Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been no shortage of publications on ruins: their elusive meanings, formal variety and complex temporalities have drawn the interest and fostered the intellectual creativity of art historians, philosophers, cultural historians, anthropologists, cultural geographers and literary scholars alike.1 Much of this literature focuses on contemporary ruins, which are shown to be emblematic of the economic short-termism of our times, but also of the apparently indelible impact of human activity on the environment. It may partly be driven by what Pierre Nora describes as the “imperative of our epoch […] to preserve every indicator of memory,” to isolate material traces from the accelerated flow of history, in order to keep a semblance of continuity with the past (Nora 7-24). But ironically, it mostly presents us with banal vestiges, the product of industry or rampant property development. As Bruce Bégout has recently argued, one may wonder whether the rapidly decaying constructions of contemporary societies may properly be considered as ruins, a notion which entails at least a form of aesthetic value (what Alois Riegl called “age value”).

Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson provides a more classical perspective on the subject, in a broad, masterful panorama of the Western tradition of ruins representations and ruins sentiment.

This is what I was looking for when reflecting on my distaste for using the word ruins to describe things like the site at Chichen Itza.