Mexico’s relationship with archaeology is a complex one. In addition to studying the distant past through its material vestiges, it is deeply engaged in more recent aspects of politics, education, national identity, and public works. The various layers of its historical past are forever present, giving rise to continual interpretations, reconstructions, demolitions, and annexations. Mexico’s archaeology is resolved in the present and its history is being modified like city landscapes, public policies, and textbooks. The project These Ruins You See shifts between politics, history, heritage, and identity in an attempt to find, in the present, the vestiges of archaeological practice.

The publication contains 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.

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.