico City’s only active landfill, both in the direct vicinity of Coatlinchan. Even if my speculation on the relationship between the cur-rent geopolitical position of Coatlinchan and its acquisition of “archaeo-

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the Grupo Cultural Coatl-I-Chan explained to me that the monolith was neither Tlaloc nor any rain goddess represented in stone. In fact, its origi-nal substance was not stone—a mineral matter that had been carved and imbued with personhood and power through human systems of significa-tion and ritual—but rather was always a living substance. In this story, the monolith was originally a person. The stone figure was an ordinary woman turned into stone by the wrath of the gods because she was sell-ing pulque as a commercial beverage, instead of treating it as the sacred and ritual drink that it had been in the past. The position of the figure is explained by the tale: her arms are outstretched as if handing or sell-ing something, and her legs are shaped like a semi-circle, an empty space where the barrel used to be. It is interesting to note that mass consump-tion of pulque, rather than an elite and ritual intake, was a product of the arrival of the Spaniards to Mexico and their destabilization of the pre-Hispanic state that restricted the circulation and consumption of the beverage (Guerrero 1980). It is likely, therefore, that this story of pet-rification, of the transmutation of person into stone, is also related to a moment of change.

The living substance within stone, both in versions that claim it as original and in the ones that believe it to be produced, does not seem to be easily welcomed by the inhabitants of Coatlinchan, provoking rather a state of anxiety. Will the Piedra, now cloned in the central square, have the power to make it rain? Will it bring prosperity? Will its sadness and anger be appeased? The emotional anxiety surrounding the monolith’s personhood, the stone being transformed into a living being, is what led me to think about the double meaning of petrification: being turned into stone, but also being paralyzed with fear. Few texts have dealt with fear in more eloquent ways than Freud’s essay on the uncanny: the heimlich made unheimlich, the familiar rendered strange by a process of repres-sion. For Freud, the feeling of anxiety surrounding the uncanny is related to the encounter of two systems, one based on a primitive state, and one very much linked to a modernity that represses the primitive state and its inbuilt fear of death (2003:149–51). In Freud’s terms, the inanimate stone object became an animate person-like being because it became uncanny: a familiar object, rendered strange by its exchange for the promise of mo-dernity, a promise that has yet to be fulfilled. It is the unfulfilled repressed promise, rather than the promise itself that makes stone come to life, and that turns people into stone.

Here, I would like to return to the theories about the fetish mentioned

ens. Suddenly, it magnifies them; using the means, the circu-ity already in place, but reemploying them in the service of an anxiety that comes from afar, unanticipated. It breaks through barriers, flooding the social channels and opening new pathways that, once the flow of its passage has subsided, will leave behind a different landscape and a different order (1996:1).

For de Certeau, this lurking substance overflows in moments of violent change to soothe anxieties and tensions provoked by a state in flux—un-stable, unpredictable, uncharted. In Loudun, this liminal state is gener-ated by a political transition from a decentralized regime ruled by local churches and ecclesiastical authorities to a centralized French state head-ed by bureaucrats and government officials.

Loudun and Coatlinchan do not just share the experience of deep change, albeit in opposite directions—centrifugal in the case of Loudun, and centripetal in the case of Coatlinchan—but also the way this state of instability shifts the relationship between persons and things, namely the metamorphosis of the inanimate into an animate substance in the shape of possessed bodies. In Loudun, it is not stones that come to life, but body parts. The nuns’ bodies were transformed from individual “selves” to indi-vidual organs each possessed by a different demon. In one of the minutes of Jeanne des Anges’ exorcism, her head is possessed by Leviathan and her mouth by Behemoth (1996:97). De Certeau explains: “The ‘residence’ of the devils in the forehead, the stomach, or ‘below the navel,’ indicates not only their character (...) but also recondite correspondences between their celestial functions and the body’s physiological ones” (1996:93). Body parts acquired autonomous personhood in the midst of transition from one system to another.

The transformation of a stone monolith into living substance with per-sonhood during a time of systemic change in Coatlinchan seems to echo the metamorphosis of organs into agents in Loudun. Another metamor-phosis in Coatlinchan, this time of person into stone, a real petrification, ensues from yet another moment of historical change, at which the fa-miliar is rendered strange: the conquest of the pre-Hispanic city-states by the Spanish Crown in the sixteenth century. In a visit to Coatlinchan in March 2007, I was told a story about the monolith and its personhood. This story echoed the petrification stories in Biblical narratives and Greek mythology mentioned in the Introduction. One of the members of

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tion seems to have to do more with the status or type of person generated in particular historical moments: from an essentially agricultural person, to an industrial and urban person, to an archaeological person. The ob-ject’s change of substance, from stone to personhood, seems to point to its belonging to the realm of “transitional objects.” If this is the case, it is likely that the life imbued in the object since its removal, and in its clone since it was finished, will eventually fade, or change back to merely meta-phorical or representational qualities. Like the fetish, transitional objects are destined by nature to change. The monolith and the replica might just return to being matter—stone and concrete—until their vital powers are summoned again to face another radical change.

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earlier in this paper. In many ways, Freud’s approach to the fear provoked by the uncanny precisely because of the encounter between a primitive state and modernity echoes the unsettling feeling generated by the co-lonial fetishes brought back to inhabit imperial powers’ museums. Like the fetish, uncanny objects embody moments of transition and make a link between a disappeared past and an inevitable future tangible. Per-haps Freud can help us understand why colonial subjects’ belief in fetishes’ powers were always thought to be irrational by, and yet were simultane-ously feared by, colonial powers.

By evoking fear and petrification, I do not mean say that Coatlinchan’s inhabitants have been paralyzed and turned into stone, especially given the many exciting and creative ways in which they are mobilizing around their own history and heritage, and using archaeology on their own terms. But perhaps it does explain why their way of making that promise come true inevitably involves using archeological objects—stones—to become what I earlier referred to as “archaeological persons” precisely because the community is in a state of anxiety around its own potential future.

Yet, Coatlinchan’s case involves anxiety, and not-quite-full-fledged fear. Perhaps the object is what mediates and assuages the fear, and its return in the form of a clone is in fact a soothing palliative. In his work on tran-sitional objects and phenomena, D. W. Winnicott focuses on infants’ use and relationship to particular objects that he calls the “first not-me pos-session” (1953:89). These possessions are interesting because they remain in a liminal space: not belonging to the body of the child, yet not fully recognized as being from the outside world (1953:89). Objects like secu-rity blankets and special teddy bears are examples of what Winnicott de-scribes. One of the qualities that Winnicott details of these objects is that “[they] must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own” (1953:91). This vitality is a defense against anxiety.

My use of Winnicott is not meant to suggest that Coatlinchan is a “child” in an early stage of a developmental cycle, but rather to place two moments, the first in 1964 and the second in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as stages of transition, and to place the monolith as an object used to undergo its tumults. Thus, the monolith functions as a certain kind of “first not-me possession” for Coatlinchan, an alienable object created by being severed from its landscape, no longer a part of a place, but a cultural property. It would be inadequate to frame this tran-sition as encompassing a trope from tradition to modernity. The transi-

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THE CONSUL OF DECEPTION:THE GREATEST ARCHAEOLOGICAL FAKER OF

THE TWENTIETH CENTURYAdam T. Sellen

This story begins in 1998, when I was a doctoral student poking around Mexico City in search of material for my dissertation. On one of my excursions, I visited the home of a woman whose

mother, now passed away, had once owned a spectacular collection of pre-Columbian antiquities. The daughter brought out the only remaining artifact from her mother’s collection, a small ceramic urn in the form of a seated figure, lovingly decorated with green beads and orange flowers leftover from the Day of the Dead celebrations. As I studied the effigy, I noticed that something had been inserted into the cylinder part of the object. With two fingers I extracted a cellophane envelope containing a brownish powder. I struggled to maintain a neutral expression when she told me it was her mother’s remains; my mind raced to think of ways I could gently tell her that her mother’s final resting place was a fake.

Although this experience was unique, my encounter with a faux urn was far from uncommon; forgeries of pre-Columbian artifacts are every-where, especially of the zapotec urn, an elaborate ceramic effigy often found in tombs, from the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. At the turn of the last century, demand for these zapotec urns engendered a local cottage in-dustry that resulted in hundreds of high-quality fakes being acquired by unknowing private collectors. Many of these objects ended up in Muse-ums around the world.

Thanks to technological advances, we can now distinguish fakes from originals. Real zapotec urns, from about two hundred to 1,200 years old, provide a window into ancient zapotec culture via their complex ico-nography. Fakes distort that picture because they reproduce forms that did not exist in antiquity. In the last twenty years teams of experts have tested zapotec urns with Thermoluminescence, a chronometric dating method that measures how much time has passed since an object was last heated, and found there to be hundreds of fakes throughout world collec-tions. But nobody has yet answered the pressing question: Who was mak-ing all these forgeries? In a holding of urns from Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), I discovered the answer.

Fig. 80

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one or two details on an object to make it unique. For example, the faces and headdresses of two fake ROM urns are different, but the torsos are essentially the same (Fig. 39). The coiffure on one urn (ROM 1900) was clearly inspired by a Mayan object typical of the island of Jaina in the Gulf of Mexico. Use of ancient styles from other areas of Mexico points to the clever sophistication of the forgers, who may have employed pho-tographic catalogues of archaeological objects in order to diversify their visual dictionary. In my mind, this raised a red flag. Consulting published catalogues may seem easily accomplished in today’s world, but at the turn of the last century few such works existed, and those that did were acces-sible only to the literate well-to-do. If the fake urns were being generated by marginalized indigenous artisans carrying out a millenary tradition of pottery making, how did they come into contact with visual material from outside the state of Oaxaca? More importantly, how were they able to access the original material, much of it now in the Canadian collection, to make their moulds? Did they find these objects? Or were they being supplied with artifacts and photographs of ancient artifacts? This line of questioning implicated the collector who sold the ROM the objects in the first place. I turned my magnifying glass to how they acquired this collec-tion and to the Victorian character who assembled it. His intriguing life made him a prime suspect.

Fig. 81 ROM 1879; ROM 496; PMAE 10161; ROM 1936; Daniel Real, La decoracion Primitive: Amerique Pre-Colombienne. Paris: Libraire des arts decoratifs, 1923.

As you would expect, forgers do not sign their creations, so ascertain-ing forgers’ identities requires meticulous detective work. I began by hy-pothesizing the fakers’ modus operandi. Although researchers before me had systematically studied the fakes, classifying them and speculating on their origin, few had asked how the forgeries were made. In ancient times, many zapotec urns were fabricated using specialized moulds (Fig. 38). A piece of clay would be pressed onto a baked ceramic original from which hundreds of moulded pieces could be produced. The same technique is still widely used by present-day Oaxacan potters who continue to make pot-tery in the same way as their ancient ancestors. Knowing this, I assumed that if local artisans had been making the fakes they would have used the mould technique.

I examined the urns in the ROM’s collection, consisting of eighty fakes and about forty genuine urns, as well as those in other museums, and an interesting pattern emerged. The very same specific motifs found on orig-inal works in the ROM’s collection, such as a face, torso, or unique deco-ration, also appeared on fakes in museums all over the world. I realized that most of the fakes had been made by combining these copied motifs in different ways. Philippa Shaplin, an art historian and pioneer in initiating tests to date zapotec urns, coined the art-historical term “pastiche” for this type of creation. The pastiche urn has a credible appearance because its constituent parts are copied from ancient effigies; however, the motifs are assembled in ways that violate the ancient zapotec canons of compo-sition. A specific motif that on original urns decorates only the headdress, for example, may be used as a pendant on a fake urn. In a pastiche urn, the visual vocabulary is often fine, but the words are arranged according to a different, and meaningless, grammar.

A fake urn in the Peabody Museum, Harvard, succinctly illustrates the point (Fig. 81). At least three original urns in the ROM’s collection were used to create the face, backrest, and headdress glyph of the Peabody urn. Another bogus urn that I found in a 1920s Paris Museum catalogue had the same base as the Peabody urn, although I have not yet located the original model. What this proves is that the source material for many of these moulds can be linked to originals in the ROM’s collection. My hy-pothesis that the forgers employed moulds to make the separate parts of the urns just as the ancient potters did was confirmed.

By mixing and matching a wide variety of moulds to create each urn, the forgers could make an unlimited number of urns in as many differ-ent combinations as they liked. Often the artisans would change only

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member of almost all of them. He was also a regular contributor to the prestigious Society of Americanists, rubbing elbows with the brightest scholars of the day at society dinners.

These were halcyon days for foreigners in Oaxaca. They lived like feu-dal lords thanks to a political climate that favored their investment capi-tal and a class system that allowed them to exploit the peasants living on subsistence wages. Hans Gadow, an English traveller and naturalist, painted a picture of stark social contrasts when he described a typical evening in the main square of Oaxaca City in 1902. The ladies and gentle-men decked out in smart European dress rambled on a promenade against a backdrop of hundreds of bare foot natives, the women draped in blue shawls and the men in white cotton.

Perhaps the most prominent foreigners at this time were the wealthy British in Oaxaca, who behaved as they would have at home, with pomp and circumstance. As a model citizen, Rickards was at the center of his community, as is evidenced by his chairing festivities for King Edward’s coronation in 1902. That night the expatriots supped on paté de pigeons aux croûtes, and filet de boeuf truffe, finishing it all off with a toast to the King, with Champagne Desbordes et fils 1887. Enveloped in this opulence, they were blissfully oblivious to the gathering storm that would destroy their world.

Before the Mexican Revolution exploded in 1910, forcing the ruling dic-tator to flee the country, there were signs that not all was well in para-dise. A financial crisis originating in the United States toward the end of 1906 resulted in a scarcity of capital and credit. The effect on the Mexican mining industry was devastating, and many operations had to be stopped. Particularly hard hit were the Rickards mines, as Rickards had invested heavily in technology to upgrade the facilities. By 1911 the country was in the throes of revolution and Rickards was in financial meltdown.

He offered his pre-Hispanic collection to the country’s National Muse-um for $25,000 pesos, but he was rejected, perhaps because of his previous political connections with the former regime. Penniless and surrounded by hostile revolutionaries, Rickards probably abandoned Oaxaca at the height of its great famine, sometime in 1915. According to Ross Parmenter, an American journalist who interviewed family members, he left his na-tive Oaxaca in a boxcar.

Down but not defeated, Rickards established himself in a bureaucratic job with the British Embassy in Mexico City. Shortly afterward, he made another desperate and failed attempt to sell his collection to the National

In 1919, the British vice Consul in Mexico City, Constantine Rickards, approached the ROM’s first head of archaeology, Charles T. Currelly, with an offer to sell his pre-Columbian collection. The group featured many large zapotec funerary urns and a spectacular Mixtec lienzo, a painting on a long swath of cloth that chronicles indigenous history and genealogy. The deal was a perfect match because Currelly was eager to buy a large collection representing this area of the world, and Rickards was anxious to sell because of financial difficulties.

The collection, bought by the Canadians for $25,000, was erroneously hailed as a gift by the press in Canada. Only a few plaster casts the ROM had received in donation from the Mexican National Museum were gifts. The rest of the pieces were purchased. The Canadian newspaper story that spoke of the “gift” was translated almost verbatim in the Mexican press, but the part that mentioned the purchase of objects described the objects as duplicates instead of originals. The text may have been altered by Mexican officials who were sensitive to the possibility that large lots of cultural property leaving the country might offend the public.

At the time, few would have suspected Rickards of selling bogus mate-rial, given his impeccable credentials and fine upbringing. Constantine Rickards had a good start in life. His father, Constantine senior, was a re-spected gold and silver mine owner in Oaxaca and was a personal friend of Porfirio Diaz, the dictator who ruled Mexico with an iron fist for more than three decades. The elder Mr. Rickards wanted his son to become a lawyer, but young Connie, as he was known, was happier exploring the nearby ruins and collecting antiquities. In 1905, the same year his father died, Constantine Jr. sealed his place in Oaxacan society by marrying Ad-ela Durán, the daughter of a well-heeled general. He also inherited some of the richest mines in the country, making him a very wealthy young man.

Young Rickards was exceedingly well connected, partly because he held the post of British Consul in Oaxaca. He was at the beck and call of President Diaz, and performed exceptional feats of protocol for V.I.P. vis-its. When Diaz’s biographer, the English travel writer Mrs. Alec-Tweedie, journeyed to Oaxaca, all stops were pulled. She was escorted by Rickards on the train, and was met at the station by the governor of the state, a pla-toon of soldiers, and two artillery wagons for her luggage. Rickards’s ac-quaintances included the famous Maya archaeologist Alfred Maudslay, who also owned a gold mine in Oaxaca, and the writer D. H. Lawrence, who rented rooms from the family. In his late twenties, Rickards became very active in the important scientific societies of the period and was a

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the museums after 1907. The British Museum, for example, has many fake zapotec urns that were purchased or accepted as donations by vari-ous individuals over the years from 1908 to 1946. The accession records for these urns name three collectors: Alfred Maudslay, Joseph Pyke, and Cecil James. What these people have in common is that they all knew Rickards: Maudslay was an acquaintance, Pyke was a co-worker, and James was his best friend. A small notation on the British Museum’s ac-cession record of an urn purchased from Pyke mentions that the urn orig-inally came from Rickards. An old photo from Rickards’s scrapbook con-firms this information, showing the object in his home, grandly displayed on the case of his butterfly collection (Figure 82).

Yet, the evidence was still too circumstantial. What I needed was a smoking gun. One day, while browsing through Rickards’s 1938 publica-tion about his collection, I saw the smoke beginning to rise. In this article Rickards published photographs of a number of zapotec urns he had sold to the ROM in 1919. At first glance, one of the objects would appear to be a genuine urn now in the ROM’s collection, but a closer examination of the details and proportions of the urn in the Rickards’s photograph revealed it to be an inexact copy of the original (Figure 40, see comparative picture). Oddly, in his description of the urn in the photograph he did not indicate the object as a copy. Why would Rickards publish a photograph of a copy if he had once owned the original? Equally disturbing is that many muse-

Fig. 82 Fake zapotec urn sitting on Rickards’s butterfly collection, in his home in Mexico City (Photo courtesy of George Rickards); Same urn now in the British Museum (1946.AM.16.1) sold by Rickards’s coworker Joseph Pyke, in 1946.

Museum, this time asking for $40,000 pesos; $10,000 in silver and the rest to pay the outstanding government taxes on his mines. The museum re-jected the offer, arguing that he had asked much less four years earlier. The non-producing mines, with taxes in serious arrears, were confiscated by the government, marking an end to all possibility of regenerating the family’s fortune.

Did Rickards’s great fall from luxury to financial ruin induce him to commit forgery? Watching his wealth evaporate must have horrified Rickards, and those close to him knew he was troubled that his five chil-dren could not enjoy the same standard of life as he had been afforded. The answer to the question is that economic necessity can drive even hon-est citizens to commit spectacular acts of wrongdoing, especially when trying to maintain appearances.

In addition to a compelling motive, Rickards’s story shows that he pos-sessed the right ingredients for concocting a large-scale forgery scam. First, he had an in-depth knowledge of the visual dictionary displayed on the urns—and he even ended up publishing a paper on the subject in 1938. Second, he was well connected to the potential buyers who were often for-eign travellers and scientists, and his impeccable credentials ensured their absolute trust. Finally, having grown up in Oaxaca, he was fluent in Span-ish and could have easily come into contact with discreet artisans capable of making the wares.

I had a motive and a clear modus operandi, but I needed more evidence to make the case. I deduced that if my supposition about his motive was correct, then Rickards must have produced the fakes during an eight-year period, between 1907 and 1915. In the Berlin Ethnographic Museum there is a large collection of zapotec urns that was assembled over many years by a famous Mesoamericanist and curator of archaeology, Edward Seler. A collection-wide test of those urns in the early 1990s showed that many were fake. Grouping the fake and genuine urns according to their acquisi-tion years revealed a pattern corresponding to Rickards’s financial diffi-culties and the supposed time he generated the fakes.

As I widened my net to include other collectors with well-document-ed histories of their collecting, such as the wealthy American collector George Gustave Heye and intrepid Italian explorer Guido Calligari, and as before, grouping the fake urns by acquisition dates and visual details, my investigations once again revealed that all roads led to Rickards. My examination of zapotec urn fakes in collections all over the world dem-onstrated that almost without exception the great onslaught of fakes hit

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Clearly, the potters knew what was going on. Were Rickards’s clos-est friends helping him launder the fakes by selling them to museums? Or were they also duped? Was his wife involved in the caper? Mortified at losing her social standing, which was inextricably tied to her husband’s position, she may have turned a blind eye, or even actively organized some of the deals. Without some kind of documentation, a private letter or note, answers to these questions will continue to elude us.

What we can be sure of is that a well-born Englishman, faced with the prospect of imminent financial ruin, resorted to fraud. He became one of the most prolific forgers of the twentieth century. Rickards died of a heart attack in 1950 while at work at the British Embassy in Mexico City (Fig. 83). In order to avoid what would have been considered an inappropriate location to die, his body was quietly removed from the compound, a fit-ting end to a life spent maintaining appearances.

ums have copies of this artifact, all of them slightly different in detail: the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin has one, the Musée du Cinquantenaire in Brussels has one, the Smithsonian in Washington has one, and the Mu-sée du quai Branly in Paris has four identical objects. Curiously, Rickards claims in his description of the published copy that it is one of four iden-tical objects found in a tomb, for which he gives a specific location. We know, however, that only one original exists—the one in the ROM. What this means is that Rickards was brazenly trying to provenance the fake objects—to establish a legitimate origin for the fakes he had previously sold by publishing one of them along with a story about its discovery.

There are still many unanswered questions about Rickards’s involve-ment in the fake zapotec urn industry. Who else participated? We know that he must have employed skilled native potters to make these wares. The results of a recent UNAM study that analyzed the chemical compo-sition of the clays in the effigy vessels from the ROM’s collection demon-strate that the fakes display a remarkably similar chemical register, while the originals vary greatly. This information suggests that the forgeries were made in one or two places, and with further study we may in time be able to pinpoint the specific location.

Fig. 83 Constantine George Rickards 1876–1950

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THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DEBRIS IN THE LAKES OF CHAPULTEPEC PARK

Guadalupe Espinosa

As part of the master plan project designed to “rescue” Chapulte-pec Park, remodeling, re-equipping, cleaning, and drainage works were carried out in the first section of the park, including dredg-

ing of the canals and large and small lakes (Schjetnan and Pérez 2004).Dredging is an excavation technique performed underwater to remove

materials such as mud, sand, and gravel to increase the depth of the water and eliminate sediment by scooping it up or removing it by suction. In the case of the park’s lakes, the intention was to make the irregular bottoms flatter and give them a depth of 90 cm. To achieve this, it was necessary to clean out dead plant and animal life, earth, and garbage. An H & H MDS-80-06 dredge was used with a rated reach of 4.5 m. Soundings were taken to ascertain the true depth of the lakes and to locate the areas that would need to be dredged. Then an air-lift machine, consisting of met-al tubes joined together end-to-end that blows air under the water, was dragged along the bottom injecting air to dislodge any debris that might impede sediment removal. The dislodged garbage floated to the surface, was collected in nets and placed in areas on the sides of the lakes. Then the sediment was suctioned and piped to 800-cubic-meter geotextile bags (Gulf Diving 2004).

When the dredging project was initially suggested, researchers in the archaeology area of the National Museum of History were particularly interested in the waste matter that would be removed from the lakes, because analysis of the residue could reflect patterns of activities and be-havior of visitors to the park in connection with use of the lake areas. As is widely known, recent archaeological discoveries in the area have con-tributed dates of as long ago as 1250 B.C. and a consecutive chronology of human occupation in various tangible manifestations up to the present.

Research on debris in the Chapultepec lakes dates back to a project carried out in the 1970s by an American archaeologist, William Rathje, in Tucson, Arizona, and reported in The Garbage Project. His own study was an analysis of garbage from contemporary housing units where groups of Africans, Indians, Mexicans, and Americans lived during an era of eco-nomic depression. His theory was that during a depression one of these groups would change its consumer habits because of insufficient income,

Fig. 84

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be extracted from the lakes, recalling events that occurred in that era, thought had to be given as to how suitable the dredging technique would be so that cultural materials would not be affected. For that reason the Underwater Archaeology Department of the INAH (the National Insti-tute of Anthropology and History) was invited to participate in the proj-ect so that it could give advice concerning recovery of artifacts and pre-ventive measures could be taken to preserve the water-logged materials.

In that field there is already a history of archaeological dredging such as the work done at the Sacred Cenote in Chichén Itzá in 1954, 1960–61, and 1967 by the Club de Exploración y Deportes Acuáticos de México un-der INAH’s direction and in collaboration with the National Geographic Society. This cenote was highly polluted at that time, and it was decided to pump it dry, purify the water by chemical means, and make it trans-parent. Suction devices were used to excavate the bottom and to recover numerous objects such as gold disks, tumbaga bells, and the like (Bush 1972).

On dredging the Chapultepec lakes, after recovering the submerged garbage from the lakes and canals, the items were separated according to the material from which they were made: some were soaked again so they would not deteriorate and were subjected to a gradual drying out process. Then data was recorded on forms containing information, recording the type of material and a description of the item in order to establish catego-ries, observe variations, and determine trends. All brand names of the dif-ferent artifacts recovered were recorded as an aid to dating them, associ-ating the items with dates or events that took place at least one hundred years ago. In the canals, a total of 1,601 pieces of residue were recovered; and in the Lago Menor, 9,813; in the Lago Mayor, 31,497, for a total of 42,911 items of different types and varying amounts. A summary follows:

Bottles with a hole (14,350; 33.4%): Bottles that had a hole in them that are used for fishing in the lakes, made from water, soft drink, chlo-rine bleach or household cleanser bottles; in order to fish a string was tied to the neck of the bottle and to some sort of pole; sometimes they had a stone or a cement bottom as a weight.

Plastics and throw-aways (14,069; 32.7%): Plastic and Styrofoam cups, plates, drinking straws, cutlery, soft drink bottles, juice bottles, wa-ter bottles, cameras, pens, packaging for toys, telephone cards, hair spray bottles, flowers, hoops, ID card containers, lighters, CDs, table wear, mea-suring cup, bottle caps, snorkels, visors, ballpoint pens, belts, telephone receiver from a phone booth, camera cases, buttons, yogurt and gelatin

and this would be reflected in the garbage (Harrison, Rathje, and Hughes 1974; Litvak, personal communication 2005).

Rathje devised methods for collecting data about the garbage and re-corded the brand names of products that were indicators of the levels of consumption in the multiethnic neighborhoods, observing differences and trends (Harrison, Rathje, and Hughes 1974). It was also possible to under-stand the results of the population, sudden social changes, and discrete information about mechanisms and processes resulting from the activi-ties of a society (Dragan 1989). Several similar studies emerged from The Garbage Project in the United States, Europe, and Israel. At that time, the framework of processual archaeology was being used: the rigorous use of the scientific method to obtain data from the material a culture produced in the past helped reveal how the formation of cultural groups took place within the process of adaptation to their environment, and thus facili-tated understanding of the combinations of these variables.

Although the Mexican Federal Law on Monuments and Archaeologi-cal, Artistic and Historical zones of 1972 covers archaeological items produced before the Spanish conquest, modern artifacts are conceived as such because garbage is a reflection of the circumstances that generated the waste material left in a place and can be interpreted as the result of elements abundant in our society and part of our cultural wealth. More-over, the importance of these archaeological objects lies in the fact that they furnish valuable information for they have been found in situ: “each artifact both in itself and in relation to the other residue” (Luna 1984).

BackgroundThe origin of these artificial lakes and their canals dates to the Scien-

tific Congress on Urbanism Problems and Urban Hygiene held in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, when proposals were formulated concerning the embellishment of parks and gardens in urbanized areas. One of the recommendations for Mexico was that avenues similar to Bois de Boulogne be planned for Chapultepec Park, trees of different kinds be planted, and the area for the lakes be excavated and the earth used to form mounds to beautify the landscape (Tovar de Teresa and Alcántara 2002). The lakes are interconnected. The larger one, the Lago Mayor, re-ceives water through the Canal de Acequia and the smaller one, the Lago Menor, receives water through the Canal de Quijote that currently brings water from a treatment plant in the Third Section of the park.

Since it was expected that objects would be found among the things to

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Uncle Mac mask, comic book character doll, hand bag, plastic snakes and worms, meccano piece, Halloween pumpkin, American football, noise-maker, airplane, plastic baby bottle, plush toys, sword, trucks, boxers, darts, pinwheels, motorcycle, rackets, small dolls, soldiers, slingshot, glass marbles, flutes, whistles and battery-operated games.

shoes (638; 1.4%): Huarache sandals, tennis shoes (for women, men, and children), high heels, orthopedic shoes, innersoles of all sizes, soles, and lifts.

Ceramics (594; 1.3%): We considered the little jars from the amusement park (jarritos locos or “crazy jars”) in this category, small glazed flower bowl (modern Talavera type pottery), large white plate, handle of a clay oven dish.

Coins (359; 0.8%): Mexican silver, nickel, and copper coins were found in the following denominations: 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 centavos: 1-, 5-, 10-, 20-, and 50-peso coins from the years 1937 (5-centavo silver coin), 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1964, 1966, 1971 to 1982, 1985, 1992, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2001, and 2002 ($1). A U.S. penny was also re-covered, as well as a commemorative copper coin with the words Pontiac Shift of the Sixties.

organic materials (248; 0.57%): Mango pits, orange peel, corn cob, co-conut shell, gourd, chicken and dog bones, skulls of ducks, skulls of chick-en and steer, seashells, wooden crate, cooked bones, nutshells, a dead lake salamander, a long bone of a horse.

nets (223; 0.51%): Different types of fishing nets, some homemade from fine screening material, strainers, and shopping bags.

Glasses (181; 0.42%): Mainly sunglasses, but also prescription glasses and plastic and metal frames.

Cosmetics (123; 0.28%): Eye shadow, lipstick, compacts, mascara, eye-liner, and lip gloss.

Costume jewelry (79; 0.18%): Bracelets, necklaces, Catholic medal, earrings, watches, rings, charms, chains, crosses, medallion with a design, and brooches.

Rubber (47; 0.10%): Tire used as a boat fender and bicycle inner tube. Documents (33; 0.07%): Institutional, school, political party and vot-

er’s ID cards, driver’s licenses, tax ID card, credit cards, regulations of the Boy Scout movement, prayer cards, and calendars.

other materials (27; 0.06%): A Walkman, photographs, cellular tele-phones, wallets and change purses (some with money in them), package of tickets for “La Feria de Chapultepec” amusement park rides, umbrellas,

containers, medicine packaging materials, rubber tubing, flowers, plas-tic sleeves for documents, key chains, clothespins, chewing gum, combs, brushes, hair clips, beads for hairdos, tops for perfume bottles, headbands, strips of photo negatives, baby bottles, pacifiers, handle of a cane, geom-etry sets, PVC pipes, brushes, dish pans, boxes and cassettes, earrings, notebook binders.

Bags, wrappers, and labels (3,047; 7.1%): Bags, wrappers, and labels of candies, sauces, juices, water, soft drinks, beer, cigarettes, peanuts, jam, cereal, snack food, pine-scented household cleanser, notebooks, choco-lates, hamburger advertising, fifteenth-birthday basket, two shopping bags, plastic covers for notebooks, and medicines.

Metal (2,350; 5.4%): Cans, bobby pins, tweezers, rods, wire, earrings, juice, soft drinks, beer, tuna fish and vegetable cans, paint, oil, choco-late milk, aerosol foam cans, lids, window screen material, hose clamp, slingshot, welder’s torch, knives, nut, spoons, clothes hangers, clothes pins, razor blades, umbrella ribs, keyhole, nail clippers, pipes, angles, electric cables, crown for one of the three kings, pliers, batteries, bottle caps, lid to an ice chest, scissors, knives, light boxes, antennas, torches, keys, car license plates, metal sheeting, frying pans, gasoline cap, Volkswagen hub-cap, molding, wheel, tire cap, electrical outlet receptacle, scissors, alumi-num molds, light boxes, handle to a dustpan, oars, measuring tapes, iron chains, locking wand for car steering wheel, aluminum coils, small pots, buckle, cyclone fence wire, container for an oil dipstick, screws, gratings, bread tray, special .38-caliber bullet.

Cloth articles (2,057; 4.7%): Hair ribbons, sweaters, blouses, shirts, brassieres, briefs, T-shirts, socks, stockings, baby bonnet, pieces of sweater material, cleaning rags, belts, shorts, jackets, gloves, remnants of mate-rial, sleeves, hammocks, backpacks, case, bag, net, sports pants, string, pennant, coin purse, ribbons, shoelaces, cotton wadding, blue jeans, and visors of all sizes.

Glass (1,760; 4.1%): Jars and bottles for baby food, beer, liquor, wine, soft drinks, shampoo, mayonnaise, perfume, jam, fruit, coffee, chocolate, sauces, salt shakers, automobile mirror, drinking glasses, window glass, pieces of bottles, fiberglass for patching boats.

Whole bottles (1,366; 3.1%): Bottles for soft drinks, water, juice, and cleansers. Some full of liquid and capped.

Toys (1,349, 3.1%): Toy cars of different sizes, pistols, tazos (large tid-dlywink-type game pieces), balls, horns, small bags of bubbles, electronic game, helicopter propeller, tricycles, doll, tractor, balloons, skates, top,

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don, Modernos del Bajío, Monoplast, Narsa, McCormick, Mirinda, Mel-low Yellow, Modelo Especial, New Mix, Morelia Presidencial, Naturalia, Nectasis, Negra Modelo, Nescafé, Nemo & Dari, Nestlé, Orange Crush, Oso Negro, Pascual, Peñafiel, Pascual, Polaroid, Penzedrina, Plastiflex S. A., Peñafiel, Primo Cuevas, Pepsi, Pepsi Cola, Picnic, Palacio de Hierro, Padre Kino, Presidente, Perk, Pinol, Poffets, Power Punch, Puppet, Risco, Resistol 5000, Reyna, Ron Potrero, Robert Rois, Sabritas, Samsonite, Sco-tia, Seagrams ginger ale, Sangría Señorial, Sea, Sears, Senzao, Skwinkles, San Jorge, Snapple, Stick, IMSS oral serum, Superwet, Sassoon, Sauza, Sony, Seven Up, San Marcos, Sidra Copa de Oro, Sidral Aga, Sidral Mun-det, Sprite, Squirt, Superior, Tang, Teens, Tecate, Tehuacan, Team, Tauro, Tres Equis, Tequila Sauza, Titán, Tecnopac, Termoformados, Tetrapack, Thermo kup, Thermoenvases, Trébol, Valle, Viña Real, Vides, Yakult, Yard stick, Yobby, Vasos Continental, Vasos Ideal, Vasos Plásticos del Ba-jío, Viagra, Viuda de Romero, Vigor, Yakult, Yashica, Windy’s.

interpretationThe frequencies and varieties of the kinds of artifacts show that the

main activities reflected in the trash the visitors to Chapultepec Park leave behind in the lakes have to do with fun, entertainment, and ro-mance, as well as religion.

In this regard, we can say that garbage gets into the lakes through four kinds of actions: (a) things that fall into the water by accident, and no one intended to throw them out; (b) things discarded or lost out of distraction or convenience; (c) things intentionally thrown away; and (d) things that reach the water because of the weather, such as wind or rain.

These artifacts are interpreted in different ways. In the case of the items that fall into the water by accident we can mention that no one intends to lose his mobile telephone or Sony Walkman or camera; or his wallet, as happened to Jorge Montoya Morales in 1981 when he gave five credit cards to the lake. How could Mario Enrique Martínez Herrera, a student in the Lázaro Cárdenas Daytime Secondary School, have imag-ined that we would find his ninth grade ID card from 1972? And surely the teachers of Azucena Alas García in 1998; Marlene Moreno Villegas in 2000; John Henry Marente Juárez, Yokasandi Vidal Romero, and Án-gel Álvarez Acosta in 2001; and Diego Armando Jiménez Cardona and Iván Emir Sánchez Rodríguez in 2003, will now be able to understand why their students reported their student ID cards missing. We can imagine that these activities may be related to playing hooky and going off for a

light bulbs, brooms, wood and metal oars, and cases for mobile phones. Fetishes (7; 0.016%): Three trolls, a jar of honey containing photo-

graphs of a homosexual couple making love associated with an incense wand, two pieces of gold chains wrapped in peanut and sesame candy, a sealed jar with liquid containing a candle and seeds with gold powder, and a watch wrapped in a sewn bag.

Diapers (2; 0.004%): Remainders of baby diapers.stone (2; 0.004%): A ball of red tezontle volcanic material characteris-

tic of the Mexica period, and a balustrade from the pier.

Brand namesThe brand names on these varied articles were as follows: Bonafont,

Aceite 1–2–3, Agua de Los Ángeles, Agua Nueva, Acuafiel, Aguanieve, Ami, Agua Mineral Topo Chico (since 1845), Alpura, Angel Face, Tuny tuna, Dolores tuna, Bonafina (chocolate milk and juice), Brica-larre, Balsam, Bancomer, Del Centro apple drink, Be light, Bebere, Big Cola, Bimbo, Bon bon, Boing, Boni’s, Bosco, Brasso, Bacardí, Bacardí Solera, Barrilitos, Barrilitos Dr. Brown, Brandy Don Pedro, Cabañas, CAR-NET, Domino’s Catsup, Cerveceria Orizaba, Clight, Clorets, Cham-bourcy, Chipilo, Condones SSA, Chiquitin, Canada Dry, Ciel, Corona, CONVERMEX, Crackets, Chokococo, Chaparritas, Chicomaco, Caribe Cooler, Carta Blanca, Cognac Martell, Corona, Crush, Chaparritas del Valle, Chocolate 7–Eleven, Cuvi, Cuevas, Cerveza Chilanga, Cleannex (PVC cleaner), Clegn Mex, Clemente Jacques, Coca Cola, Copos Locos (artificial snow), Crush Uva, Cartoon Network, Chicas Superpoderosas, D’Javis, Del Río, Daren dart, Del Valle, Del Fuerte, Del Monte, Delsa, Desechables del Bajío, Dixie, Danone, Darel, Danonino, Delaware Punch, Destilería Huasteca, Electropura, Emperador Gamesa, Extrapoma, Ericsson, Enerplex, Envases Cuevas, Escuadras Baco, Escuadras zamar, Envaflex, Extreme, Fanta, Fresca, Flexi, Foena, First-toronja, Fritos, Fran-cisco del Rincón, Fud, GE, Fiesta Cola (1960s), Gran Emyco, Garci Crespo, Gatorade, Gerber, Great Value, Gelatina Chuy gelatin, Giorgo Armani, Gelatinas Rayc, Gamarak, Gerber, Globalon, Helen’s, Hot-nuts, Herdez, Honnay, Industria Magnoplastica, Industria Rotoplastica, Industrias Plastiflex, Jarritos, Jerez Tres Coronas, Joelee, Jugositos, Jumex, Jumex Mightee, Jaguar, Kas, Kid Kleenex, Kosako, Kodak, Liverpool, Lala, La Costeña, Levite Bonafont, Leche Lulú, Los Charilocos, Mafer, Magno Plástica, Marlboro Lights and Reds, Manzana Lift, Libro Vaquero, León, Manzanita Sol, McDonald’s, Morgan Drake, Marca Aurrera, Moët Chan-

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other lightweight items such as a Bimbo bread bag with the logo of the Mexico 1968 Olympic Village might have been blown into the Lago Menor by the wind. As for the ball of volcanic stone from the Mexica period found in the Lago Mayor, two theories are possible: (a) there was a pre-Hispanic site in the area where the lakes were dug, or (b) a visitor found the ball somewhere else and it somehow found its way into the lake.

There are two legends about the lakes of Chapultepec Park: one men-tioned by a reporter of El Universal, concerning the theft of a jade mask from the Museum of Anthropology that was said to have been thrown into the lake. If that is true, it was, unfortunately, not recovered during the dredging, so the possibility that it is still there remains alive. Also, there was mention of a Volkswagen submerged in the lake, from which parts were recovered, such as the lid to the gas tank, a wheel, moldings, mirrors, and window cranks.

This research project, besides recovering contemporary historical in-formation about the activities of visitors to Chapultepec, also provided data concerning pollution of the lakes: one mercury or cadmium battery can contaminate 60,000 cubic meters of water and can render it poison-ous for man. This idea tells us of the ability of adaptation to the lakes and survival by animals, such as ducks, lake salamanders, freshwater shrimp, and lake fish.

Plastic items were the most numerous, and it is possible that this is re-lated to the average life of the material (more than 6,000 years in some cases) and their density. It is to be supposed that because of the dredging method used, some heavier articles might have remained on the bottom. Moreover it is estimated that much of the organic materials have already decomposed and have been assimilated into the lake; this could happen with different kinds of cloth, paper, cardboard, etc. (Del Valle, personal communication 2005).

This type of archaeological research is recommendable because it is not expensive and allows observation of human activities associated with a specific area, leading to an understanding of the different social and cul-tural dynamics of today.

At the present time a sampling of the debris from the lakes and canals of Chapultepec Park is stored at the National History Museum. An exhi-bition is planned for the near future in order to raise awareness among visitors and the general public.

Translation: Debra Emy Nagao Ogawa

day of fun. Although there are not a lot of these artifacts, the materials from which they are made, such as plastic, are well preserved.

Among the garbage thrown away by distraction or convenience, we find a large number of bottles with holes in them or made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate). Perhaps in the last fifteen years when plas-tic containers appeared, the activities associated with fishing (lake fish) were reflected. Here, also, we can speak of intangible wealth, because the PET bottles are sometimes prepared at home and brought by park visi-tors knowing they are going fishing in the lakes. Nevertheless, in the past fishing was done with other kinds of traps and nets. In the case of plastic throwaway bottles, they are possibly thrown into the water for the sake of convenience, or they arrive there by natural causes such as the wind, for, being lightweight, they are easily blown away. However, the variety of objects suggests other lines of interpretation, such as the discovery of bottles that contained champagne, cognac, brandy, tequila, and a can of Chilanga beer made in the United States, that all speak of events related to celebrations of some kind. In the same way, cloth items appear with only moderate frequency: trousers, underpants, and sweaters were pos-sibly thrown into the water when a group of friends was playing on the boats. Surely many children cried when they lost their tricycles, toy cars, skates, dolls and other toys and saw them sinking into the lake water. An-other kind of activity of visitors to Chapultepec is reflected in the find-ings: swimming, as snorkels and visors were found.

Garbage that was intentionally thrown into the lakes includes the small number of fetishes related to witchcraft and linked to some ceremo-nial activity. Perhaps some shaman prepared a love charm for a couple or some lovelorn person placed a Giorgio Armani watch into a bag and sewed it closed so as never to know anything more about the other per-son. In the same way, petitions for good luck for the trolls were interrupt-ed when they were found in the channels because it is believed that the charm is broken if some other person finds the fetish. Other items, such as an intentionally folded automobile license plate, were thrown into the water with the idea that they would never be found again. And the find-ing of plastic bags advertising hamburgers and tickets to the amusement area of the park are the most obvious evidence of not wanting to pass out printed flyers.

The refuse entering the lakes from natural causes is usually associated with dead animals, leaves, and branches of trees that fall in the water, or else with fruit and vegetable peels that are thrown away. Nevertheless,

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BibliographyAedan, Dense. “Trash Treasures.” Archaeology and Public Education (Society for American

Archaeology 5(3), 2005. Bush, Pablo. El pozo sagrado de Chichén Itzá. El Correo de la UNESCO,

Una ventana abierta al mundo 5: 30–33, 1972. Castillo, Héctor. La sociedad de la basura: caciquismo en la Ciudad de México. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM, 1983. Del Valle, Flavio, Consultant. Personal communication, 2005. Dragan, Kathleen. “Historical Archaeology, Tracing the Waste Makers.” Archaeology 42: 57–61, 1989.“Gulf Diving, Dragado de lagos.” Typed manuscript. Calle Mante 109–C Fraccionamiento Colinas de San Gerardo, Tampico, Tamaulipas, 2004.Harrison, Gail, W. Rathje, and W. Hughes. “The Study of Garbage as a Nonreactive Measure of Nutritional Behavior.” Typed manuscript, Anthropology Department, University of Arizona, Tucson. pp. 1–17, 1974.Litvak, Jaime, Consultant. Personal communication, 2005.Luna, Pilar. “En busca de tesoros.” Memorias de la tercera semana de la ciencia y las actividades subacuáticas, G. Espinosa, L. Corominas, P. Luna, J.I. Golzarri and A.M. Mendía, eds. Mexico City, 1984: 21–25.Rathje, William L. The Milwaukee Garbage Project. Washington, D.C. The Solid Waste Council of the Paper Industry, American Paper Institute, 1981. Schjetnan, Mario and José Luis Pérez, Plan Maestro, 1a. Sección. Typed manuscript of Grupo Diseño Urbano, Mexico City, 2004.Tovar de Teresa, Lorenza and Saúl Alcántara. “Los jardines en el siglo XX.” Arqueología Mexicana 10(57): 56–61, 2002.

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BRIGIDO LARA, POST-PRE-COLOMBIAN CERAMICISTJesse Lerner

In July 1974, Mexican police arrested and imprisoned a group of in-dividuals from the Gulf Coast State of Veracruz for the possession of a collection of what appeared to be looted pre-Columbian ceram-

ics. Though such objects have long been protected as national patrimony, the high prices they fetch in the auction houses and galleries of New York and Europe fuel a contraband traffic in antiquities. At the trial of the accused, archeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e His-toria (INAH) testified that the ceramics had been taken from ancient sites in the Cempoala region, in the central part of the state of Veracruz. Con-victed largely on the basis of this testimony, the individuals were sent to prison for their role in this illegal trade in looted objects.

From his cell, one of the convicted individuals, Brigído Lara, made an unusual demand. At his request, clay was brought to the jail. From within his cell Lara then proceeded to create indisputable proof of his in-nocence—identical reproductions of the pieces that had sent him to jail. He was not a looter at all, it turned out, but a wrongfully accused forger, an accomplished imitator of ancient styles. For the past twenty years he had been fabricating contemporary copies of ancient ceramics. Though he worked in many styles including Aztec and Mayan, his specialty was the ceramic wares of the ancient Totonac, a population that inhabited Veracruz and flourished between the seventh and twelfth centuries AD. The replicas were taken from the jail and once again shown to the same experts from the INAH whose testimony had led to the convictions. Once again the verdict was rendered: these too were judged to be ancient pieces from Cempoala.

Cleared of the charges of looting, Lara was released from jail in Janu-ary, 1975. He was subsequently employed by the state Anthropology Mu-seum in Xalapa, second in the country only to the National Museum in Mexico City, to restore ancient pieces and to review the collection for forgeries. Lara continues to sculpt what look like ancient objects, pieces which he prefers to call “original interpretations.” He has since been li-censed as a maker of replicas by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, the very institution that once condemned him as a looter, and he now signs all of his ceramics.

A decade after his release from jail, Lara began to learn something of

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objects exhibited there were made by Lara. While cautious about any ex-pression of pride in his accomplishments, Lara is equally uncomfortable with the designation “forgeries.” He prefers to think of them as his “own originals.”1

As remarkable as his tale is, Lara is certainly not alone in his efforts to forge ancient Mesoamerican sculptures. The elevated prices these objects fetch, the availability of the raw materials, and Mexico’s relative poverty all fuel the black market trade in forged antiquities. The business is veiled in secrecy, for obvious reasons, but the history of forgery seems to be long and complex. The trade has been traced back to colonial times. Some have speculated that during the Conquest artisans sought to preserve older religious objects by providing the Spaniards with an unending supply of forgeries to destroy. This dynamic changed when Mexico gained its in-dependence from Spain, but the cottage industry continued to flourish, spurred by new developments. One such development is noted in an 1886

1 Interview with Brigído Lara, Xalapa, Veracruz, 31 May 1996.

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the fate of the approximately 40,000 pieces he claims to have made prior to his arrest and reform. Agustín Acosta Lagunes, then governor of Vera-cruz, spent considerable sums overseas in order to purchase and repatri-ate numerous ancient objects for a pet project, the Xalapa Anthropology Museum. After the governor returned with a number of purchases made at Sotheby’s in New York, Lara came forward with a dramatic announce-ment. He had made these ceramic pieces. Further investigations revealed more and more of Lara’s objects all over the world. Some had become part of prestigious international collections. The Dallas Museum of Art, the Morton May collection at the Saint Louis Art Museum, New York’s Met-ropolitan Museum, and important collections in France, Australia, Spain, and Belgium all contained pieces that Lara claims to have made. In fact, Lara may have been so prolific that he had a hand in shaping what is today understood as the classic Totonac style. In 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History presented a large exhibition entitled “Ancient Art of Veracruz.” Today, it appears that at least a dozen of the

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sesses a spectacular, three-foot tall hollow ceramic figure of Ehecatl, the Mesoamerican wind god. Fluoroluminescence and other laboratory tests attempting to date the artifact have yielded ambiguous results, and ex-pert assessments of the object based on style achieve no consensus. Lara, who has never been to New York, knows a great deal about the piece and its construction, enough to suggest that at the very least he was witness to its manufacture. But other details seem to contradict this conclusion. Before being donated to the Metropolitan, the object was exhibited in New York’s now-defunct Museum of Primitive Art. Before that, it was part of Nelson Rockefeller’s private collection. When Rockefeller purchased the object Lara was eight years old. It does not look like the work of an eight-year-old. When pressed for details, Lara explains that he made the Ehecatl figure “many years ago.” Could Lara have been the apprentice to an older, master forger, making him the latest, most notorious representa-tive of a tradition of latter-day Totonac ceramicists? Lara emphatically denies this, claiming to be an autodidact. His training was in the fields as a child in Loma Bonita, Oaxaca, and Mixtequilla, Veracruz, where he grew up—areas rich in archeological artifacts. He would study the frag-ments of ancient objects that peasant farmers would turn up while plow-ing their fields. From these he would extrapolate the form of the entire object. Meanwhile the Metropolitan Muse-um has taken the piece off dis-play. Whether the Met’s Ehecatl is a fake fake—that is, an authentic ob-ject falsely labeled as a forgery—remains an open question.

Lara’s success points to certain weaknesses within the archeological es-tablishment, which has paid a great deal of attention to iconography and the identification of divinities and royalty. Only relatively recently has it started to examine the raw materials used to create the objects. Lara’s expertise lies precisely in this area. In his studio is a vast assortment of clays from the region, each with a different hue and set of characteristics, and each serving diverse functions in the forger’s repertoire. Archeolo-gists know more about the worldview that the objects give us access to than Lara does. Not being an eleventh-century Totonac, he does not know which elements are associated with which gods. One can imagine that if a member of that ancient culture had a chance to evaluate Lara’s creations, they would have rejected them, just as William Henry Holmes dismisses some of the more inept forgeries he encounters: “Compositions made up of unrelated parts (derived, maybe, from ancient art), and thrown together without rhyme or reason.”3 To the extent that archeologists have used his

3 Ibid., p. 172.

article in the magazine Science, in which William Henry Holmes links the arrival of the railroad to the burgeoning market in ancient objects of dubious authenticity:

It is very easy for the native artisan to imitate any of the old-er forms of ware; and there is no doubt that in many cases he has done so for the purposes of deceiving. A renewed im-petus has been given to this fraudulent practice by the influx of tourists consequent upon the completion of numerous rail-ways.2

Another development that fostered forgery was photography. The late nineteenth century was a time in which the circulation of photographs and other accurate likenesses of authentic pre-Columbian objects was relatively limited. In spite of archeology’s central role in nineteenth cen-tury Mexican photography (Desire Charnay, Frederick Catherwood, and the LePlongeons are protagonists in both of these histories), distorted re-productions were commonplace. Guillermo Dupaix, Luciano Castañeda, Frédéric de Waldeck, and the other travelers and adventurers published their impressions of the pre-Columbian ruins, often accompanying these texts with fanciful images bearing little resemblance to anything Meso-american. It is likely that these contributed to the proclivity to manufac-ture bad fakes, objects singularly unconvincing. Notorious among these is the sculpture known as the “Dying Aztec,” which looks less like a Mexica object than a mediocre knock-off of a Frederic Remington sculpture. That these kinds of egregious distortions were understood and exhibited as au-thentic objects suggests that Westerners could not grasp the pre-Colum-bian aesthetic. Its rules and conventions utterly alien to anything with European traditions, the Mesoamerican aesthetic clearly escaped the anonymous craftsman responsible for the “Dying Aztec,” just as it escaped the illustrated magazines that produced such distorted reproductions.

The contrast with Lara’s work could not be more dramatic. Not only do his ceramics achieve an aesthetic level that, according to Lara, at least, leads some collectors to prefer them to authentic objects, but they are also unusually credible, to the extent that some of his claims have been questioned. Corroborating Lara’s claims of authorship has proven no simple matter. The Metropolitan Museum’s Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection of Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas pos-

2 William Henry Holmes, “The Trade in Spurious Mexican Antiquities.” Science, vol. VII, no. 159.

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of his creations has plummeted, and rather than exhibiting in the Metro-politan, he now shows at events like the Veracruz State Fair. In art-world terms, this is an unquestionable step down, though the objects he created have not changed. The question we may ask here is the following: do the authentic Totonac objects express a worldview now otherwise lost to us, while Lara’s only mimic this worldview? Are Lara’s not an equally authen-tic expression of what Hillel Schwartz calls “the culture of the copy”?7

Though he makes no such claims, it is tempting to view Lara’s story as some sort of a comeuppance. Looters continue to carve up archeological ruins, raid tombs, and ship off the spoils for sale on foreign markets. To-day, the black market for antiquities makes it easier for forgers to oper-ate by discouraging collectors from inquiring into an object’s provenance. Before the institution of laws protecting national patrimony, museums, universities, and other scientific institutions engaged in these activities unhindered. Even after the institution of these protective laws, Edward H. Thompson smuggled objects from Chichen Itza to Harvard’s Peabody Museum.8 In the light of all this, there is, it seems, a kind of poetic justice in the fact that a peasant artisan with a grammar school education seems to have fooled not only dozens of collectors, but some of the world’s lead-ing archeologists and curators. Lara’s success does not simply call into question the expertise of the authorities, but subverts that neocolonial project which continues to drain Latin America of its cultural heritage.

7 Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy. New York: zone Books, 1996.8 A brief account of this notorious incident is provided in: Conquistadors Without Swords.New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967, p. 268.Jesse Lerner’s documentary film Ruinas contains a section on Lara. For more information, see www.americanegypt.net.

objects to draw inferences about the ancient world, Lara is guilty of add-ing misleading data to the pool of available evidence. The degree to which Lara’s creations have been disseminated make it difficult to share Hol-mes’s assuredness when he writes: “Doubtless in time most of the spurious objects will be detected and thrown out.”4

In 1910, Leopoldo Batres published his Antiquedades Mejicanas Falsifi-cadas: Falsificacion y Falsificadores, the first book-length study of forg-ery in Mexican antiques. The book presents reproductions of numerous objects of dubious authenticity, supporting Batres’s claim that certain celebrated objects are inauthentic. It also offers an eyewitness account of a workshop of forgers located near the pyramids of Teotihuacan.5 Batres’s depiction of the forger is an unflattering one, typically as both a victim of unscrupulous middlemen and an alcoholic “who spends his time in taverns.”6

Though information on the subject is scarce, Batres’s evident con-tempt is consistent with most accounts of forgers and their motivations. Almost without exception, the most celebrated and accomplished forg-ers of the twentieth-century—Lara’s peers—are depicted as despicable people. Cleared of accusations of collaborating with the Nazis, Hans van Meegeren has nevertheless gone down in history as a resentful failure, stung by the critical rejection of his own mediocre paintings, kitschy oils of fawns and overblown allegorical scenes exhibited under his own name in his youth. More recently, John Myatt, forger of Picassos, Matisses, and Giacomettis, is invariably portrayed as a hapless loser, manipulated and bullied by his own collaborator, the more intelligent and conniving John Drewe. Lara, however, does not fit this profile. An affable, modest man from a poor rural area, he expresses a sincere admiration for the pre-Columbian cultures that he mimics, and regrets not having lived in those times. No longer beholden to the imposed vow of silence of the forger, he signs all of his “original interpretations,” and is insistent on his author-ship. This points to the dilemma of the forger, for whom the greatest suc-cess implies anonymity, the reverse of the experience of any other artist. Perhaps, before his arrest, Lara craved the recognition that could only come at the price of exposure. If this is so, then the upshot must be a dis-appointment. Recategorized as contemporary replicas, the market value

4 Ibid., p. 170.5 Batres, Leopoldo, Antiguedades Mejicanas Falsificadas: Falsificacion y Falsificadores. Mexico D.F.: Imprenta de Fidencio S. Soria, 1910, p. 14.6 Ibid., p. 15.

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NOTES CONCERNING A SCIENCE OFCREATIVE DESTRUCTION

Gabriela Torres-Mazuera

Strange as it may seem, modernization has been the most prolific source of ruins of all times. Not only from wars, which in the twen-tieth century destroyed entire cities, but also as a consequence

of the violent, merciless transformations of lifestyles that were consid-ered old fashioned or traditional at a given time. Residue often remains from the whirlpool of destruction, creation, and replacement of models, projects, and ideals, becoming ruins that are vestiges of an “outmoded” utopia that failed to make the grade. Carrying our position to a radical extreme, we might also say that ruins are or have been possible only in modern times: only from a modern historical perspective that conceives of the survival of humanity as a continuum do ruins, as testimonials of the past, become visible. Bearing this aspect in mind (one we should ex-plore in greater detail) my intention here is to set down the bases of a new discipline, one close to archaeology or history, which will enable us to ex-plore the phenomenon of modern experience in depth. Ruinology (from the Latin ruere, to destroy), or the science of creative destruction, arises from the need to understand modernization, not in its conscious, willing processes, but from the marginal and residual point of view.

Since viewpoint is what creates the subject matter of a study, as Ferdinand de Saussure has said, it is necessary to start by saying that it is a certain way of looking at reality that converts everything that is being observed into a ruin. Beyond the catastrophic nature of this statement, the initial theory of this new science is that point of view is what creates the phenomenological reality of ruins in two senses: first of all, taking the chaotic, unexpected, and often unwanted aspects of those transfor-mations motivated by an avant-garde initiative as an axis to be analyzed; and secondly, generating a meaning and establishing continuity between the past and the present. This initial premise—both subjectivist and epis-temologically relativist—must be colored by saying that a ruin, as an ob-ject in itself, effectively has a true existence that, nevertheless, is mean-ingless until it is placed in relation to a group of elements and facts that change it into a link in a chain of broader meaning.

Hence, as a first step into considering the probable objects to be studied, we must establish a kind of typology that will enable us to ask questions

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Cities are a privileged observatory for locating the sediment of an ac-celerated modernization that, by transforming and replacing development plans, converts buildings once thought to be immune to the passage of time into ruins. In the historic centers of cities in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia we can find a former colonial palace sandwiched between a functionalist building of the 1970s, and a parking lot that replaced a nineteenth-centu-ry building; or we can find the disconcerting image of a baroque church that has lost all its possible entrances because it is now bounded by two lanes of a controlled access road. No less moving is the case of more recent buildings, touted as the cutting edge of architectural modernism, such as the Insurgentes Condominium Building in Mexico City on the street of he same name. Having been sold off in the 1960s as highly innovative luxury condominiums, largely because they were among the first in Mexico, it is now a sort of black hole that disappears in the night. Without electricity, and without water on some floors, the one-hundred-meter-tall building with a capacity for two thousand offices is only visible in daylight, and the top floors are inaccessible. What was once a symbol of the economic development of a city that saw itself as cosmopolitan and modern has be-come decadence, spatial reappropriation, and emergence of informality.

In order to organize the diverse processes that generate ruins and as an introduction to ruinology, we will distinguish two factors that explain many of the ruins in Mexico, a country with strong but contradictory modernist pretenses: the legitimating of the architecture of a moderniz-ing, state and the logic of short-term gain.

The Modern Ruins of a Modernist stateMexico has historically been represented both abroad and to its own

provinces as a territory of sumptuous, exotic landscapes and archaeologi-cal sites. It is not surprising that beginning with the constitution of the post-revolutionary modernist state there has been a particular interest in pre-Hispanic ruins. The new national identity defined in terms of cultural wealth is the fruit of pre-Hispanic and European legacies that exalted the indigenous character of the country throughout the twentieth century. Mesoamerican ruins were taken as a palpable sample of the greatness and splendor of ancient civilizations, which, it was presumed, had built impos-ing cities and temples. Thus it was that, challenging Octavio Paz’s critique of the pyramid, the postrevolutionary Mexican state began to motivate the restoration of an immense amount of ruins from pre-Hispanic times that would bear witness to the glorious past of the nation. The recovery or

and suggest hypotheses. From strictly common-sense observation based on a time-frame criterion, we can divide ruins into two categories: ancient ruins and modern ruins. Ancient ruins evoke images of a remote past and have been the subject matter par excellence of archaeology. Modern ru-ins, granted the haste with which they were created, have generally gone unnoticed by specialists in that discipline; for this reason they deserve special attention and will be the main topic addressed by this new sci-ence. Modern ruins, the fruit of a recent past, are the product of a num-ber of processes that characterize modernity. For reasons of conceptual simplification useful to our study at hand, and without wanting to get into a difficult discussion on the temporality of modernity1, we will take the nineteenth century as the starting point of our study. Industrializa-tion and the growth of large cities, together with the consolidation of the nation-state, were generators of what are now modern ruins par excel-lence: mines, industrial complexes, hangars, train stations, and seaport facilities. In recent decades, the economic dynamic sparked by the freeing up of trade and more flexible labor conditions conceived in terms of glo-balization has provoked the transformation of the productive structure and the resulting abandonment of a number of constructs conceived un-der this model. What some specialists call the crossing over from “heavy modernity” to “liquid” or reflexive modernity2 has produced ruins from what only a few decades ago was still a modernist utopia. Unlike the ancient ruins that have usually been represented as deserted and even forgotten places, contemporary ruins can continue to be inhabited, reap-propriated by people who are usually relegated to the fringes of society, and can continue to comply with certain utilitarian ends not intended by those who designed them in the beginning. So it is that besides having fallen into decadence, their main characteristic is that they have lost the initial, ever innovative and advanced meaning with which they were built. An example of contemporary ruin is the abandoned factories in certain cities that have been become weed-infested vacant lots and that now serve as canvases for urban graffiti artists; another example is the shopping centers that have been slowly abandoned by those who formerly leased space in them and that have seen the once immaculate architecture become a ruin.

1 For a discussion of the origins of modernity see Fernand Braudel, Civilisation, économie et capi-talisme XVe-XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Librairie générale française, 1993; and Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.2 Beck, U. A. Giddens, and S. Lash. Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in Modern Social Order. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Bauman, zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

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ings, which are sometimes not completely finished, display symptoms of decadence. Two representative examples are the Honorable Cámara de Diputados, the legislative building that was the legacy of José López Por-tillo (1976–1982), and the Centro Nacional de las Artes (CNA), the legacy of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994). The first of these is situated on what was once Lake Texcoco, in the eastern part of the city and was nev-er integrated into the zone in which it was built. Its permanently closed main entrance suggests the failure of the urban development project of which it was to be a part, as do its cracked tezontle (volcanic rock) walls and broken windows. The CNA, which showed faults in its construction from the day it was inaugurated—water seepage, leaky ceilings, cracks in the walls, gardens with dead plants—would be an excellent topic for ruinologists to study and perhaps devise some hypotheses to explain the phenomenon.

The decadence of structures built by the government can be construed as a manifestation of a discontinuous political system that every six years can abandon projects and programs set in motion by the previous regime. The strict centralization of federal and state budgets can be added to this, as can the fact that these large works, as white elephants, also need enormous resources to be properly maintained, them and these are not al-ways available in the subsequent decades. In the long run such ruins often speak to us of the crisis of a national project in countries such as Mexico and Brazil5, where nationalism has been associated with a modernizing project.

Rapid Destruction from short-term GainsPrivate initiative also produces modern architectural ruins, especially

in cases of corruption and scant or excessive legal regulation that makes the accumulation of capital possible in the short term at the cost of last-ing decadence. Let us start with buildings that were constructed with a very precise objective: to produce immediate gains for the investor. Just as the large plantations the United Fruit Company were established in a given territory to exploit the land for a few years, then leaving it ex-hausted and infertile, some hotel chains have invested in buildings that in many cases will be decadent in less than twenty years. Such is the case of certain hotels in tourist centers such as Acapulco, Cancun, and Cuerna-

5 See, for example, an analysis of modern ruins in Brazil: Beatriz Jaguaribe, “Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms.” Alternative Modernities. Gaonkar Dilip Paramesh-war, ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

“rescue” that took place from the 1940s to the 1960s transformed former mounds of stones of indeterminate shape dispersed throughout the coun-try into archaeological sites open to the public. The Mexican government created an institution for precisely that purpose to rebuild temples, cities, observatories, and ballgame courts, using, in many cases, techniques that enabled patches recreating the pre-colonial past to be passed off as genu-ine. Many of the great pyramids that today draw thousands of visitors from all over the world are, according to some specialists, falsifications of an architecture that disappeared several centuries ago.3 Therefore, rebuilt pre-Hispanic ruins can be considered contemporary ruins to the extent that they were produced with completely modern objectives: to become the material receptacles of Mexican nationalism, and parallel to this, to become one of the main attractions of the incipient tourism industry.

In more than one sense, the modernizing state has been one of the most prolific producers of modern ruins. For their size and scope, the most out-standing modern ruins are those structures built to honor, legitimate, or exalt some elected official, who, during or at the end of his term of office, hires a famous architect to create some structure of “universal” voca-tion. The main characteristics of these works, which are usually muse-ums, hospitals, libraries, and government buildings, are their dimensions and avant-garde style. The monumentality of architecture is a phenom-enon unique to those societies that have a strong state, which attempts to link the immortality of the work to the immortality of power and, more precisely, to the name of the president at the time (Auge, Savillon).4 The strange thing about this phenomenon is the contradiction that exists in recent times, when the choice of a modernist architecture with the pur-pose of making power sacrosanct contradicts its own governing prin-ciples in some way. Utility and functionality give way to magnificence exalting official rhetoric and overlooking the principles of architectural austerity proposed at the outset of architectural functionalism by Adolf Loos. These buildings are not ruins in themselves, although in some po-litical contexts their becoming decadent seems almost inevitable. Taking Mexico as an example again, we see that many times large-scale works undertaken for political reasons become ruins almost immediately after their inauguration. From the moment they are put into use, these build-

3 See Molina-Montes for a technical description and discussion.4 France with its great monumental works has examples par excellence: the Centre Pompidou de-signed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano; the Bibliothèque National de France; Site François Mitterrand by Dominique Perrault; and the Musée du quai Branly by Jean Nouvel, a legacy of Jacques Chirac.

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vaca that were once luxurious and that today are virtually abandoned. This type of construction is characterized by architecture of artifices or effects, just as Walt-Disney-inspired amusement parks materialize a set of hackneyed notions about the exotic or paradisiacal (take, for example, the Casino de La Selva in Cuernavaca and the Acapulco Princess in the city of the same name). Another much more contemporaneous modality can be found in nightclubs and shopping centers characterized by a cer-tain amount of glamour that disguises low-quality building materials and precarious safety standards that become evident in fires, earthquakes, or hurricanes. These structures tend to be abandoned or put up for sale once their objective has been met, so long-lasting architecture is not even con-sidered. Such modern ruins are the product of a consumer-oriented soci-ety that quickly changes its habits and demands.

The Potential of RuinologyAs we have been trying to show, the possibilities of ruinology are quite

vast. In this article we have only examined selective examples of archi-tectural remains and have not addressed the diversity of material cul-ture produced under the aegis of modernization. Two examples of poten-tial topics of study are, on the one hand, artifacts that we can still find for sale in flea markets, such as radio-phonograph consoles, video games (Atari, for example), Betamax systems, walkie-talkies, and dial telephones (some time ago I heard an eight-year-old ask his mother what that “disk with holes” on what appeared to be an enormous telephone was) that are now relics of another time, and incomprehensible to the younger gener-ations. On the other hand, we have the new uses that certain marginal groups in our society make of modern appliances. Such is the case, for ex-ample, of the refrigerators that were sent to some regions of rural Mexico to the homes of poor families who had no means to pay for the electricity. Such voluminous household appliances have been reappropriated as clos-ets or cupboards for food and as beautifully decorated pieces of furni-ture highly regarded by the whole family. As a new science, ruinology will have many questions to answer, such as Why do some societies produce more ruins than others? or Why are certain modern styles or materials more susceptible to becoming ruins than others? or Why do some mod-ern ruins (for example, motels and shopping centers) assume an aura of authenticity when they become decadent? We conclude this introduction with these questions, hoping to have sparked interest in a field of research that is wide open.

Translation: Debra Emy Nagao Ogawa

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MUSEUMS AS ADVENTUREJorge Ibargüengoitia

A few days ago I ran into an old school friend on the street and af-ter a few conventional greetings we came to the inevitable ques-tion: “What have you been doing?” He told me that he was on the

verge of moving to a border city where the government had invested and would continue investing millions in an effort to turn it into a paradise for tourists: an airport, two highways, a race-track, two craft markets, and to improve our image on the other side of the border, a branch of the Anthropology Museum, where little by little the pieces currently in stor-age in the main museum would be put on exhibit.

When I heard this told with such enthusiasm, I came to a sad realiza-tion that we are becoming increasingly bored. We are applying supermar-ket chain policies to culture. On the other hand, clearly we have reached a point at which only tourists and schoolchildren—the latter, whether they want to or not—visit museums.

This situation is due in large extent to the pedantic, earnest, and er-roneous idea, but one very much in vogue in official circles, that muse-ums are all about culture. Now then, culture has one really big defect: the whole world yearns for it in an abstract way, but there are few who are willing to take the trouble to acquire it. The mere idea of entering a hallowed precinct to see four pieces from Snockersville stupendously well exhibited with the obligatory accompaniment of two or three murals by some hard-working muralist from the Mexican School, is enough to make most Mexicans yawn. In many cases this automatic reaction is due to trauma. Hearing the word “museum,” in the mind of many Mexicans, conjures up the image of the woman principal of the elementary school they attended, giving explanations like the following, which I heard the other day:

“Children, be quiet. I don’t want to hear the sound of little bees buzz-ing. Pay attention: since we entered the museum where we shouldn’t have, we’ve now reached the place where we should have come in. This gallery, children, is called the Hall of the Conquest...” etc.

That’s why we yawn.So culture is a big deal, but we have to acknowledge that people en-

ter museums because they are forced to, or out of curiosity. On the other hand, we have to admit that in Mexico, despite its many wonders, as de-

Fig. 92

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one that the family had made, and the one of the lining cloth with which it was upholstered inside. (6-VI-72)

Translation: Debra Emy Nagao Ogawa

Fig. 93

clared by the foreigners who visit us, each time they have to give a speech, there are more museums than objects worthy of being exhibited.

But we shouldn’t let this discourage us. That’s not really important at all. One of the most mysterious and therefore most satisfactory experi-ences that I have ever had in this area happened the day that my wife and I paid a visit to the cloisters of a sixteenth-century monastery. We climbed the well-proportioned staircase and at the moment we set foot on the last step, we heard, resounding in the vaults, the barking of a dog that we never saw, but that we imagined was enormous and fierce. We waited a moment trying to decide what to do, but since the barking continued, we chose to go back down the stairs we had just come up, passing the guy who had just sold us the tickets, and out into the atrium, where we had a beer. We paid four pesos not to see anything, but I remember the dog epi-sode with greater satisfaction than if we had been able to study with ut-ter calm the four pieces of the termite-ridden altarpiece that adorned the upper part of those cloisters. Isn’t it more interesting to see the bathtub where Empress Carlota used to bathe and the bed where she slept than the portraits of all the viceroys who governed New Spain? As a matter of fact, it is more interesting, although it might be less informative.

When I was a child, it was virtually a must to go to Puebla and visit the convent of Santa Clara, where several dozen nuns lived in hiding dur-ing the time of their persecution, and who ended up being discovered by an atheist pilot. What was inside was amazing, since it was a house with three patios that managed to escape unnoticed for years, but what was visible could only be of interest to an expert in ornaments. What was re-ally worthwhile, on the other hand, was the entrance: in a small shop and through a revolving shelf. The Casa del Alfeñique is another museum in Puebla that is worth visiting just for the fright you get when you go from one room to the next and come across General Obregón sitting on a sofa.

But of pleasant museums, in Guadalajara there are two of the best that I have ever seen. In one of them, there are the bones of the mammoth of Santa Clara (or was it Santa Rosa?), Jalisco. This museum, which is in a single room, contains in addition to the celebrated mammoth several mastodon jaw bones and the bones from the foot of a tiny camel that in life must have been about the size of cocker spaniel. The other is the Re-gional Museum of Jalisco, where among several noteworthy things can be seen a buggy that was donated to the museum by one of the great families of the locale, together with a label of close to a thousand words that con-tains not only the history of the carriage, but the history of its twin—the

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LISTA DE FIGURASLIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1. Xochicalco. Ibero-amerikanisches Institute, Nachlässe Eduard Seler, Berlin, 1887. Fig. 2. Xochicalco. Ibero-amerikanisches Institute, Nachlässe Eduard Seler, Berlin, 1887. Fig. 3. Xochicalco. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2004. Fig. 4. Proyecto Templo Mayor/Project Templo Mayor. Fototeca Templo Mayor, Ciudad de México, 1978. Fig. 5. Volcán/Volcano. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig. 6. Galería de Monolitos, Museo nacional/Gallery of Monoliths, national Museum. Ibero-amerikanisches Institute, Nachlässe Eduard Seler, Berlin. Fig. 7. Desfile/Parade. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig. 8. Chac-Mool. Augustus Le Plongeon, 1875. Fig. 9. Chac-Mool. Augustus Le Plongeon, 1875. Fig. 10. Tlaloc. Litografía/Litograph. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2005. Fig. 11. Réplica/Replica. Litografía/Litograph. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2005. Fig. 12. Muestras/samples. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig. 13. Lección de arqueología/Archaeology lesson. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig. 14. Museo de sitio/Local museum. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig. 15. Monolito de Coatlinchan/Monolith of Coatlinchan. Ibero-amerikanisches Institute, Nachlässe Eduard Seler, Berlin. Fig. 16. Ídolo de Coatlinchan ¿Tlaloc?/Coatlinchan idol, Tlaloc? Batres, Leopoldo, ¿Tlaloc? México, Imprenta Grande, 1903. Fig. 17. Modelo a escala/scale model. Modelo a escala del transporte que llevó el monolito desde Coatlinchan hasta la ciudad de México. El modelo se encuentra a la entrada del despacho del arquitecto Pedro Ramírez Vázquez en la ciudad de México/Scale model of the transport that carried the monolith from Coalinchan to Mexico City. The model is at the entrance of the office of the architect Pedro Ramirez Vazquez in Mexico City. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 18. operación Coatlinchan/Coatlinchan’s operation. Fotografía de la operacion Coatlinchan en los talleres del Museo de Antropología/Photograph of the Coatlinchan’s opera-tion in the workshops of the museum of Antropology. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 19. el Jorobado/The hunchback. Sandra Rozental, 2006. Fig. 20 Réplica en el lugar del hallazgo/Replica in the place of the discovery. Sandra Rozental, 2006. Fig. 21 Recuerdos/souvenirs. Sandra Rozental, 2006. Fig. 22. Llego Tlaloc y hubo lluvia. Llegada del monolito al zócalo de la ciudad de México/Tlaloc arrived and there was rain. Arrival of the monolith to the main square in Mexico City. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Monumentos Históricos, INAH, 1963. Fig. 23. somos historia hacemos historia/We are history, We make history. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 24. Colgando/hanging. Archivo del INAH/Arqueología Mexicana/Raíces, 1963. Fig. 25. Construcción de la réplica en el zócalo de Coatlinchan/Contruction of the replica at the main square in Coatlinchan. Sandra Rozental, 2006. Fig. 26. La piel/The skin. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 27. Triates/Triplets. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 28. el Monolito en la actualidad. A la entrada del museo de antropología de la ciudad de México/The Monolith nowadays. At the entrance of the Museum of Antropology in Mexico City. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006.

Fig. 29. el zócalo de Coatlinchan con la réplica cubierta/Main square in Coatlinchan, with the replica covered. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 30. Transporte/Transfer. Archivo del INAH/Arqueología Mexicana/Raíces, 1964. Fig. 31. observando/Looking. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006 Fig. 32. Retrato de la figura de pie/Portrait of the figure standing. México a Traves de los Siglos. Tomo I. José Maria Velasco, 1889. Fig. 33. sitio de taxis en Coatlinchan/Taxi stand in Coatlinchan. Sandra Rozental, 2006. Fig. 34. Dobles/Twins. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 35. Ritual en torno a la réplica/Ritual around the replica. Sandra Rozental, 2007. Fig. 36. Patio en Coatlinchan/Backyard in Coatlinchan. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 37. Piezas arqueológicas decomisadas/seized archaeological pieces. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig. 38. Molde para la fabricación de urnas zapotecas/Mold for the fabrication of zapotec urns. Adam Sellen. Fig. 39. Figurilla maya de la isla de Jaina/Mayan object typical of the island of Jaina. Adam Sellen. Fig. 40. Diagrama comparativo/Comparative diagram. Adam Sellen. Fig. 41. Rickards hacia el final de su vida/Rickards towards the end of his life. Fig. 42. Lago de Chapultepec, Ciudad de México/Chapultepec lake, Mexico City. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2005. Fig. 43. Diagrama comparativo de los objetos encontrados en los lagos a partir del dra-gado/Comparative diagram from the objects found in the lake. Guadalupe Espinosa, 2006. Fig. 44. Antigüedades mexicanas falsificadas/Mexican forgeries. Leopoldo Batres, 1910. Fig. 45. hombre sedente/seated figure. Marco Antonio Pacheco/Arqueología Mexicana/Raíces. Fig. 46. Copia de Brígido Lara/Copy from Brígido Lara. Marco Antonio Pacheco/ Arqueología Mexicana/Raíces. Fig. 47. Proyecto Templo Mayor/Project Templo Mayor. Fototeca Templo Mayor, Ciudad de México, 1980. Fig 48. Restauración del monolito de Coyolxauhqui/Restoration of the monolith of Coyolauhqui. Fototeca Templo Mayor, Ciudad de México, 1978. Fig. 49. Visita guiada/Guided tour. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig. 50. Museo/Museum. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig 51. excavaciones en la Gran Pirámide de Cholula/excavations in the great pyramid of Cholula. Archivo Técnico de la Coordinación Nacional de Arqueología. Fig. 52. hallazgo del monolito de Coyolxauhqui/Discovery of the monolith of Coyolauhqui. Fototeca Templo Mayor, Ciudad de México, 1978. Fig. 53. Moldes/Molds. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 54. Transporte del molde de la Coatlicue de Tepepan al Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil/ Transportation of the Coatlicue’s mold from Tepepan to the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 55. espectadores/spectators. Fototeca de la Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH. Fig. 56. escalando/Climbing. Archivo de la Familia Arellano. Fig. 57. Antes y después/Before and after. Archivo de la Familia Arellano. Fig. 58. ¿escondiendo el original?/ hiding the original? Fototeca Templo Mayor, México. Fig. 59. Piedra de los Tecomates. Litografía/Lithograph. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2005. Fig. 60. Miniaturas/Miniatures. Litografía/Lithograph. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2005. Fig. 61. Mexitlán. Archivo de la Familia Cirett. Fig. 62. Arbol de la noche triste/Tree of the sorrowful night. Ibero-amerikanisches Institute, Nachlässe Eduard Seler, Berlin.

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Fig. 63. Mexitlán. Archivo de la Familia Cirett. Fig. 64. Restauración de maqueta/Restoration of a scale model. Archivo de la Familia Cirett. Fig. 65. Fronton Coatlinchan. Manuel Raeder, 2006. Fig. 66. Mudanza de un coloso/Moving a colossus. Archivo del INAH/Arqueología Mexicana/Raíces, 1964. Fig. 67. Momento solidificado/solidified moment. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 68. Ídolo de Coatlinchan, ¿Tlaloc?/Coatlinchan’s idol, Tlaloc. El Sr. Lic. Chavero y el Monolito de Coatlinchan, Leopoldo Batres. México: Imprenta de Fidencio S. Soria, 1904. Fig. 69. Descubierto/Discovered. Archivo del INAH/Arqueología Mexicana/Raíces, 1963. Fig. 70. La Piedra. Ibero-amerikanisches Institute, Nachlässe Eduard Seler, Berlin. Fig. 71. A sus pies/in his feet. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2007. Fig. 72. Cumbre del cerro Tlaloc/Top of the hill Tlaloc. El Sr. Lic. Chavero y el Monolito de Coatlinchan, Leopoldo Batres, México: Imprenta de Fidencio S. Soria, 1904. Fig. 73. Puesto de zapatos en Coatlinchan/shoe stand in Coatlinchan, Sandra Rozental 2006. Fig. 74. somos historia, hacemos historia/We are history, we make history. Sandra Rozental 2006. Fig. 75. Réplica de piedra/stone replica. Sandra Rozental 2006. Fig. 76. el consentido/The favorite. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 77. esqueleto/skeleton. Sandra Rozental, 2006. Fig. 78. Tortillería Tlaloc. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 79. Ceremonia de inauguración oficial de la réplica/oficial inaugural ceremony of the replica. Sandra Rozental, 2007.Fig. 80. Taller de reproducciones del inAh/inAh’s reproductions workshop. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2006. Fig. 81. ROM 1879; ROM 496; PMAE 10161; ROM 1936; Daniel Real, La decoration Primitive: Amerique Pre-Colombienne. Paris: Libraire des arts decoratifs, 1923. Fig. 82. urna zapoteca falsa en la casa de Rickards (foto cortesía de George Rickards), la misma urna ahora en el Museo Británico vendida por el colega de Rickards Joseph Pyke en 1946/Fake Zapotec urn sitting on Rickards’s butterfly collection, in his home in Mexico City (Photo courtesy of George Rickards); Same urn now in the British Museum (1946.AM.16.1) sold by Rickards’s coworker Joseph Pyke, in 1946. Fig. 83. Constantine George Rickards, 1876–1950. Fig. 84. seleccionando/Choosing. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2005. Fig. 85. Paisaje/Landscape. Mariana Castillo Deball, 2005. Fig. 86. Brígido Lara en su taller/Brígido Lara in his workshop. Arqueología Mexicana. Fig. 87. sacerdote portador del dios jaguar. Proviene del zapotal, Veracruz. Periodo Clásico Tardío, Museo de Antropología Jalapa, Veracruz/Priest of the jaguar god. Comes from El zapotal, Veracruz. Late classic period, Museum of Anthropology, Jalapa, Veracruz. Marco Antonio Pacheco/Arqueología Mexicana/Raíces. Fig. 88. sacerdote portador del dios jaguar, copia de Brígido Lara/Priest of the jaguar god, copy by Brígido Lara. Marco Antonio Pacheco/Arqueología Mexicana/Raíces. Fig. 89. Maqueta/Model. Fototeca del Templo Mayor, Ciudad de México. Fig. 90. Maqueta/Model. Fototeca del Templo Mayor, Ciudad de México. Fig. 91. el universo a escala/The scaled universe. Archivo de la Familia Cirett. Fig. 92. Develando/uncovering. Archivo de la Familia Arellano. Fig. 93. Piramide-cebolla/onion-pyramid. Archivo de la Familia Arellano. Vistas de la exposición estas Ruinas Que Ves/exhibition views of These Ruins you see,Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil 2006. Ramiro Chaves, Mariana Castillo Deball.

BIOGRAPHIESBIOGRAFíAS

Mariana Castillo Deball nació en la Ciudad de México, estudió Artes visuales en la Escuela Nacional de Artes plásticas de la UNAM y realizó estudios de postgrado en la Jan van Eyck Academie en Maastricht, Países Bajos. Algunos de sus proyectos recientes incluyen: Do ut des en Objectif_exhibitions en Amberes, Bélgica; A for Alibi, Deappel, Amsterdam; The last piece of John Fare, GB Agency, Paris; Transacciones Filosóficas, observatorio histórico, Córdoba, Argentina; Estas Ruinas Que Ves, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México D.F.; 10 Defining Experiments, Cisne-ros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA; Mercury in Retrograde, De Appel, Amsterdam; 9th Baltic Triennial of International Art, CAC Vilnius, Lituania; Prix de Rome Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; 2003, Interlude: the reader’s traces, Intervención en las bibliotecas públicas en Berlín, París y Nueva York. Junto con Irene Kopelman es miembro fundador de Uqbar, desarrollando proyectos que vinculan a las artes visuales con otras disciplinas.

Mariana Castillo Deball was born in Mexico City. She studied fine art at the National Univer-sity in Mexico and at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Recent proj-ects include: Do ut des, Objectif_exhibitions, Antwerp; A for Alibi, Deappel, Amsterdam; The last piece of John Fare, GB Agency, Paris; Transacciones Filosóficas, Historical Observatory, Córdoba Argentina; Estas Ruinas Que Ves, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México D.F.; 10 Defining Experi-ments, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA; Mercury in Retrograde, De Appel, Amsterdam; 9th Baltic Triennial of International Art, CAC Vilnius, Lithuania; Prix de Rome Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; 2003, Interlude: the reader’s traces, National Library, Paris; the Public Library, New York; and the National Library, Berlin. Together with Irene Kopelman, Mariana is a founding member of Uqbar, developing projects that relate contemporary art to other disciplines.

Guadalupe espinosa es antropóloga con especialidad en arqueología por la Universidad de las Américas Puebla y candidata a la maestría por el IIA de la UNAM. Miembro de ICOMOS México. Espinosa es coordinadora del Proyecto Arqueológico Bosque de Chapultepec, el cual se desarrolla bajo tres líneas de investigación enfocadas a: El patrón de asentamientos y la filiación teotihua-cana en la falda sur del Cerro del Chapulín; la investigación arqueológica y análisis tipológico de basura contemporánea contenida en el Lago Mayor y Menor, Canal del Quijote y Acequia del Bosque; y la investigación arqueológica de cementerios coloniales del periodo estimado entre los siglos XVI al XVIII, en el acceso al Jardín de los Leones.

Guadalupe espinsosa has a degree in anthropology, with a specialization in archaeology, from the University of las Américas, Puebla; and a master’s degree from the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropologicas at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Espinosa coordinates the ar-chaeological project at the Bosque de Chapultepec, which develops under three lines of research: the establishment patterns and Teotihuacan filiations in Cerro del Chapulin; the archaeological investigation and typological analysis of contemporary garbage contained in the Lago Mayor and Menor, Canal del Quijote y Acequia del Bosque; and the archaeological research of colonial cemeteries from the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Jorge ibargüengoitia (Guanajuato, 1928-Mejorada del Campo, 1983) Escritor y periodista mexi-cano, considerado uno de los más agudos e irónicos de la literatura hispanoamericana y un crí-tico mordaz de la realidad social y política. Estudió en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y fue becario del Centro Mexicano de Escritores y de las fundaciones Rockefeller, Fairfield y Guggenheim. Su obra abarca novelas, cuentos, piezas

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teatrales, artículos periodísticos y relatos infantiles. Su primera novela, Los relámpagos de agosto (1965), una demoledora sátira de la Revolución mexicana, lo hizo merecedor del Premio Casa de las Américas. A ésta seguirían Maten al león (1969), Estas Ruinas Que Ves (1974), Dos crímenes (1974), Las muertas (1977) y Los pasos de López (1982), en las que echó mano del costumbrismo para convertirlo en la base de historias irónicas y sarcásticas. En el terreno del cuento publicó La ley de Herodes (1976). Entre sus piezas teatrales destacan Susana y los jóvenes (1954), Clotilde en su casa (1955) y El atentado (1963). Ha pasado a la historia como una de las voces más innovadoras de la narrativa hispánica contemporánea, como el escritor que liberó a la literatura mexicana del agobio de la solemnidad. Su obra es un corrosivo alegato en favor del humor sarcástico y la ironía.

Jorge ibargüengoitia (b. Guanajuato, 1928; d. Mejorada del Campo, 1983) Mexican writer and journalist, he is considered one of the most sharp and ironic minds in Hispanic literature and a critic of the social and political reality. His work is a corrosive statement in favor of sarcastic humor and irony. He studied at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the National Univer-sity in Mexico and received grants from the Rockefeller, Fairfield, and Guggenheim foundations. His work includes novels, short stories, theater pieces, newspaper articles, and children’s stories. With his first novel, Los relámpagos de agosto (1965), a demolishing satire of the Mexican revolu-tion, he obtained the price Casa de las Américas. Following would come Maten al león (1969), Estas Ruinas Que Ves (1974), Dos crímenes (1974), Las muertas (1977) y Los pasos de López (1982). His plays include Susana y los Jóvenes and Ante varias esfinges, both dating from the 1950s.

Jesse Lerner es director de cine y escritor. Se interesa en las relaciones entre México y los Estados Unidos con sus películas, entre ellas Nativos (1991, con Scott Sterling), Fronterilandia (1995, con Rubén Ortiz Torres), Ruinas (1999), El Egipto americano (2001), T.S.H. (2004) y Magnavoz (2006). Como curador ha programado exhibiciones para el seminario Robert Flaherty y el museo Guggenheim. Entre sus libros destacan F is for Phony (con Alexandra Juhasz) y El impacto de la modernidad. Ha dado clases en universidades y instituciones en México y los EE.UU., como los Colegios de Claremont y la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.

Jesse Lerner is a filmmaker and writer. His movies Magnavoz (2006), T.S.H. (2004), The American Egypt (2001), Ruins (1999), Frontierland (1995, with Rubén Ortiz Torres), and Natives (1991, with Scott Sterling) have won prizes in Latin America, Japan, and the U.S. He has curated exhibi-tions for the Robert Flaherty Seminar, the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Oax-aca, and the Guggenheim Museum, and has taught at the Autonomous University of Yucatan and the Claremont Colleges as well as other schools in the U.S. and Mexico. His books include F is for Phony (with Alexandra Juhasz) and The Shock of Modernity.

Oriunda de la Ciudad de México, sandra Rozental cursó la licenciatura en Politicas Culturales en la Universidad de Georgetown donde también obtuvo una maestría en Estudios Latinoameri-canos. Trabajó en la Ciudad de México como consultora, investigadora y curadora en el Museo de Historia Natural, el Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares, y en el Museo Nacional de Antropo-logía. Publicó en el Diario Monitor la columna semanal Artífices y Artefactos. Actualmente, esta cursando el doctorado en Antropología sociocultural en la Universidad de Nueva York. El ensayo incluído en esta publicación forma parte de su proyecto de tesis: Movilizar al Monolito: Propiedad, Colectividad, y Arqueología Vernácula en el México Contemporaneo.

sandra Rozental is from Mexico City. She studied at Georgetown University, where she obtained a B.A. in Cultural Politics and an M.A. in Latin American Studies. She worked in Mexico City as an exhibition researcher, consultant, and curator at the Natural History Museum, the National Museum of Popular Cultures, and the National Anthropology Museum. Her column on museums and exhibits, Artifices y Artefactos, appeared weekly in Diario Monitor. She is currently working