The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft, Sandra Rozental, 2026, Duke University Press
Mexico is in the vanguard of an archaeological revolution that has passed under the radar for most of us yet has momentous implications.
In a quiet yet relentless official campaign, the Mexican government has been repatriating priceless cultural objects—often looted in past eras—that have been dispersed across the globe.
This proactive decolonisation in the form of the recovery of irreplaceable national patrimony—from pre-Columbian figures to colonial-era objects—has sent shock waves throughout the international antiquities trade.
One reason for this is that the Mexican state’s official default position—and this administration alone has so far repatriated more than 3,700 items—is that any heritage object that can be found outside the country permanently was taken illegally.
This year alone, Mexico has so far taken possession of 160 cultural objects—either ancient or historical, and ranging from clay figurines linked to Teotihuacan to baroque doors—from countries such as the United States, Canada, France and Argentina.
The campaign #MiPatrimonioNoSeVende (“My heritage is not for sale”) to press for the return of ancient artifacts from museums and auction houses was launched as a key tenet of the “Fourth Transformation” under Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
It sits firmly within the logic of fighting corruption—i.e., to return to the Mexican people what had been stolen from them both by outsiders but also national elites.
Its most concrete expression has been the creation of the Instituto para Devolverle al Pueblo lo Robado (Indep, Institute to Return to the People What has been Stolen).
Some of the pieces repatriated are of unparalleled cultural significance; in April 2023, for example, the Mexican government repatriated an important Olmec work from a private collection in the US known as the Portal to the Underworld.
The then foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard proclaimed this was “of great significance for the idea that we have of ourselves. It was like an open wound not to have it.”
It is in this context that Sandra Rozental’s The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft has been published, zooming in on a significant stone from San Miguel Coatlinchan east of Mexico City.
In 1964 the large object hewn from volcanic rock and purportedly representing the storm god Tlaloc, one of the most important Mesoamerican deities, was removed from a ravine to be taken to the then new Museo Nacional de Antropología under construction in the Bosque de Chapultepec in Mexico City.
Since then, the stone has stood vigil over Mexico City at the centre of a circular fountain on the Paseo de la Reforma, the capital’s emblematic boulevard.
Its removal and transportation to the centre of the capital in itself was lauded as a national triumph of engineering, equated to the conquest of space, and a key event in the nationalist calendar that “restored” the object to the former Aztec seat of power.
Residents of Coatlinchan thought otherwise, however, and their efforts to resist the stone’s “theft” was met with the full force of the modern state: the stone was ultimately removed from the village under an escort of dozens of armed soldiers.
Fascinated by this story, the author has devoted many years to researching it, and collaborated in a documentary film about it, The Absent Stone (2013) which she co-directed with filmmaker Jesse Lerner.
Rozental has documented what residents of the village still consider to be a theft and their continuing sense of dispossession alongside the triumphant and ultimately political narratives about the stone promoted by the Mexican government and the museum.
The result is a fascinating exploration of archaeology, the role of museums, the construction of national patrimony by states, and the meaning that the stone’s removal by its own government has for residents of Coatlinchan. The villagers believe it is theirs: the nation believes it is its.
It is a complex issue that touches upon many themes, and Rozental writes: “In other parts of the world, cases of forced dispossession like Coatlinchan’s have been denounced as theft linked to colonial violence, inspiring Indigenous communities, First Nations, and former colonies to file legal demands for restitution and repatriation.
“Legal frameworks for repatriation have been critiqued as partial and incomplete means to translate cultural claims over artifacts and human remains … yet, as many have suggested, they have served both in practice and in context for communities and postcolonial nation-states to reclaim sovereignty over things and foster cultural renewal in the wake of dispossession.”
Moreover, despite its 60-year sojourn in Mexico City, the villagers still want this stone back, attributing its loss among other things to local ecological decline and their town’s dwindling fortunes.
They have been campaigning for the return of this artifact to Coatlinchan in a very similar way to the Mexican government’s current efforts seeking repatriation of other lost artifacts from abroad.
This call for restitution, notes the author, reflects a “politics of patrimonio” that accounts for how certain objects and sites cannot be separated from the places and communities they are embedded in.
She writes: “Theirs is not only an effort to right a historical wrong. Ultimately, their call for the stone’s return is premised on the ways in which it remains connected to and interacts with telluric forces crucial to their town and the region’s survival, collective well-being, and environmental restoration.”
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Categories: Mexico, North America