In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico(Confluencias)

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El TajÍn is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac residents of the region know well that the site’s relative absence from discussions of global archaeology and heritage belies a century of wide-ranging labor, extractive industries, and commodity exchange. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and rarely consulted administrative archives, In the Shadow of El TajÍn tells the story of how a landscape of ancient mounds and ruins became an archaeological site, brings to light the network of actors who made it happen, and reveals the Indigenous histories silenced in the process. By drawing on the insights of Indigenous Totonac peoples who have lived and worked in El TajÍn for more than a century, Sam Holley-Kline explores historical processes that made both the archaeological site and regional historical memory. In the Shadow of El TajÍn decenters discussions of the state and tourism industry by focusing on the industries and workers who are integral to the functioning of the site but who have historically been overlooked by studies of the ancient past. Holley-Kline recovers local Indigenous histories in dialogue with broader trends in scholarship to demonstrates the rich recent past of El TajÍn, a place better known for its ancient history.  

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Lands: Public Pyramids, Private Parcels 2. Oil: Practical Entanglements, Cumulative Contamination 3. Vanilla: Violence and Temporality 4. Wage Labor: From Subsistence Farming to Archaeology 5. Custodios: Cohorts and Histories of Labor 6. Experts: Precarity and Opportunity Conclusion Appendix: Annual Visitors to El TajÍn, 1925–2024 Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Sam Holley-Kline is an assistant clinical professor in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park, and was named a 2023–24 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow.    

Review :
“Immensely important. . . . Sam Holley-Kline reframes the archaeological site of El TajÍn as a location of recent, rather than just ancient, Indigenous history. In the Shadow of El TajÍn makes a significant contribution to the emerging field of the history of archaeology in Mexico and beyond, as well as to our understanding of Mexican political economy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”-Lisa Pinley Covert, author of San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site