Dear Member of the Society of Americanists,

We are pleased to announce that the Society’s next conference will be held on Thursday, June 4, 2026, at 6:00 p.m., in Lecture Hall 2 of the Quai Branly Museum.

Annabel Villalonga Gordaliza (Autonomous University of Barcelona – Department of Art and Musicology) will present:

From the Trocadéro to the Quai Branly (MQB-JC): Historiography and Archaeometry of the “Teotihuacan” Materials in the Alphonse L. Pinart Collection.

The MQB-JC houses a collection of archaeological artifacts from Teotihuacan, the Valley of Mexico, and other sites in the Mexico Basin that belonged to the collection of French explorer, anthropologist, and linguist Alphonse L. Pinart (1852–1911), who traveled through northern Mexico, the Gulf Coast, and the state of Guerrero between 1878 and 1882. Based on a historiographical and documentary study, the ongoing research examines correspondence, old catalogs, and museum inventory records in order to reconstruct the history of these pieces. The presentation will propose alternative hypotheses regarding the possible methods of acquisition for some of these objects. The second focus of the project centers on the study of eight “Teotihuacan-style” stone masks preserved in the museum’s storage. The presentation will outline the initial results obtained through traceological analyses aimed at identifying tool marks associated with possible modern manufacturing, as well as a geometric morphometric study applied to two specimens. Through the integration of historiographical research and archaeometric analysis, this contribution seeks to offer new perspectives on the formation, circulation, and authenticity of Mesoamerican collections in European museums.

The lecture will be delivered in Spanish