Customer Reviews

Moon Handbooks: Archaeological Mexico (1st Ed.)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the best guide book to Mexico's archaeological sites written in the 20th century. As a professional archaeologist who has worked in Mexico since 1961, I have visited virtually every archaeological site he describes and read almost every guide book published in English or Spanish. Coe is accurate, informative, and interesting. This book will be in my backpack on every trip to Mexico in the future.

I really looked forward to this book and took it with me on my tour of mayan sites in the Yucatan. However, I found that this book offered very little more than was available on the posted signage at the sites. Also, many of the maps are inadequate. I often found myself going to my Lonely Planet guide (Belize, Guatemala & Yucatan) for more detailed maps and decriptions of archeological sites.

Although the author presents the sites in a "tour" format, in practice it is hard to follow, and since the descriptions lack photos, it's very difficult to compare what you're seeing with what's written in the book. Although there are photos of the sites, but not of the specific items that the author is describing.

I know it's hard to keep up to date, but that's why new editions are published. What got my attention was the fact that this book's description of getting to Yaxchilan clearly pre-dates the construction of a paved road from Palenque all the way along the Guatemala border to Lagunas de Montebello. The publication date of the book is September 2001, yet the road was opened in 2000 and must have been under construction for some time before then. I hate it when something I know is wrongly described in a book; it makes me mistrust the rest of it.

As I live in Mexico and have visited at least 50% of the sites in this book in the last few years, I can personally testify that most if not all of tour information is woefully out of date. It needs to be updated to be useful in any meaningful way. Much has changed since the 2001 printing. At this point, it is little more than a general outline for the archaeologically minded tourist but should not be relied on for accurate details as to fees, hours, directions, site facilities, etc. In addition, I have found the descriptions are little more than a restatement of the signage available at the sites. The hours suggested for visiting each site are entirely subjective. I have spent days at sites he says can be done in a few hours and stayed a few hours at sites he recommends for a day.

I have used Archaelogical Mexico for personal use and have placed it on reserve in the college library to supplement the scholarly texts in my Latin American Culture course. The book contains over 400 pages of concise history, illustrations, photographs and quality anecdotes about the Mesoamerican cultures of ancient Mexico. This is one of the most responsible travel books I have seen, so I wanted to write to congratulate Mr. Andrew Coe on a delightful compendium of Mexican archaelogy. Kathleen O'Connor-Bater

this book can be deceiving, it's small, doen't use very technnical language, fits in your backpack and looks very innocent. But is full of information, maps, step by step guides to the sites and some tips on hanging around the sites.

I'm not disapointed of buying it.

I think that the reviewers that gave this book lower scores may have had misplaced expectations. While this book gives a reasonable amount of information about each of the sites that it covers, it does not provide an in depth treatise on them. It does, however, provide sufficient detail for a starting point and, more importantly, is invaluable in identifying the major sites and in recommending which sites are potentially more interesting. I found the rankings (in number of trowels) to be particularly useful.

Outstanding! This is a book that will delight any traveler interested in the histories of Mexico's ancient cities and how best to visit and understand the sites today.

The book is a little bit out-dated today, as Mexicans continually dig and "update" their sites, but it's still very informative regarding the historical and archeological record about each site covered, which I know from the first hand, as I've visited some of them with the book in the hand. The only minus would be not including some also important sites of which I was aware, but which I haven't seen, so I personally wasn't at any loss here.

Well, I am going to go out on a limb and say that I found the book disappointing. Maybe that just shows my preference for an all-around guide that covers many subjects. I felt that most of the information was already available in other guides. However, since seeing the excellent reviews given here, I will be re-reading the book to try to find out what I missed!