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Several of Mexico’s richest gold and silver mines were located near the town of Etzatlán, which lies 70 kilometers west of Guadalajara.

El Bosque del Centinela is a one-square-kilometer area of woodland located just over two kilometers north of the northern Guadalajara Periférico or beltway. 

In 1896, British archaeological artist Adela Breton visited a newly excavated shaft tomb in Jalisco, thought to be 1,500 years old. 

Archaeologist Ericka Blanco, director of the Centro Interpretativo Guachimontones Phil Weigand (CIG), told me a year ago that many foreign visitors – out of the 150,000 in total annually – ask for a booklet to take back to their home countries.

Etzatlán is a busy town located 66 kilometers west of Guadalajara. It’s a fine place to visit after touring the nearby Guachimontones archaeological ruins. The town’s historian, Carlos Parra, recently invited me to see a fascinating mining museum he has set up inside the recently renovated train station, now transformed into a cultural center.

The Austrian-born anthropologist and historian Eric Wolf once complained that for a long time the field of Mesoamerican archaeology was in the hands of “shardists” and “pyramidiots” whose archaeological horizons were limited to dating and classifying pieces of pottery or restoring pyramids for tourism.