Museo Nacional de Antropología

This guide to the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City starts with El Paraguas, the concrete umbrella roof raised over the courtyard in just nineteen months and finished in 1964, and the message architect Pedro Ramirez Vazquez built it to send about ancient and modern Mexico. It then turns to Coatlicue, a two-ton headless serpent goddess unearthed beneath the capital's main square in 1790, and the clergy's decision to bury her again rather than let her stand in daylight. A German naturalist later had her dug up just to sketch her.