Museo Nacional de Antropología

Introduction

The National Museum of Anthropology stands in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, designed by Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, begun in February 1963 and opened on 17 September 1964, a construction period of only nineteen months for a building of this scale. It is the most-visited museum in Mexico, the largest anthropology museum in the world, and one of the foremost collections of pre-Columbian archaeology anywhere. President Adolfo Lopez Mateos commissioned it with an explicit intent: to house Mexico's pre-Hispanic heritage at the same scale and grandeur as the European museums that had been taking that heritage for centuries, as an act of national identity-building. Twenty-three to twenty-four galleries ring a vast open-air courtyard whose centre is El Paraguas, the umbrella: a single bronze column 11 metres tall supporting a canopy of about 4,200 square metres, with water falling in a continuous ring off its outer edge. The column carries Aztec-style reliefs by the sculptor Tomas Chavez Morado depicting the rain god Tlaloc, so the water off the rim can also be read as Tlaloc's rain. The collection is split by floor: the ground level holds archaeology arranged chronologically by culture, the upper level ethnography of living indigenous peoples. The Mexica Hall opposite the entrance holds the 24-ton Aztec Sun Stone, which is worth stating clearly is not a calendar but a cosmological monument depicting cosmic cycles and the sequence of the five suns; the same room holds the Coatlicue statue and the Tizoc Stone. The Maya Hall keeps the jade death mask of Palenque's king Pakal and a reconstruction of his tomb; the Olmec Hall's basalt colossal heads date to 1200 BCE and are the physical evidence of Mesoamerica's so-called mother culture; the Zapotec Hall's bat-god jade mask from Monte Alban represents the peak of Oaxacan craftsmanship; and the Teotihuacan Hall, the largest in the museum, reconstructs the facade of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The upstairs ethnographic halls are the most easily skipped and are precisely the point of the place: modern indigenous dress, textiles, masks and ritual objects give the antiquities below a living context. Most visitors leave after seeing only half. Four practical points. The building is vast and the layout is not intuitive, so take a map at the door, start with the Sun Stone, rest in the courtyard, then choose two or three cultures to look at properly rather than trying to read every case. All bags, large luggage and umbrellas must be checked, at a free cloakroom to the right of the entrance. Tuesday or Wednesday at the 9:00 opening is quietest, while the free Sunday is the most crowded. And the museum has one good story of its own: in 1985 two thieves removed 140 objects in a single night, and most were recovered four years later from a drug trafficker's apartment.

✨ Highlights

🛈 Practical Info