Archaeology, land tenure, and Indigenous dispossession in Mexico

In this paper, I examine a case of dispossession that made land belonging to Indigenous Totonac residents of San Antonio Ojital part of the archaeological site of El Tajín. To do so, I examine the failure of a 2016 claim made to Mexico’s Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Rather than this being a case of purpose-driven dispossession or an unintended consequence of well-meaning policies, I trace the ultimate causes to multicultural recognition, 19th-century land reforms, and the expansion of archaeological research in El Tajín. Liberal land reforms brought a private property regime into being through enrollment and inscription, and Totonac landowners around El Tajín used the regime to their benefit. As El Tajín expanded though excavation, archaeologists and landowners used the private property regime’s conception of space to address conflicts in El Tajín. The resulting pragmatic accommodations would ultimately fail landowners when an archaeological megaproject came in. Ultimately, I argue for an historical and contextual understanding of archaeology and land tenure to understand the discipline’s diverse relationships with dispossession.