Reinventing “Tesoro”: Treasure Hunting Petitions and the Making of Mexican Patrimony

In the mid nineteenth century, in the aftermath of Mexican independence, residents of Mexico City began appealing to local authorities for permission to carry out excavations across the capital. Searching for ‘antiquities,’ they requested permission to dig in plazas, causeways, and convents. Unlike the antiquarians and explorers of the age, however, these petitioners were not members of Mexico’s political or intellectual elite and their expeditions were profoundly local endeavors. In an effort to regulate these excavations, petitioners and government officials alike turned to colonial law, specifically decrees concerning tesoro and royal patrimony. This paper examines the transformation of colonial law in a republican era and considers the role of informal practice and popular thought on legal frameworks, in this case formative debates about the nature of national patrimony. Over the last decade, historians of archaeology have rightly called upon their fellow scholars to think beyond the state. After all, many early expeditions were carried out by individuals or independent scientific institutions whose efforts were only subsequently appropriated by state projects for the development of nationalist ideologies. In this paper, I return to the question of the state’s relationship with excavations, but consider more mundane modes of engagement–– from taxation to urban planning––where regulations were not necessarily guided by a historical interest in the pre-colonial past, but rather by a concern with the nascent state’s territorial sovereignty.