For many scholars, the historiography of their own fields is a late-career feat, arrived at after decades of slow rumination—George Kubler’s Aesthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) comes immediately to mind. This slim volume, by contrast, is the reworking of a dissertation (Yale, 1998). Its five chapters are written with vigor and freshness, and while they lack the intellectual heft of Kubler’s work (though this could be said of most works in the field), they offer an easily accessible introduction to some key nineteenth-century writers who tried to make sense of the ancient history of Mexico, largely through direct encounter with surviving ruins. The book takes the form of five thematically linked essays, arranged in rough chronological order. The first chapter summarizes the lack of knowledge about pre-Columbian peoples at the end of the eighteenth century, a lacuna fitfully addressed by the Spanish Bourbon kings who sponsored field surveys of the ancient architecture of New Spain (as Mexico and Guatemala were known). The most extensive of these was that of Captain Guillermo Dupaix, who along with the artist José Luciano Castañeda surveyed important sites, some of them Maya, over three years, 1805–7. A key...