contrasts with his earlier contributions to Scottish archaeology, where he had
been theWrst to apply the Three Age System outside Scandinavia (Rowley-
Conwy forthcoming). At the time, Wilson was not an exception, for his
classiWcatory methods were the norm until the First World War. No time
depth was assumed for the past of the native Indians and this meant that
ethnographic data were used to explain the archaeological remains found in
the region.
The native was generally considered by most to be unrelated to the modern
nation. This view was explicitly argued by some museums. In Argentina, a
text written in 1910 describing the Museum of La Plata made clear that
indigenous peoples were not included in the national account of Argentinian
history:
Above all...weWnd little or nothing arising from indigenous barbarism before the
discovery or the Spanish Conquest. Recollections of this genre have not been excluded
through desire or caprice, but rather because, in reality, Argentine culture owes little
or nothing to that barbarism... Our civilization is the legitimate descendant of the
ancient civilizations of Europe: Greece, Rome, Spain. Rather than their ideals or
knowledge the Indians contributed or sacriWced generously to the Argentine culture
their blood, their precious blood of free peoples; and blood does not coagulate in
museums but rather boils in the veins!
(in Podgorny 1997: 750).In Argentina, the view that natives did not form part of the nation had been
expressed in the 1870s by Bartolome ́Mitre (1821–1906), who in addition
to being a historian was the President of Argentina between 1862 and 1868.
He considered natives as uncivilized and unconnected to the great pre-
Columbian civilizations and, therefore, the written documentation as the
only relevant as the base for the study of the national past. His opinions
were not unlike those of many others in Latin America. Some scholars
claimed that any attempts to civilize the natives would be to no avail, and
that, because these inferior races had not contributed to the progress of the
nation in any respect, their disappearance would, in fact, be beneWcial for the
development of the nation. Among those who maintained these opinions was,
in Brazil, the director of the Paulista Museum between 1895 and 1916, the
German naturalist Hermann von Ihering (1850–1930), a racist who defended
the extermination of native Indians in Brazil, but who wasWnally forced out
of his job for political reasons in 1916 (Funari 1999: 20).
Yet, not all scholars denied natives’ potential for becoming civilized and
their right to form part of the nation. A case in point is the polemic that
Mitre had with the other major historian in Argentina, Vicente Fidel Lo ́pez
(Scha ́velzon 2004: 21–2). Lo ́pez insisted on the importance of oral history
292 Colonial Archaeology