Andrés Marcos Burriel

First he continued his academic career, taking up the position of director of a seminary for the aristocracy in Madrid and the post of professor of philosophy for the Jesuit University of Alcalá.

His imminent departure was halted by Francisco de Rávago, who by royal decree named him director of an investigative commission into the ecclesiastical archives.

About this disappointment he wrote the following to Juan Francisco Tompes on 3 June 1750: I am almost completely persuaded, that this strange reprisal that has been done to me, while walking to the port, destined to the Province of Mexico, and wishing to bury myself among the Californians, was the work of God, such that the people of the Indies have in me an agent wishing the universal good of the Indies.The mission of the investigative commission was, with a group of historians including the influential Francisco Pérez Bayer, to critically edit all the documents in the church archives, reorder them and at the same time purge from the archives all documents related to the rights of the Crown over the Roman Curia.

In 1754, Pedro Ignacio de Altamirano commissioned Burriel to re-elaborate the Empresas Apostólicas by Miguel Venegas, a project which took him two years and in which he reordered and expanded the original manuscript, reducing the role of the supernatural[4] and bringing it in line with contemporary standards of natural history.

In the dispute surrounding Lorenzo Boturini's depiction of a glorious Amerindian past wiped out by Spanish colonialism, Burriel (along with Mayans) initially supported the Italian and attempted to secure a him a salary at the court.