I offer this study as an ethnographic foray into the intimate politics of monumental heritage and the contingencies of claiming cultural patrimony in Yucatán, Mexico. Perhaps this project resonates with contradiction. After all, the very notion of monumentality suggests-and perhaps even requires-the univocalization and ossification of meaning in material cultural icons. Through archaeological science and the project of nation building, what is commonly understood as Mexican heritage signals a "glaciation of the past" (Foucault 1967/1986). Thus, the invocation of monumentality, it would seem, necessarily effaces the subtle, personal, contingent practices, expressions, and claims enacted in negotiating both the meaning and content of the stuff of heritage. Yet as Knapp and Ashmore (1999, 1-2) suggest, "We know from modern peoples that meaning in a landscape is not directly related to how obtrusively it has been marked in material, archaeologically detectable ways." Indeed, monumentality strives to erase-and thus assumes the erasure of-ambivalence. But once we begin to look for the fissures in monumentality, we find that ambivalence abounds.