of the British Museum this was not a great loss, as he explained during a
parliamentary inquiry in 1860 when he answered positively the question
about whether the museum had stowed away in the basement Mexican and
Peruvian antiquities (Graham 1993). If the British Museum was not inter-
ested, the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, seemed to be (but
perhaps on a personal basis): he ordered his charge ́d’aVaires in Guatemala
to acquire a collection of Mayan ruins for the British Museum in 1851.
Despite the fact that two scientists were eventually hired for this, the Austrian
Karl Ritter von Scherzer (1821–1903) and the German Moritz Wagner
(1813–87), the attempt was unsuccessful (Aguirre 2005: ch. 3).
In Britain, the archaeology of the Latin American Great Civilizations 2
became mainly curated in ethnological museums. From the 1870s a few
objects were exhibited in ethnographical museums such as the Cambridge
Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology set up in the 1870s and the Pitt Rivers
Museum at Oxford opened in the 1880s. Also, in 1886, the Mesoamerican
collection bought by the British Museum from the collector Henry Christy
(1810–65) in 1860 was put on display in Bloomsbury. The casts made by
Alfred Maudslay, purchased by the British Museum in the late nineteenth
century, were left in the basement of the South Kensington Museum until
1923 (Williams 1993). The origins of these collections showed that British
interest in archaeology in Latin America followed a pattern already familiar in
the case of the Western ancient Great Civilizations (Chapters 4 and 5). 3 They
were formed without state intervention by private adventurers and by wealthy
individuals. Some of these were William Bollaert (1807–76), Henry Christy
(1810–65) (a silk and towel manufacturer better known as a collector of
French Stone Age material) and Alfred Maudslay (1850–1931). The latter,
an explorer of the Mayan world, wrote famous volumes such asContributions
to the Knowledge of the Fauna and Flora of Mexico and Central America
(1889–1902, vols. 55–9 on archaeology) and A Glimpse at Guatemala
(1899), describing sites such as Yaxchilla ́n and Palenque. 4 SigniWcantly, the
great economic investment in countries such as Argentina was not matched
with a British state funding in the archaeology of the northwest of the country
where Inca sites were located.
2 Information about non-monumental archaeology in Latin America, as well as in Central
and Eastern Asia, is provided in Chapter 10.
3 This at least until the major excavation in the late 1920s paid for by the British Museum
(Williams 1993: 134).
4 Alfred Maudslay’s attempt to work in Monte Alba ́n was opposed by the Mexican arch-
aeologist Leopoldo Batres, who tried to monopolize the archaeological work in the area
(Scha ́velzon n.d.).
Latin America, China, and Japan 173