TERRITORIAL EXPANSION AND NATIONALIST ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE WAR OF THE PACIFIC (1879–1883)
In 1899, Chilean workers discovered the mummified body of a woman in a copper mine in Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert. Chile's most prominent archaeologists were called to examine the body and they estimated it had been in the mine for more than four centuries. What most astonished both the public and the scholarly community was that the body had been preserved virtually intact, apparently by nothing but the environmental conditions surrounding it. José Toribio Medina, a central figure in Chilean archaeology at the time, discussed this finding in 1901:
Natural causes account for the mummy of Chuquicamata. The body is that of a female. The depth of the soil where the corpse was found was no more than six to eight feet, and the miner was probably searching the mountain when a sudden collapse buried her. The miner, feeling that the mountain was breaking down, lifted her arms up to protect her head, the position in which her body is preserved. … In some parts of the body, especially the arms, the difference between the injured and the intact parts of the skin can even be distinguished, to the point where it seems almost that blood is flowing from the wounds. In her face, hidden between her arms, her contracted mouth is visible… .Footnote 1
When Chile annexed Bolivian and Peruvian territories in 1883 as a consequence of the War of the Pacific, it did not only gain possession of humans, land, and resources; Chileans would also make several spectacular archaeological findings there, of which the mummy of Chuquicamata was one. What after the war came to be the “Greater North” of Chile boasts some of the world's driest deserts, and environmental conditions have favored the excellent preservation of organic material from pre-ceramic times. Salt arrests bacterial growth, the hot, dry conditions facilitate rapid desiccation, and nitrate ensures organic preservation.Footnote 2 Although the western slopes of the Andes are extraordinarily barren, where rivers cut across the desert there are narrow strips of lush greenery lining the river valleys, and a number of ethnic groups settled in these fertile areas and along the coastline from around 9000 b.c. onward. Due to the exceptional conditions in the territories, human remains and the cultural artifacts of numerous pre-Hispanic societies have been preserved virtually intact.
The War of the Pacific broke out over control of the economically profitable nitrate beds in the Atacama Desert. In 1883, after four years of armed conflict, Chile annexed the entire Bolivian coast, which is today the Chilean region of Antofagasta, and the Peruvian province of Tarapacá, in perpetuity and unconditionally. Furthermore, the peace treaty awarded Chile the right to administer the adjacent Peruvian provinces of Tacna and Arica for a period of ten years, after which the inhabitants via a plebiscite would chose their nation of formal citizenship. Peru and Chile failed to conduct the vote, and in 1929, agreed to instead divide the territory, with Chile retaining Arica and Peru reincorporating Tacna. A number of historians have examined the political, economic, and social processes that lay behind these Chile's acquisitions of Peruvian territories,Footnote 3 but its appropriation of the region's ancient past has yet to be explored. In what follows, I look at how, through the peculiar lens of an archaeological discourse, this past was used for political purpose by all parties of the conflict: the Chilean nation-state, Peruvian nationalists, and actors in the borderlands.Footnote 4
How does one nation-state conquer another's ancient past? Appropriating symbolic manifestations of national identity, such as ancient history, is a concerted action with undeniable political intentions. Based on an understanding of archaeology as a discipline produced and shaped by ideologies, processes of identity formation, and nationalism in particular,Footnote 5 historians have highlighted the relationship between archaeological exploration and political appropriations of territory. Studies have included cases of European imperialism and the national conflicts arising from the First and the Second World Wars.Footnote 6 This paper reconstructs and analyses the place of archaeology in the period that followed the most important borderland conflict in nineteenth-century Latin American history.Footnote 7
My analysis is structured by two central ideological components that linked the discipline of archaeology and the nation in the late nineteenth century: the paradigms of history and modernity. As a discipline devoted to processing evidence of the past, archaeology was a fundamental tool in the production and shaping of national historical imaginaries. And as a new discipline within the natural sciences, it was intrinsically linked with the notion of modernity and progress. My first section focuses on the relationship between political claims over the area in question and the incorporation of its archaeological record into the Chilean national historical imaginary. Following the movement of artifacts, I will look also at contestations of this by Peruvian nationalists and borderland actors who used an archaeological discourse to stake their own claims to the area.
My second section analyses how Chilean archaeologists appropriated not only extraordinary primary material but also archaeological knowledge about the annexed area produced by their Peruvian predecessors. I will argue that both the incorporation of archaeological remains and the appropriation of Peruvian archaeology helped insert Chile into international scientific debates, and that this effect was, if not intended, at least conducive to the priorities of the emerging nation-state. The area gave Chilean scientific archaeological production an international presence that embodied what Chile aspired to: a share in the advances and modernity of Europe.
Archaeology and Nationalism: Conquering and Re-Conquering the Objects of National History
After the annexation of Tarapacá and the occupation of Arica and Tacna, the territories came to be governed from and for Santiago. Chilean political and cultural elites used scientific exploration to make the newly conquered areas known, governable, and exploitable by the central state. Archaeology figured prominently in all expeditions sent to the three provinces, both the more general ones investigating their economic potential or population and the, narrowly speaking, “scientific ones.” The Chilean Government launched two major waves of archaeological expeditions, in the mid-1880s and the 1910s, and between these two periods Chilean journalists and scattered one-man expeditions pushed archaeological exploration of the area forward in the service of Santiago institutions.Footnote 8 Archaeological investigation of the recent annexation was significant as a means for getting to know the territories' economic potential; traces of pre-Hispanic agriculture or land use revealed to Chilean scientists their fertility and resources, and descriptions of ancient infrastructure were often useful in that structures could serve as directional landmarks and even transportation routes.Footnote 9 Yet findings with practical implications were a secondary goal of the archaeological explorations. The principle task of the scholars involved in the state-based expeditions with an archaeological focus was to take back to Santiago as many samples of ancient artifacts as they could find, buy, or excavate. Once in Santiago, these artifacts were put on display in national museums.
The removal of Peruvian archaeological remains involved much more than a transfer of bones and shards. Nineteenth-century Latin American nation-states, like their European counterparts, utilized images as depositories and instruments of state power. The composition of the archaeological record was one of the ways in which national iconography was forged, circulated, and reified, and a reflection of the formation of national identity.Footnote 10 In this context, both the trajectory of Peruvian artifacts to Chilean national museums and their retention in the region or by the Peruvian state were central to attempts to stake claim to the territories.
Conquering Objects: The Chilean Appropriation of Pre-Hispanic Remains
The first stage of archaeological appropriation was set before the effective end of the War of the Pacific. During the war the director of the Chilean National Museum, Rudolfo Philippi, sent the museum's taxidermist to accompany the Chilean troops on their way to Lima and ordered this employee and his former students to be among “the soldiers and medics to collect objects of natural history as well as American antiquities.”Footnote 11 The farther the Chilean troops proceeded in their occupation of Peru, the closer appropriation came to the core of the cultural legacy of the vanquished. When the Chilean troops took Lima in 1881, the army looted Lima's National Library and Museum and part of the booty was taken to the National Museum in Santiago. Although Philippi criticized the state of preservation, number, and quality of the objects, he nevertheless selected some of them to be in the Chilean National Museum's permanent collection on display.Footnote 12 As in other cases of political expansion, the conquest of Peruvian territory went hand in hand with the confiscation of cultural resources.Footnote 13 The Chilean attempt to erase the institutions that produced and preserved the collective memory of Peru was a key part of sealing the victory.
The second stage of the appropriation process was systematically sending expeditions to the new territories. The first Chilean scientific expedition after the official annexation focused primarily on Tarapacá. This territory was appropriated in perpetuity by Chile and was thus the principal and first object of what historians have called “chilenization.”Footnote 14 The expedition was suggested by the director of the National Museum, and was approved and welcomed by the Ministry of Education.Footnote 15 The expedition departed for Tarapacá a year after the war's end and was led by Philippi's son and ongoing collaborator at the National Museum, Federico. It was charged with investigating the province's zoology, botany, archaeology, and paleontology.Footnote 16 Philippi reported back to the Ministry of Education observations of pre-Hispanic edifices, geoglyphs, and infrastructure—remains that could not be moved. Principally, however, Philippi was engaged in gathering archaeological artifacts he could take back to the National Museum. Philippi and his crew excavated in several sites but also, wherever he could, he purchased artifacts from local collectors. By the end of the expedition, the crew had gathered numerous pre-Hispanic artifacts and mummies, in addition to animals, stones, and fossils significant to natural history.Footnote 17
Also reaching the National Museum in Santiago were objects from the new Greater North gathered by individuals. Most of these collectors were involved in the military appropriation of the territories or, in the war's aftermath, their commercial exploitation or administrative control.Footnote 18 The central figure among the donors was José Toribio Medina.Footnote 19 He was not only the author of the first substantial work on Mapuche prehistory, published in 1883, and a key figure in national archaeology, but he had also served in the army during the war, and as a judge in Tarapacá in its aftermath.Footnote 20 His interest in the annexed territories was important in the process of incorporating the North into the national historical record. Several other individuals involved in the political annexation of the territories also advanced the appropriation of its archaeological remains. Luis Risopatrón, for instance, one of the main figures in the geographical and political exploration of the borderlands toward commercial ends,Footnote 21 donated mummified bodies from Arica to the National Museum.Footnote 22 Wenceslao Diaz was the director of the Medical Commission in the war, during which he offered to the National Museum his collection of human physical remains and artifacts “found in Arica's huacas.”Footnote 23 I highlight this pattern here to argue that archaeological exploration in its entirety was not a purposeful plan, a concerted attempt organized by the central state. And yet the collecting activity of such individuals served an unintended function and does clearly reveal how conquest and archaeology were closely related. Both official and private initiatives ultimately helped transfer the new archaeological record to the National Museum, and thus into Chile's historical imaginary.
The collecting of indigenous artifacts in the previously Peruvian territories represented a “proof of conquest, proprietorship, and ultimately incorporation.” As in the case of the U.S.-American “lure of the Southwest”—the annexed Mexican territories after 1880—the collecting was part of a process of regional definition.Footnote 24 To amass archaeological artifacts from the North and take them to Santiago helped define these territories as no longer Peruvian. By incorporating into the National Museum the archaeological remains gathered in the first expedition, the objects were re-contextualized within the symbolic framework of the Chilean nation. As Chile displayed Peruvian objects in its National Museum and incorporated them into its own archaeological record, what had been Peruvian prehistory became part of Chile's scientific record and national imaginary.
The archaeological activity in the territories reached an unprecedented climax in the 1910s. In 1912 the Chilean government hired “one of the most competent Americanists of the time,” the German archaeologist Max Uhle, to work in the annexed territories.Footnote 25 A specialist in Peruvian archaeology, Uhle had between 1906 and 1911 worked in the service of the Peruvian Government. From his expeditions to Tarapacá, Arica, and Tacna, Uhle brought back a collection of thousands of pre-Hispanic objects, among them fifty mummified bodies excavated in cemeteries and four hundred partial samples of human remains. The collection was so massive that it had to be divided between Santiago institutions. Part of it was transferred to the newly founded National Historical Museum, while the other, more significant part was incorporated into the archaeological and ethnographic section of the National Museum.Footnote 26 In both museums the artifacts and human remains were made the basis of their archaeological collections, and functioned as reminders of Chilean power over the annexed territories.
The newly founded Chilean National Historical Museum was the symbolic core of the centralized nation-state. It was separated from the National Museum in 1911 and throughout the first half of the twentieth century the Uhle collection of textiles and mummies constituted the largest and most significant part of the pre-Hispanic section.Footnote 27 The incorporation into the Ethnological and Anthropological Museum added yet another nuance to the claim over Peruvian archaeological remains. The proliferation of artifacts led to the ethnographic section's autonomy in 1912, and it was opened to the public starting in 1917.Footnote 28 During most of the nineteenth century, the Chilean National Museum had held a collection of artifacts, yet most were colonial objects and ethnographic and archaeological pieces from Africa, Europe, Asia, and other Latin American countries.Footnote 29 Only after the 1910s did the vast majority of the archaeological material in the Ethnological and Anthropological Museum derive from Chilean territory, either the annexed regions in the North, the Araucanía, Tierra del Fuego, or the Easter Islands. All of these were annexed politically during the 1880s, and all of them were territories with a prominent indigenous legacy. The Museum thus presented pre-Hispanic and contemporary artifacts from the Chilean nation's new indigenous peoples north and south of the nation's core, neatly juxtaposed and complemented with maps indicating the provenance of the respective artifacts within Chilean territory.Footnote 30 As such, the collection displayed an appropriation of indigenous artifacts in a way similar to European ethnological museums: it represented a discursive strategy to come to terms with and visually dominate the exotic through its re-contextualization according to the collector's preferred categories.Footnote 31 Archaeology, in the context of Chile's expansion and subsequent redefinition of its national territory and identity,Footnote 32 was a fundamental tool in the conquest of new spaces. It suited the purpose of making comprehensive, visible, and controllable unknown and seemingly indomitable environments.
Through the conquest of Arica, Tacna, and Tarapacá, anthropology and archaeology were no longer tangential or circumstantial activities; they became a scientific preoccupation with political importance. State-based archaeological expeditions to the North peaked in the mid-1880s, shortly after the annexation, and again in the 1910s. Both periods saw a marked tightening of the political situation concurrent with increased archaeological activity. The immediate impact of the annexation of Tarapacá in 1884 marked the intended cultural, political, and social appropriation of the region. In the 1890s the Chilean government allowed a plural society composed of workers and capitalists from different national contexts to emerge in the annexed and occupied nitrate regions. When the plebiscite over Arica and Tacna was close at hand in the 1910s—it was scheduled at several different times, but not in fact held—xenophobia, nationalism, and racism came to determine public discourse and action in all of the occupied and annexed territories. The discrimination and expulsion of Peruvians from the area during that period became systematic and violent, as part of attempts to win the territories for Chile.Footnote 33 At the same time the archaeological exploration of Tarapacá, Arica, and Tacna reached unprecedented heights. The concordance of state-based archaeological expeditions, supported by private Chilean initiatives and politics is similarly evident in the institutional development of the museum projects. In 1929, the year of the plebiscite in which the annexation of Tarapacá was finally approved and the incorporation of Arica and the loss of Tacna sealed, the Ethnographic and Anthropological Museum ceased to be an autonomous institution and was reintegrated into the National Historical Museum.
Due to the association of the nation with a specific visual representation and a determined historical trajectory, characteristic of countries from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries under the impact of the European paradigm, the process of transferring archaeological artifacts from Tarapacá, Tacna, and Arica to Chile's cultural institutions between the 1880s and the 1910s helped political incorporation on a symbolic level. Chile was constructed through the accretion of territories in relation to a presumed core or homeland area and the taking of archaeological artifacts was an essential element of the annexation process. But beyond being a symbolic incorporation, the annexation literally supplied Chilean archaeological research with a material base. Whether due to the momentum produced through archaeology's role in the appropriation of the North or to a conscious act, the North provided the majority of the artifacts in archaeological museums and museum sections in Santiago. National archaeological artifacts had figured in the National Museum collection since the directorship of Claudio Gay in the 1830s, but they had long been seen as insignificant. Between the 1880s and the 1910s, however, the number of artifacts soared, and the new government's interest in archaeology was transformational.
Contesting Conquests: Peruvian Nationalist and Borderland Reactions to Chilean Archaeological Appropriation
Chile's intellectual and physical appropriation of the archaeological record in Tarapacá, Tacna, and Arica did not remain unchallenged. The indigenous legacy was at the core of Peruvian nationalist propaganda aimed at reviving in the annexed regions patriotic feelings of belonging. Patriotic folk songs, poems, and slogans reified Peruvian national identity through references to the homeland and the Andean or Incan pre-Hispanic past.Footnote 34 The underlying message was that the annexed area could not but belong ethnically and culturally to the Peruvian nation, the legitimate successor of this past. Its remains were also put to purpose in disputes over Peruvian territorial claims. The Chilean occupation was depicted as an offence against ancestral borderlines established by maps of ethnic belonging and the frontiers of pre-Hispanic and colonial history.Footnote 35
Excavation in the occupied territories was closed off to Peruvian scholars, and was now the exclusive privilege of Chilean archaeologists. However, Peruvian journals continued to publish archaeological articles by “neutral” scholars, such as Max Uhle, who had free access to the “captive provinces.” After the Chilean Government terminated his contract, Uhle in 1918 republished his groundbreaking work on the “Origins of Arica”—originally released in 1917 in the journal of the Chilean Museum of Ethnography and AnthropologyFootnote 36—in the Revista Histórica, the journal of the Peruvian National Historical Institute.Footnote 37 To publish a work on Arica in the latter journal, the main organ of Peruvian national history, in the year in which negotiations over Arica reached another climax,Footnote 38 was a political statement. The Peruvian elites intended to regain not only a share in the archaeological discourse but also control over the artifacts from the annexed provinces. The Peruvian Government acquired a number of private collections during the principal phase of the institutionalization of archaeology in the 1910s and 1920s. Some of these contained large numbers of artifacts from the formerly Peruvian provinces, such as the Brüning collection with its hundreds of objects from Arica.Footnote 39 Throughout this period, Peruvian historians participated in the reclamation of the area by inserting it into the Peruvian national historical narrative. For instance, Romulo Cúneo-Vidal, a Peruvian historian born in Arica, maintained throughout his career a specific focus on the region. In his writings he incorporated the occupied provinces into the Peruvian historical and archaeological record by claiming that, historically, the territories in the Arica area remained a part and prolongation of Peruvian territory.Footnote 40
Like the nations fighting for the provinces, the citizens of the annexed and occupied territories used archaeology to construct a regional identity that suited their purposes. The particularity of the borderlands of Tarapacá, Tacna, and Arica was based upon both their unique mix of nationalities, composed of workers and capitalists attracted by the nitrate production, and their ambivalent status in between two states.Footnote 41 While the Chilean state neglected and inflicted violence upon the Peruvian population, many perceived the Peruvian state to have abandoned its former provinces.Footnote 42 In the dynamic process of opposing or adopting measures directed from the “centers,” the borderland actors developed a local identity anchored in the history and the endogenous environment of the provinces. The citizens of Tarapacá, Tacna, and Arica constructed a hybrid identityFootnote 43 grounded in the delimited regional space, as a basis from which to argue for projects of regional economic development, autonomy, or defense from political violence.Footnote 44
Archaeology came to play a prominent role in the formation of a borderland identity. The area's abundance of precious archaeological material had long made the provinces interesting to archaeologists in the service of European museums, and to a vast number of looters involved in an active antiquities trade with visitors and locals.Footnote 45 This same abundance provided a material foundation for locals' own archaeological collections. As with German regionalist antiquarians or British county societies, archaeological agency in the borderlands was not contextualized within institutional spaces, which were during this period mostly created by the central state.Footnote 46 In all of these cases, local scholars or “antiquarians” with regional outlooks investigated ancient pasts based on their physical remains in spaces parallel to the national ones, but they were excluded from official and institutional purview due to their geographical location, ideological outlooks, or, as in this case, borderland political situations.
The population in the occupied regions had long retained artifacts from the local cultural space within substantial private collections.Footnote 47 In the 1910s, the decade in which the struggle over the provinces intensified, members of the local elite opened regional museums with archaeological holdings. The museum of Tacna, founded in 1911 on the initiative of the region's Chilean intendant Vicente Dagnino, presented a vision of the region in terms of its geological and material characteristics, most importantly its archaeological remains and mineralogical resources. Historians have naturally assumed that Dagnino's museum and cultural activities were a “crusade” meant to “ingrain Chilean nationality in these territories.”Footnote 48 The evidence gathered here indicates that, on the contrary, the regional archaeological interest was characteristic of the blurred and hybrid realm created in the borderlands, outside the agency of Chile or Peru. For instance, Dagnino financed the Tacna Museum privately, and was involved in Peruvian, Chilean, and Italian scientific institutions established in Tacna and Arica. He participated also in archaeological debates about the area within the Chilean national scholarly community.Footnote 49 Most remarkably, he was named an honorary member of the Peruvian Geographical Society and the Peruvian Historical Institute in Lima because of the contributions his historical and archaeological studies had made to Arica's history.Footnote 50 The museum record also displayed the multiplicity of old and new identities that borderlands peoples juggled in their effort to make sense of their new situation.Footnote 51 Archaeological artifacts occupied a prominent place in the Tacna museum's collection, the majority being from Tacna. In the introduction to the museum catalogue Dagnino characterized Tacna's historical trajectory as an existence in between pre-Hispanic ethnicities, anti-colonial conflicts, and the victorious and the vanquished of the War of the Pacific.Footnote 52 He emphasized the value of the area's ancient sites, the extraordinary density of pre-Hispanic graves along Arica's coast, and, conducive to his argument, the ethnic diversity of their origins. For Dagnino, the pre-Hispanic past represented the roots of the region's historical trajectory in between the two countries.
As shown by historians of other borderlands, such as the U.S.-Mexican frontier, state-building is not a centralized, unidirectional effort but rather is about how people link, or refuse to link, their shifting identities to larger imagined communities.Footnote 53 People in Tacna voiced a refusal to explicitly state their national belonging, in part through the discourse of archaeology.
As with the Tacneños, Tarapaqueños expressed their borderland identity by founding a museum. The regional museum of Iquique, established between 1917 and 1920 by Recaredo Amengual, a local intendant with scientific interests, was divided into sections devoted to archaeology, mineralogy, and geology. Tacna's status in the 1910s was, like that of Arica, far less certain and more “negotiable” than Tarapacá's. Yet despite the theoretically permanent annexation of Tarapacá, Peruvian nationalist discourse reclaimed it, like Arica and Tacna, as a “captive province.”Footnote 54 Particularly in the 1910s, Chilean pressure to erase Peruvian national identity was most intense and violent in Tarapacá.Footnote 55 Yet despite—or because of—these Peruvian and Chilean pressures on the province, regionalist discourses figured prominently among the many identity projects there. The archaeological record composed of pre-Hispanic artifacts gathered in expeditions to the area's indigenous cemeteries, especially in the oasis of Pica, provided the territories with a claim to an existence more enduring than could be established by national politics.Footnote 56 Like Tacna's museum, the Iquique one was grounded in a local identity with the area's material conditions, its prehistory and geology. It was as if Iquique elites, faced with political struggles threatening to uproot the region, hoped that these physical characteristics would embed them in the territory.
The mental apprehension of space requires creative acts, conscious and not, to interiorize it. The trajectories of artifacts from and within the annexed territories demonstrate how archaeology played a fundamental role in claiming the arid space for the Chilean Government, the Peruvian Government, and those in the borderlands. All sides used the area's ancient history as a tool for making territorial and political claims, and ultimately for defending, producing, and shaping collective identities.
THE SCIENCE OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: CONQUERING ARCHAEOLOGY AND MODERNITY
Symbolic appropriation was not the only desired effect of archaeological exploration in the North. Chilean archaeological interest prior to the 1880s had been minimal, and particularly the new northern area presented Chilean scholars with an entirely uncharted spot. However, the archaeological knowledge of their Peruvian precursors provided a foundation that Chileans could exploit for their own studies. Chile thus acquired both excellent primary material and a knowledge base from which to study it. Both allowed Chile to participate in the international scientific community, the ultimate aspiration of an emerging nation striving for recognition and prestige in the concert of “modern nations.”
Conquering Facts: Archaeological Knowledge and the Trajectories of Chilean Appropriation
Interest in the pre-Hispanic past differed fundamentally in pre-1880s Chile and Peru. The entangled history of both national disciplines, seen through the lens of the “borderlands,” highlights this contrast. Chilean archaeology emerged gradually as a discipline in the 1880s and was fully institutionalized around the turn of the century. This development was parallel to that in several South American nations, among them Peru, and took place within a global process of institutionalizing and professionalizing academia. In Santiago, as in Lima, the fin-de-siècle produced a burst of nationalist-inspired interest in history and archaeology, which led to the foundation of historical societies, museums, and journals.Footnote 57 Yet while Peru was home to a long tradition of antiquarian collecting and learning that merged into the new discipline, Chilean scholars commenced the archaeological investigation of the North in the 1880s almost from scratch. Chile could produce archaeological research immediately only because, for this particular area and the particular topic they were interested in, they were able to draw on their Peruvian precursors.
What most intrigued Chilean scholars about the archaeology of the annexed territories was the preservation of pre-Hispanic bodies. One of the main research questions in the first decades was whether preservation was due to chemical additives or was natural, due only to climatic and geological conditions.Footnote 58 The fascination with the processes of mummification among Chilean scholars after 1884 was not new, nor was the attempt to solve this archaeological problem. Chilean researchers could build on the work of their Peruvian precursors, which stood in the tradition of the early Spanish chroniclers. Peruvian mummies had been objects of anthropological and historical interest since the first Spanish conquerors were confronted with human bodies that were dead but did not look the part. The extreme environmental conditions in parts of South America preserved bodies, but the conquerors were also astonished by the Andean tradition of intentionally preserving them. They did this mostly by exploiting natural processes.Footnote 59 A few yet spectacular cases of artificial mummification produced by evisceration, fire, or embalming substances, particularly in the case of the Incan monarchs, had induced scholars from the seventeenth century onward to assume that the preservation of pre-Hispanic bodies was mostly artificial.Footnote 60 The early works influenced the approach of the early-nineteenth-century Peruvian antiquarians, who again debated the preservation question.
Pedro Canales was one of several Chilean scholars who grounded their studies of mummification in the work of the Peruvian Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustariz. In a paper he gave at the International Congress of the Americanists in 1910 about the coastal cemeteries of Tacna, Arica, and Tarapacá, Canales drew particularly on Rivero's method of determining whether mummification was artificial or natural.Footnote 61 The debates surrounding mummification in Chile reached an apogee around 1900 with the finding of the Chuquicamata mummy with which I opened this paper. Chile's most important archaeologists, José Toribio Medina and Rudolfo Philippi, published studies on the mummy, and tried to understand how its excellent preservation was possible, contrasting it with other mummified bodies found in cemeteries. Medina, who had dated the mummy to the fifteenth century, used the Rivero's work to explain that Incan burial practices were restricted to nobles, and that the desert environmental conditions alone accounted for the preservation.Footnote 62 Philippi argued similarly that it was due to the dry air and to the sulphate and copper chloride that surrounded the body.Footnote 63 Two decades before his study of the Chuquicamata mummy, Philippi had published on what were by then Peruvian mummies held by the Chilean National Museum, preserved naturally by environmental conditions.Footnote 64 In his discussion of natural mummification processes he reproduced a debate between Rivero and another Peruvian scholar, Francisco Barrera, which had begun in the 1820s and revolved precisely around the question of the artificial versus natural mummification processes.Footnote 65 According to Philippi, Rivero was the indisputable authority on issues of natural mummification, since he had examined “on the basis of chemical analysis and through the microscope hundreds of corpses in the hot zones of the coast as well as in the cold highlands… .”Footnote 66
Not only artifacts made their way into the Chilean national archaeological record; knowledge followed a similar path. Histories of Peruvian archaeology have neglected the fact that although the discipline's institutionalization paralleled that which occurred in several other Latin American nations, the country had a significant tradition of antiquarian study long before the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 67 Rivero, born in Arequipa in 1798, served as governor of Moquegua, and was a naturalist educated in Europe. His investigations into Peruvian archaeology, geology, and mineralogy, and as director of the National Museum, were connected with a regional shift of scientific interest in the Southern Highland area.Footnote 68 Like European travelers in the early Enlightenment and through the nineteenth century, Peruvian collectors and antiquarians in the country's south had studied artifacts and naturally preserved dead bodies in the district of Tarapacá with particular interest.Footnote 69 Rivero was involved with a loosely connected group of early- to mid-nineteenth-century antiquarians in the southern Peruvian Highlands who had worked on the southern edge of Peru before it was occupied by Chile. Tarapacá, Arica, and Tacna had formed part of Arequipa in colonial times, and part of the Department of Moquegua under the Peruvian Republic. The cities of Arica, Puno, Cuzco, and Potosí were all centers of the eighteenth-century rebellions against the Spanish Crown initiated by Tupac Amaru II, an alleged descendant of the last Incan ruler, and they thus had a politicized identification with the pre-Hispanic past.Footnote 70 During the nineteenth century the region was a center of autonomist aspirations in opposition to Europeanized Lima elites.Footnote 71 In this context, the collecting and study of antiquities enjoyed popularity and respectability among the descendants of the Incan nobility, and the white or mestizo upper classes.Footnote 72 The method of scholars like Rivero, Mariano Macedo, Ana María Zenteno, and José Lucas Caparó Múñiz remained, like that of mid-nineteenth-century European antiquarians, one of collection, classification, and description.Footnote 73 Although the antiquarian study of ancient remains was re-founded on new methodologies, and was by the end of the century renamed and re-contextualized as “archaeology,” the process of knowledge transmission was continuous.
As noted, Chilean scholars began to participate in international archaeological debates only from the late 1880s onwards.Footnote 74 In several Latin American countries, particularly Peru and Mexico, creoles in their discursive construction of the nation after independence positioned themselves—rather than the indigenous masses—as the inheritors of the pre-Hispanic past.Footnote 75 Though Chile adopted a similar discourse revolving around the Araucano, newly independent Chileans conceptualized the nation, not as multiethnic or mestizo as in other Latin American countries, but as homogenous.Footnote 76 Throughout the nineteenth century, because of the scarcity and insignificance of the monumental record within Chilean territory, Chile did not receive the same kind of foreign and internal scientific interest as Peru and Mexico did.Footnote 77 Yet Chilean scholars readily accepted the exclusion of their ancient past from research agendas because the identity they were constructing for their nation was hardly related to the indigenous legacy. Particularly because mid-nineteenth-century antiquarianism as practiced in Peru was politicized, and related to an identification with remains of the past, Chileans showed no interest in it.
The archaeological investigation of the indigenous legacy in the North did not indicate a change in the Chilean stance; indigenous ethnicities there remained insignificant to Chilean national identity, and would until long after the 1920s. Chilean archaeology and anthropology considered indigenous peoples objects of study, part of a past it was important to know before it disappeared. This attitude was similar to that of the late-nineteenth-century Lima elites or scholars in the Old World.Footnote 78 The Chilean government and society displayed no social awareness linked with scientific interest. Instead, the general policy was one of negation, integration, and assimilation of the Aymara and Atacameño peoples.Footnote 79 The archaeological record of the North was worthy of study only because it enabled Chile to build up a prestigious discipline. The particularity of its archaeological record and the knowledge already available made the area a perfect setting for an influential scientific project.
Conquering Modernity: Natural Mummification and the Science Paradigm
It is evident that the archaeological exploration of the North was not a sincere attempt to illuminate the country's indigenous legacy. If that legacy was secondary to the Chilean nation, then what spurred on the archaeological exploration to the point where archaeological institutions not only served exploration, but also were created specifically to that end?
The practice of archaeology around the century's turn was inexorably associated with rational-positivist history grounded in “hard,” verifiable facts. Between the 1860s and 1890s, methodology drawn from the natural sciences, especially geology, became the dominant paradigm among archaeologists, and the prestige of the discipline rested on its being a “natural science.”Footnote 80 Science was a form of capital, a valuable currency embodying prestige and power because it was a form of rationality and modernity then identified as exclusively and inherently European. Archaeology was closely linked not only with the nation's historical imaginary, but also with notions of modernity and progress.
During the period in which Chile was incorporating the new territories economically and socially, Chilean scholars and the international scientific community alike were acutely aware of the significance of the Greater North for finding solutions to contemporary archaeological problems. As Uhle pointed out in a 1916 letter to the Chilean minister of education, the conquered provinces were archaeologically extraordinary: “The antiquities situated along this part of the coast have a singular value for archaeological study. In no other part of the continent have the geographical conditions preserved pre-Hispanic remains as intact as in this nitrate region. Remains of similar antiquity might exist … in other areas of the continent. But the effects of the climate … have generally erased their traces. … The primitive American Indian can be better studied here than in any other part of the continent.”Footnote 81
The natural preservation of human bodies “as if they were alive” has long captured human emotions and intellect. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of social evolutionism rendered the preserved remains of ancient “primitive” peoples all the more important to scholarly debates. The mummified bodies promised to help solve the most pressing questions in the field and in public debates: How old was mankind? Where had it originated? How had it evolved over time?Footnote 82 Nineteenth-century evolutionary archaeologists' were attempting to synchronize cultures in all nations within a universal framework, and they drew data from Africa, the Americas, and Asia into their global narratives about humanity and history. Evolutionism, when applied to human societies, assumed different stages of development among coexisting groups, and that linear cultural progress was closely correlated with racial types.Footnote 83 Consequently, “primitive” peoples became worthy of close attention since social evolutionism suggested that they could shed light on humanity's earliest evolutionary stages. With the annexation Chile took possession of objects of scientific study that were highly significant to the international scientific community.
Chile's modernization was at the core of the country's nationalist discourse. The nitrate trade produced a class of wealthy citizens who profited from renewed export-led growth, and also strengthened Chile's connections with other nation-states in the Atlantic World. The elites claimed Chile was capable of participating in the “concert of nations” as an equal of the industrialized countries, through the acquisition of cultural capital.Footnote 84 Rather than focusing on educational activities or attracting visitors to their museums, Chilean archaeologists were principally engaged in the manufacture of scientific knowledge and its dissemination to a select group of educated professionals around the world.Footnote 85 In the aftermath of the 1880s, Chilean scholars published systematically on both the area and evolutionism more generally.Footnote 86 Although Chilean archaeological studies had less impact in Europe and the United States than Chileans had hoped, they were able to participate and publish in the scholarly circles of the Atlantic World.Footnote 87 The archaeological peculiarity of what had become the Greater North gave Chilean scholars the means to participate in archaeological debates; for them it was the “missing link” through which to approach a scientific community not easily accessible to non-“Western” scholars.
The hardening of boundaries between nation-states and empires after 1860 led people to find ways of linking, communicating with, and influencing each other across them.Footnote 88 The formation of national cultures was accompanied by and dependent upon the development of international practices that recurred in the creation of a global class united by invented rituals, a global “imagined community.”Footnote 89 International expositions like the pan-American ones were for emerging states like Chile a significant forum for self-representation. By placing objects in the service of the modern nation and in the context of imperial encounters, international expositions yoked cultural material to politics.Footnote 90 Archaeological sections in the national pavilions displayed a country's scientific mastery of its territory as its historical record.Footnote 91 Before the 1880s, when Chile defined the nation at exhibitions archaeological artifacts were virtually absent. At the 1901 Buffalo Exposition it presented a tiny yet significant archaeological section.Footnote 92 The Chuquicamata mummy was the section's curiosity and greatest attraction, arousing interest among scholars visiting from around the world.Footnote 93 Chile had a poor image in the United States, argued one commentator in a Santiago newspaper, and the Buffalo Exposition was an occasion to improve that image by revealing Chilean wealth, culture, progress, and modernity.Footnote 94 Archaeology was one means to this end.
International congresses were another phenomenon of the late nineteenth century. For American archaeology, the Congresses of the Americanists were the most prestigious forum.Footnote 95 At the 1910 meeting Chileans suggested holding the next session in Tacna. They argued that the ancient desert sites provided extraordinary source material for archaeological research carried out by Congress members. As a part of the Chilean campaign, Canales publicized the area's qualities in his paper on the coastal cemeteries of Tacna, Arica, and Tarapacá. Before his international colleagues he marveled especially at the naturally mummified bodies of humans, which looked “as if they were alive. … The skin, the hair, the nails, muscles, nervous system, dried blood, everything is perfect, in an excellent physiological condition.”Footnote 96
The extraordinary archaeological quality of materials in the North also justified the employment of foreign specialists. When the Chilean government hired Max Uhle in 1912, it gained the services of one of the most prestigious and cosmopolitan members of the international archaeological community. Uhle had been trained at the Berlin Museum of Ethnology and had worked for decades for museums in the United States and Peru.Footnote 97 He was involved in a number of international debates, and brought the Chilean archaeological record, and along with it the nation's scholarly community, into the international limelight. Uhle was part of a group of scholars that, within one of the most controversial debates in late-nineteenth-century Americanist archaeology, argued that the Americas had experienced a Paleolithic Age analogous to that of Europe. The 1859 discovery in Europe of human remains associated with extinct Pleistocene mammals demonstrated a human prehistory antedating the Bible, and spurred a quest for remains of a similar age in the Americas. Several scholars argued that all that was necessary to find were artifacts that resembled European Paleoliths. Allegedly Paleolithic remains were reported at dozens of sites in the United States through the 1880s, mostly from geological settings suggesting great antiquity.Footnote 98 Uhle countered that the remains of America's Paleolithic Age were preserved in the Atacama Desert, more precisely in Taltal, situated in what had become the Chilean province of Antofagasta. His arguments were seized upon by Chilean scholarsFootnote 99 and highly contested within the international community.Footnote 100
Science was not only a colonizing ideology at the center of imperial domination;Footnote 101 former colonies believed their pathway to autonomous statehood required it: a modern, independent nation needed to have a national science. The northern territories granted Chile an object of interest to foreign scholars as well as a vehicle for presenting the emerging nation as a producer of archaeological knowledge. In common with the world's imperial powers, Chilean scholars were well aware of the political implications of their archaeological activity and they competed with other nations in the pursuit of high-quality research. Possession of the archaeological record from the annexation gave Chileans the opportunity to produce world-class science on a topic of international interest.
CONCLUSION
Archaeology played a significant role in the Chilean annexation of Peruvian territories. The appropriation of the area's precious artifacts and the knowledge of its extraordinary pre-historical past, and the fact that both processes were channeled through the modern science of archaeology, all intimately connected this process with the larger project of political annexation. Chilean archaeological explorations of the North not only helped with appropriation of the newly acquired Peruvian territories on the symbolic level, but also enabled the emergence of the discipline of archaeology in Chile. It has been argued that the exploration of the non-European world was important in shaping emergent scientific disciplines within Europe.Footnote 102 In the same way, Chilean archaeology would have been unthinkable without its territorial expansion into formerly Peruvian territory. Chilean archaeology was born in the 1880s on the basis of scholarship produced by Peruvian precursors, which, like the actual artifacts, was subsequently incorporated into the Chilean intellectual record. If we take into account regional and non-institutionalized aspects of archaeology, this fundamentally changes the picture previously presented in histories of archaeology: not only was there a dynamic archaeological tradition in Peru prior to the arrival of foreign scholars, but this tradition served as an intellectual underpinning for the Chilean institutionalization of modern archaeology. A regional perspective renders visible also the agency of local elites in the borderlands, which contested the nationalist claims over the area using the same tool: the prism of an archaeological discourse. And, examining the discipline from the angle of a critical history of archaeology, one that allows for the politicized nature of science, reveals that the discipline was founded in Chile in pursuit of an agenda of national progress, not from a desire to explore the area's indigenous legacy. The specific archaeological conditions in the North, given importance due to the particular moment in global intellectual history, helped introduce Chile into international debates surrounding evolutionary archaeology. The archaeological exploration of the Greater North thus helped position the Chilean nation-state within the international community of modern nations.
Around the turn of the century, archaeology represented a new knowledge discipline that was being pressed into service in different parts of the world. Scholars have shown that archaeology, as a peculiar method of history writing, served Indian nationalists constructing an autonomous identity in opposition to British imperialism,Footnote 103 German regional patriots seeking to differentiate themselves in the new nation-state,Footnote 104 and Chinese intellectuals intending to reveal the value of their century-old intellectual traditions in the face of Western threats.Footnote 105 The practice of archaeology was fundamentally linked with the consolidation of bounded spaces, with collective identities, and with the historical imaginaries of political entities, all fundamental to nineteenth-century nation-states, regions, and colonies. The modernity associated with archaeology rendered it desirable as more than simply a tool for collective definition. For turn-of-the-century Chilean archaeologists, as for their counterparts in Peru, the annexed regions, and around the globe, archaeology was a political resource that served to naturalize the existence of territories as sovereign, delimited entities defined by history, identity, and modernity.
