Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915

"Evans has meticulously researched his subject and writes in an elegant and clear prose style that makes his book a pleasure to read.... In short, this is an outstanding scholarly book that should be of interest to Mayanists, art historians, and students of American literature and history."

—The Americas

"Romancing the Maya will be required (and enjoyable) reading for students of the Maya. And its careful analysis of visual expositions—including the subjective uses of photography—makes it especially appropriate for the undergraduate classroom."

—The Journal of Latin American Anthropology

"This work will appeal to general readers because of its subject: ancient Mexico and its first investigators. The archaeologists treated here are some of the most fascinating and rakish in the history of the field. Some were real Indiana Jones types."

—Khristaan Villela, Director, Thaw Art History Center, College of Santa Fe

During Mexico's first century of independence, European and American explorers rediscovered its pre-Hispanic past. Finding the jungle-covered ruins of lost cities and artifacts inscribed with unintelligible hieroglyphs—and having no idea of the age, authorship, or purpose of these antiquities—amateur archaeologists, artists, photographers, and religious writers set about claiming Mexico's pre-Hispanic patrimony as a rightful part of the United States' cultural heritage.

In this insightful work, Tripp Evans explores why nineteenth-century Americans felt entitled to appropriate Mexico's cultural heritage as the United States' own. He focuses in particular on five well-known figures—American writer and amateur archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens, British architect Frederick Catherwood, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the French migr photographers Dsir Charnay and Augustus Le Plongeon. Setting these figures in historical and cultural context, Evans uncovers their varying motives, including the Manifest Destiny-inspired desire to create a national museum of American antiquities in New York City, the attempt to identify the ancient Maya as part of the Lost Tribes of Israel (and so substantiate the Book of Mormon), and the hope of proving that ancient Mesoamerica was the cradle of North American and even Northern European civilization. Fascinating stories in themselves, these accounts of the first explorers also add an important new chapter to the early history of Mesoamerican archaeology.