America when he was thirty-six. He started to work for the University of
Pennsylvania three years later, and, in 1900, for the University of California.
In 1905, he moved to Peru as the director of the National Archaeological
Museum and then to Chile to organize the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology in Santiago in 1912 and to Ecuador in 1919 where he repre-
sented this country in several international congresses. UhleWnally retired in
1933 to live in Berlin (Rowe 1954: 1–19). Stein and Uhle were not the only
examples, and the names of Chavannes, Klaproth and Przhevalsky could also
be mentioned. The impact that their association to diVerent nation-states and
empires had in their studies and interpretation is something still in need of
attention. The development of novel, diVering approaches to understand the
multi-layered and situational features of ethnicity can only enrich a critical
study of trans-national scholars in the colonial world.
THE LATIN AMERICAN GREAT CIVILIZATIONS
FROM THE 1840sAs seen in Chapter 4, at the time of their independence, the Great Civiliza-
tions of Latin America had been used as metaphors for a glorious past which
could help the elites living in Mesoamerica and the Andean area to explain
their rights to self-government. Yet, the rise in importance of the racial
component in nationalism, and in particular the prestige conferred on the
Aryan race (Chapter 12), soon led to a rejection of this early enthusiasm. The
exception to this, although only to a limited extent as has been explained in
Chapter 4, was the development of the Indianist movement in Brazil in the
mid nineteenth century, in which the native was seen as a ‘good savage’ and
celebrated as the embodiment of the Brazilian nation. In the new republics of
Spanish America this discourse was largely unsuccessful until much later.
This, and particularly the lack of legislation protecting antiquities, left the
door open to foreign collectors and scholars.
Colonizing Latin American antiquitiesThe Latin American countries did not escape from the colonial aspirations of
the Euro-American powers. From their independence in the 1810s and 1820s
(see map 1), most Latin American countries endured a period of chaos that
paved the way for the intervention of other powers. The political instability
throughout theWrst decades of independence had resulted in a rise in the
Latin America, China, and Japan 171