amassed by the physician Jose ́Mariano Macedo, and by a certain Marı ́aAna
Centeno, who then sold their collections to the Museum fu ̈rVo ̈lkerkunde
(Ethnology) in Berlin in the 1880s. This degree of interest in antiquities was
not shared by the Peruvian state. The rejection of the indigenous past may be
explained by the diYculties derived from the political instability of the country.
After Spain’s attempt to invade Peru in 1865, the country had been unsuccess-
fully involved in the War of the PaciWc (1879–83) between Peru, Chile, and
Bolivia, and had been prey to military rule in the 1880s.
Some of the local ideas on Inca society proposed at this time came, in fact,
from Argentina, an interest spurred by the presence of Inca ruins in the
northwest region of the country. These interests were not based onWeldwork,
but on theoretical linkages between archaeology, linguistics, and anthropol-
ogy, which were seen more clearly here than in other areas. In 1871 the
Argentinian lawyer, historian, politician, and professor of ancient Roman
law from 1872, Vicente Fidel Lo ́pez (1815–1903), suggested that the Aryan
race had been the builders of the Inca monuments in a book, published in
French,Les races Aryennes du Pe ́rou(The Aryan Races of Peru), basing his
argument on linguistic arguments. Lo ́pez argued that the Quechua language
was an archaic form of Aryan or Indo-European language and, therefore,
those who spoke it could be considered Aryan. He saw the site of Inti-Huassi
located in the north of Argentina as the second Inca capital. In this way the
Inca past was turned into Argentina’s past, precisely at the time when the
President Bartolome ́Mitre had signed the law which led later, in the 1870s, to
the extermination of thousands of Indians in the so-called ‘Conquest of the
Desert’. Fidel Lo ́pez’s hypotheses did not fall into a vacuum. Elsewhere, they
were well received, for example in the First Congress of Americanists in
Nancy, and were subsequently adopted by Jose ́Ferna ́ndez Nodal in Peru and
by Couto de Magalha ̃es in Brazil, although in Argentina they did not have
much success (Quijada Maurin ̃o 1996). 8 At the start of the twentieth century,
in Argentina, local archaeological researchXourished, and the work in the
northwest thrived with scholars such as the Professor of American Archae-
ology of Buenos Aires from 1906, Juan Bautista Ambrosetti (1865–1917),
who pioneered stratigraphic research in the northwest in sites such as
Tilcara, a site that he called the Argentinian Troy after its discovery in 1908.
The following generation produced graduates such as the anthropologist
Felix Faustino Outes (1878–1939) and Ambrosetti’s main disciple, Salvador
Debenedetti (1884–1930) who wrote his thesis on the prehistoric pottery of
the site of La Isla (Politis 1995: 199).
8 On Lo ́pez see also Scha ́velzon (2004).Latin America, China, and Japan 183