framework that the archivist and historian, Jose ́Toribio Medina (1852–1930),
published a monumental synthesis of Chilean archaeology,Los Aborı ́genes de
Chile(Chile’s Aborigines) in 1882 (Rivera & Orellana 1994).
In Argentina the keyWgure at the outset would be Florentino Ameghino
(1854–1911), a palaeontologist whose interests ranged from anthropology,
zoology, geology to archaeology. Among his publications wasAntigu ̈edades
indias de la Banda Oriental(Indian antiquities of the East), written while he was
exiled in Uruguay and published in 1877. It served as the basis for Uruguayan
archaeology thereafter (Scha ́velzon 2004). Ameghino published copiously on
Argentinian archaeology, including syntheses such asL’Homme pre ́historique
dans le bassin de la Plata(The Antiquity of Man in the Plata Basin), written in
French for the International Congress of Anthropological Sciences held in
Paris in 1878. Many of his hypotheses would become key for the development
of archaeology in Argentina, though several were subsequently proved wrong,
including his proposal that human evolution had originated in Argentina, a
suggestion he made following an evolutionary logic based on the fossils
collected in Patagonia. This thesis was opposed by Karl Hermann Burmeister
(1807–92), a German living in Buenos Aires and the director of the National
Museum from 1863, who refused to accept evolutionism. From 1886 Ame-
ghino worked in the Museo de la Plata. Shortly afterwards, in 1888, he
obtained the chair of Zoology at the University of Co ́rdoba (Politis 1999: 4),
but moved again when he became the director of the National Museum of
Natural History of Buenos Aires (Lopes & Podgorny 2001). Not far from
Buenos Aires, the Museum of La Plata was opened in 1877, partly thanks to
the collections obtained in the ‘Conquest of the Desert’ by Francisco Moreno, a
prosperous expert in the natural sciences, who seemed to have a fascination
with human skulls (Cornell 1999: 193; Podgorny 1997: 749). In 1890 two
scientiWc journals appeared, theRevista del Museo de La PlataandAnales.
In the early twentieth century government supported research in the Parana ́
delta by Torres, and in the Pampas and Patagonia by Felix Faustino Outes
(1878–1939, an archaeologist who worked in the archaeology section of the
National Museum of Natural History) and Salvador Debenedetti (1884–1930),
employed by the Ethnographical Museum (Politis 1995: 198–200).
Brazil had a very early institution, the Instituto Histo ́rico, Geogra ́Wco e
Etnogra ́Wco Brasileiro (IHGE, Historic, Geographic, and Ethnographic Insti-
tute of Brazil), created in 1838, which, as explained in Chapter 4, became the
focus of nineteenth-century cultural life in Brazil. Between the 1860s and the
1880s the initiative in research was located in the museums, the Museu
Paraense of Bele ́m and the Museu Paulista in Sa ̃o Paulo and, above all, the
National Museum of Rio de Janeiro. The latter had a budget more than half
the size of that common in Europe (Pyenson & Sheets-Pyenson 1999: 139).
288 Colonial Archaeology