Other Western countries contributed to a limited extent to Latin American
archaeology. Sweden, a former imperial power in the early modern era
(Roberts 1979), was one of these. In Beni, in the lowland area of Bolivia,
the Swedish scholar and aristocrat, Erland Nordenskjo ̈ld (also spelled Nor-
denskio ̈ld), undertook several excavations of mounds and excavated some
material from Anco ́n on his expedition of 1901–2 to Chaco and the Andean
mountain chain (Hocquenghemet al. 1987: 180). On this expedition Eric
Boman (1867–1924), a Swede who lived most of his adult life in Argentina,
assisted with the work (Cornell 1999; Politis 1995: 199–200).
The United States of America exhibited a steady increase in its interest in
Latin American antiquities throughout the nineteenth century. In 1823 Presi-
dent James Monroe, during his seventh annual State of the Union address to
Congress, had argued that the new American nations were sovereign and
should not be subject to colonization, and that the US should keep neutrality
in any confrontation in wars between the European powers and their colonies.
This doctrine was to dominate nineteenth-century US politics until the early
years of the twentieth century, when the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine looked at the Latin American countries as a possible area for
economic control. In the US the concern towards the Great Civilizations of
Latin America evolved in parallel with the emergence of the imperialistic
dreams of this young nation. To begin with, the remains of the American
Great Civilizations were seen as representing a native past that distinguished
the new continent from the old world. This was the view of John Lloyd
Stephens (1805–52), an American who had managed to subsidize his stay in
the Mayan area by holding a diplomatic mission in 1839 and 1841. Stephens
argued that ‘The casts of the Parthenon are regarded as precious memorials in
the British Museum...Would not the cast of Copan be similarly regarded in
New York?’ (in Fane 1993: 146). He also declared that the so-called Governor’s
Palace at Uxmal, one of the Mayan sites visited by him in 1840, ‘marks the
Wnest achievement of Uxmal’s builders’ and added that:
if it stood this day on its grand artiWcial terrace in Hyde Park or the Garden of the
Tuileries, it would form a new order... not unworthy to stand side by side with the
remains of the Egyptian, Grecian and Roman art.
(Fisher 1995: 505).His book,Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan(1841,
1843), enhanced by Frederick Catherwood’s drawings, became a bestseller. He
argued for the link between modern and past native customs, and undertook
some excavations in order to prove these views. He took some objects with
him on his return with the aim of creating an American National Museum.
The project, however, came to nothing because, once in New York, they
178 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism