Conquista y pérdida de Yucatán

About this book

This book deals with the archaeological expeditions to the Yucatan Peninsula that were financed by US funds from the eighties of the 19th century, in particular those native to the Cambridge-Boston area, then continued, between 1923 and 1940, by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, under the new concept of "scientific archaeology". The basic argument postulated by this research is that the geographical and conceptual construction of the "Mayan Area", initiated by a group of antique dealers-collectors and academic entrepreneurs from the Boston-Cambridge area, was fundamental to the development of archaeology (and anthropology) in the United States. The publication of a book that narrated the exports to Harvard of archaeological specimens removed from the bottom of the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá by the former American consul Edward H. Thompson, that coincided with the struggle of the government of General Calles with that of the United States, caused a political earthquake that closed the spaces for American archaeology in Mexico, at a time when World War II radically altered Washington's scientific priorities.