The first time I crossed from North America into Mexico, and once past the fun-house mirrors of the border town, I felt I was entering a place where a multi-layered past was still urgently present in the dress, manners, practices and aesthetics of the people rather than in monuments and museums. That impression of an exposed and visible temporal archaeology makes Mexico seductive to historians. These essays are the fruits of my love-affair with the place.

Working on early Mexico was the happiest time of my academic life. The literary sources were sumptuously equivocal: sixteenth-century Spaniards watching Indians, or glimpsing them from the corner of an eye; Indians acting, reacting, memorialising their experience in ways quite unfamiliar to the outsider. Mexico was also my introduction to non-literary sources: to figurines and pots, to ceremonial dress and dramas, to customary practices sacred and mundane, to local landscapes drenched with transcendent meanings – a baptism by full immersion as a cultural anthropologist, and about as disorientating as full-immersion baptism must be. The challenge of learning to use unfamiliar sources, unfamiliar theories and unfamiliar disciplines, and the hunt to find the words to express those new-hatched understandings, constitute the dynamic of the essays collected here.

In time I began to understand some of the rules structuring the myriad ways Indians had inscribed their understandings on the world: to feel I was in (intermittent, always fragile) communication with these people remote from me in time, place and thought.