If it was unacceptable that antiquities were converted into the focus of
forbidden native religious beliefs, the cult of Antiquity as a source of prestige
became acceptable to an increasing number of scholars. Some authors, such as
Juan de Velasco in Peru and Francisco Javier Clavijero in Mexico, started to
pave the way for the imminent nineteenth-century nationalist appropriation
of the pre-Columbian past (Chapter 4). In 1780 Clavijero, a Jesuit who had
been exiled to Italy in 1768, publishedHistoria antigua de Me ́xico(Ancient
History of Mexico). In the preface he explained that he had undertaken the
writing of the ancient history of Mexico ‘to serve my country... and to restore
to its true splendour the truth now obscured by the unbelievable rabble of
modern writers on America’ (in Bernal 1980: 75). Interestingly, the existence
of the ancient Aztec civilization in Mexico’s territory led him to compare the
situation there with that of Greece:
He who contemplates the present state of Greece could not convince himself that long
ago that country produced those great men about whose existence we know, if he were
not assured of the fact by the survival of the immortal works the Greeks wrote and by
the consent of the ages. But the obstacles that the Greeks must surmount in order to
acquire an education are small in comparison to the diYculties that the American
Indians have always and still have to overcome.
(Phelan 1960: 765).Needless to say, despite Clavijero’s and other intellectuals’ eVorts in Mexico
and Peru, the idealization of the past and its admission as a Golden Age did
not imply a better appreciation of indigenous populations and a regard for
their beliefs (Quijada Maurin ̃o 1994a: 373–4). 11
FROM ANTIQUARIANISM TO ARCHAEOLOGY: TOWARDS
THE NATIONAsexplainedinthischapter, thefascinationwitheverythingtodowiththeclassical
worldcanbetracedbacktofourteenth-centuryItaly(althoughsomeprecedentsin
the medieval period have been mentioned above). It was the expression of new
politicalideologiesdevelopedby rulingelitesandincreasinglyalsoby themoneyed
11 Nonetheless, there are always individual exceptions. In the US Thomas JeVerson had
passed from seeing Indians as savages without history to considering that they were capable
of being ‘civilized’ and hence of becoming American citizens. This possibility led him to attempt
to provide them with a history, and therefore to embark on archaeological digs and research into
their language and ways of life (Wallace 2000). However, his use of classical authors appears to
have had a greater impact (Patterson 1995b: 19–20).
Antiquities and Political Prestige 57