already led to the development of a philological tradition of oriental lan-
guages in several universities in Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that it
was within philology that the study of Chinese and Japanese antiquitiesWrst
developed in the nineteenth century. This was not the case in America: its
eVective colonization had left the learning of the native languages redundant,
at least for trade, and the imposition of the colonizer’s literacy meant the loss
of the knowledge about certain ancient scripts that were still in use at the
time of the European arrival. The institutionalization of Americanism, there-
fore, lacked a secure academic base and it was within the study of the exotic,
within ethnology and anthropology, that it became anchored.
Another major diVerence between Latin America and Asia relates to the
nature of local traditions and the extent to which we can talk about hybrid-
ization. In theWrst area, the development of archaeology, the European model
fully followed European science, for European science had dominated
scholars’ life since colonization and by the time of independence all local
native scientiWc knowledge about the past that had originated in their own
Great Civilizations—Aztec, Mayan, and Inca—had been lost. In China and
Japan, however, there existed a long scholarly tradition of the study of ancient
documents, and a liking for collecting and describing that tainted the recep-
tion of Western knowledge. Although this issue will not be developed further
in this book, aWnal disparity between the processes in Latin America and
Central and East Asia can be indicated. This relates to artists’ reception of
antiquities in modern art: whereas the art and archaeology of China, and
especially Japan, inXuenced late nineteenth-century Western modernist art-
ists, those of Latin America inspired, in the early twentieth century, local
artists of the standing of the Mexican artist Diego Rivera.
The archaeology of the Great Civilizations of Latin America, China, and
Japan oVers a series of examples of connections between nationalism and
internationalism. Although most of the scholars mentioned in this chapter
are described as members of the country in which they were born and received
scholarly education, for some of them their national identity was less clear-cut
than may appear in the following pages. Some of them moved from their
country of origin and even changed nationality. This was the case of Aurel
Stein (1862–1943). He was born in Hungary, educated in Germany and
received university education in both Austria and Germany. He then moved
to England and then India, from where he initiated his research on China.
Stein became a British subject in 1904, and even before he became oYcially so,
he appealed to the British nationalist feeling against the Swedes and Russians
in order to obtain funding for hisWrst expedition to China (WhitWeld 2004:
10–11, 23). Another example of a trans-national scholar is Friedrich Max
Uhle (1856–1944). Born and educated in Germany, heWrst visited Latin
170 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism