America was created for the study of this in 1879 (Dyson 1998: chs. 2–4). An
interest in the Latin American civilizations grew in the US parallel to the
strengthening of its economy, its greater weight in international politics, and
its growing imperial aspirations. In unequal competition with the classics, the
Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were increasingly seen by scholars and public alike,
especially from the last third of the nineteenth century (Chapter 7), as their
own glorious past. This did not happen for the archaeology of non-state
societies found anywhere in the US.
The US passed from being prey of colonizers to being a colonial empire. In
the eighteenth century the European imperial powers had attempted to
colonize parts of what would become the US and Canada. Following the
eighteenth-century French expeditions to California and the west coast men-
tioned in Chapter 7, and those organized by the British on the northwest coast
of America (King 2004: 235–7), others ensued (Cole 1985: ch. 3). In the
nineteenth century the expeditions were mainly carried out by Americans
themselves. In the expeditions to the North American continent archaeology
became part of the natural sciences and anthropology, something that
resulted in their joined institutionalization. Thus, information about Indians
was included in theWrst museum of natural history set up in Philadelphia in
1794, and in 1799 native Indians,Xora and fauna were put together in an
appeal for information made by the American Philosophical Society. In a
similar vein, American antiquities, along with rare specimens of art and
nature, were among the interests of the American Antiquarian Society of
Massachusetts founded in 1812 (McGuire 1992: 820). The link between
natural sciences and anthropology and archaeology would be eroded, al-
though it did not disappear, through institutionalization. Around the mid
nineteenth century one of the evidences of the weakening of the connection
became marked by the creation by the federal government of the Smithsonian
Institution in 1846. In this institution the combination of anthropology and
archaeology became further strengthened in 1879 with the establishment of
two oYces that developed from the Smithsonian, the Bureau of Ethnology,
and the National Museum (Willey & SabloV1980: 41). The Bureau of
Ethnology began social research based on evolutionary ideas. Its scope was
to document the dwindling native cultures as well as to advise the government
on Indian issues (McGuire 1992: 822). Anthropology and archaeology also
became entwined in theWrst chair in anthropology, funded by a donation of
George Peabody to Harvard in 1866 with a requirement that it purchased
books and collections about American archaeology and ethnology and built a
museum to house them (Patterson 1995b: 47). Years later, in 1899, the
endowment of Phoebe Apperson Hearst to the University of California
resulted in the creation of the Department of Anthropology and a Museum
286 Colonial Archaeology