Hispanic past in the service of a mestizo national identity. Today, archaeological sites like the
Templo Mayor and Teotihuacan remain important symbols of nationalism and sites for lucrative
tourism. While the state Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) holds a
longstanding monopoly on the practice of archaeology in Mexico, its role in supporting elite
imaginaries of the nation has too often been assumed. In this paper, I evaluate federal
budgets documenting the development of the INAH’s workforce during the mid century Golden
Age of Mexican archaeology from the founding of the institution in 1939 to the decentralizing
reforms of the 1970s. Following recent efforts to understand Mexico’s archaeological heritage as
contested rather than given, I hypothesize that the INAH’s regional research was limited in
practice; its personnel were never numerous enough to carry out its institutional mandate; and
that its institutional organization function to further divide the labors of knowledge production
from heritage management. I conclude by asking what such a perspective might mean for the
current conditions of Mexican archaeology, suggesting that it allows us to distinguish between
the varieties of precarity that are typical of the neoliberal era and that which previously affected
the guild—and how workers of the past faced their challenges.
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