He grew up in a very religious family, and at the age of thirteen, support by his uncle, Antonio Plancarte y Labastida, he entered the Pontifical Latin American College in Rome.

[3] During the thirteen years that he lived in Europe doing his ecclesiastical studies, he visited museums, ruins and ancient monuments, and he observed archeological digs.

[4] In 1880 Plancarte became a young priest, outstanding in ancient and modern languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, French and Italian), a brilliant student of philosophy and theology, doctor of Canon Law, music connoisseur, historian, and archaeologist.

[5] Plancarte writes about the prosperous maritime trade, and about the men of science who were trained in the Campechan schools, which made him fall in love with Campeche even before the Pope appointed him bishop.

He formed a second collection of ancient Mexican objects, similar to those of the first, among them a large, beautiful jade glass; he visited and studied Yucatan ruins and descended to the depths of a cenote.

He writes about how he found archaeological pieces "on the Hacienda of Zacatepec and in my own backyard [the cathedral garden, which is now Revolution Park]... in Cuernavaca, in Teposltlan (sic)... all over the state of Morelos.

With the 1911 publication of Tamoanchan, Plancarte developed a rich ethnography; he also established a museum with valuable archaeological samples, much of which was lost during the Mexican Revolution.

[9] Although archaeologists today reject most of Plancarte's ideas about the ulmecas (Olmecs) and Tamoanchan, Lucía Martínez Moctezuma and Carlos Capistrán, writing in inventio: La genesis de la cultura universitario de Morelos (March, 2009), note, "The ideas of Plancarte and Navarrete left their mark on the imaginary of the first generations of Morelos.