Inca ruins and buildings are very interesting and it hurts to see these last vestiges of
the culture of the past being destroyed... Ruins are not the property of the Hacienda
owner but belong to the country... and even to the whole civilised world. It would be
of extreme importance to rescue the little that still remains... There is no other
solution for the rescue of these interesting ruins than for the government to assume
their protection.
(Reiss in Stu ̈ttgen 1994).Wilhelm Reiss eventually settled in Berlin and between 1879 and 1888 played
a leading role in the development of German geological and ethnological
studies. For a few years he led the Gesellschaft fu ̈r Erdkunde (Geographical
Society) of Berlin, and was the president of the Gesellschaft fu ̈r Anthropolo-
gie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and
Prehistory). He was also involved in the VII International Congress of Amer-
icanists held in Berlin in 1888.
The Latin American collections gathered by Reiss and Stu ̈bel were acquired
by the Museum fu ̈rVo ̈lkerkunde (Ethnology) in Berlin and by the museum
of the same name in Leipzig. Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), a good friend of
the anthropologist-archaeologist Virchow (Chapter 13), worked in theWrst
of these two museums. He was also a key link in the chain leading from
Humboldt to geography and through to culture history. Bastian proposed the
concept of the Elementargedanken, the particularities by which each culture
employed and expressed culture, forming in this way culture-geographical
provinces (Chapter 13). Bastian was interested both in diVusion and in
independent invention. It was his concern to study culture history on a very
wide scale that led him to acquire Latin American collections. Bastian also
sent Max Uhle, one of his museum assistants, to South America. Uhle, despite
having been originally trained as a Sinologist, was not new in theWeld of
Latin American antiquities: he had already published on many aspects of Latin
American archaeology and helped Stu ̈bel to study his collections. Uhle had
also contributed to events such as the Congress of Americanists of 1888, for
which he was secretary. His trip to America in 1892 to buy objects for the
museum would result in the increase of the Berlin collections, but would also
mean for him the start of a new life. This will be examined later in the chapter.
Eduard Seler (1849–1922), now considered by some to be the founder of
German pre-colonial Mexican archaeology (www nd-c), was the director for
the American Division of the Ko ̈niglichen Museum fu ̈rVo ̈lkerkunde in Berlin
(1904–22). He would combine archaeology not only with ethnography but
also with aboriginal American linguistics and native history, becoming one of
the few to approach Latin American archaeology from a philological base, an
exceptional case in Latin American archaeology.
Latin America, China, and Japan 177