Excavating identity: Archaeology and nation in Mexico, 1876--1911

This dissertation examines the state project under Mexican leader Porfirio Diaz (1876--1911) to gather, protect, and display the objects of the pre-Hispanic past. It argues that the Porfirian regime brought Mexico its first concerted archaeological policy, one that was inseparable from nation and state-building concerns. The government used archaeology to present Mexico as modern, scientific, and sovereign. It used the findings of the science, in turn, to present the Indian past as the basis of national identity, and project an image of Mexico as sophisticated and ancient. Popular reaction to this project is a central part of this story. This dissertation looks at how local people both aided and resisted the state.;Chapter 1 examines how locals and sackers were using the ruins before the government began to take control of the remains of the ancient past. The following chapter looks at why Mexico's archaeological policy consolidated at this time, analyzing Porfirian ideas about race in order to understand how such a policy developed under such a profoundly racist, anti-Indian regime. The chapters that follow focus on different aspects of the state project. Chapter 3 looks at the institutions established to protect the past: the Inspection of Monuments, legislation, and a system of guards at the ruins. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the effort to centralize antiquities in the National Museum, and the creation of Mexico's first archaeological site at Teotihuacan. The epilogue looks at how the birth of state-archaeology under Diaz effected the later development of the science.;At its core, I argue that state-archaeology was a negation of the live Indian. It reflected leaders' concerns with modernity and their preoccupation with what they saw as Mexico's "backward" Indian population. While the ancient Indians were exalted as sophisticated, the live Indians were marginalized and seen as degenerate. Even the very government projects to preserve antiquities negated Mexico's indigenous reality. Federal officials took artifacts from Indians who still worshipped them, and cleared sites of local people in order to turn the Museum and the ruins into showcases of the ancient past.