Elite and middle-class men and women living in Cuzco, Lima, Santiago, and the Arancanian territories in southern Chile during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries collected, sold and donated pre-Columbian antiquities and archaeological artefacts. These military officials, landowners, engineers, doctors, and other professionals, including a handful of elite women, hosted intellectual circles in their salons to discuss and interpret the material objects in their private collections. They proudly showed their antiquities to foreign guests and visitors and made presentations at international conferences and wrote articles about them published in scholarly journals. By focusing on private collectors of antiquities and archaeological artefacts living in South America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gänger recalibrates a historiography that has traditionally focused on world renowned twentieth-century archaeological expeditions and European and North American scientists and travellers in the study of archaeology in South America. In addition, this innovative study adds a layer of rich complexity to literature on the history of science and nation building in an Atlantic and comparative context.
This well-researched monograph draws on collection catalogues, writings, and scholarship of the antiquities collectors born or living in South America. Four chapters focused around “object biographies” of three different material artefacts—a mascapaycha, khipu, and the Valdivia jug—and an indigenous man, Pascual Coña, illustrate how indigenous peoples and cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became imagined as relics during their lifetimes.
A rich historical context emerges that highlights the transatlantic connections and networks among private collectors, scholars, scientists, and merchants. Gänger shows how private collectors living in Peru and Chile interpreted and produced knowledge based on their material objects in dialogue with local, regional, national, and transatlantic contexts. South American collectors used their local knowledge of the indigenous peoples and cultures they were studying to shape transatlantic scholarship and debates about pre-Columbian indigenous peoples and material cultures in Peru and Chile. These same Peruvian and Chilean collectors also drew on and adapted European intellectual currents to inform discourses of race and nation at home, particularly sharpening national distinctions after the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) through the collection and study of the pre-Columbian past. Gänger shows how South American collectors of antiquities influenced European and North American understandings and debates about pre-Columbian societies. The private collectors of pre-Columbian artefacts in Lima, Cuzco, or Santiago participated in scholarly conferences in North America and Europe, published in leading journals, and sold their antiquities to other collectors, universities, and museums throughout the Atlantic world.
Gänger places her analysis of antiquities collecting and archaeology in a comparative context of nation-building discourses during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Chile and Peru. After the War of the Pacific, the collection of antiquities, the study of material artefacts, and discourses about the pre-Columbian past sharpened national distinctions between Peru and Chile. Debates about the pre-Columbian peoples and cultures centred around the characterization of the Inca empire and how far it geographically reached into Chilean territory. Similar to German and other European nation-building discourses at the time, Chileans defined the nation based on an ancient past that was found within its country’s territory. Chileans understood their nation in opposition to their characterization of the Incan empire as despotic and decadent. These characteristics of the Incan empire became the embodiment of the Peruvian nation from the Chilean perspective. Thus, Chileans embraced the fierce Araucanians, who had fought off the Incas, Spaniards, and held off the Chilean state until the late nineteenth century, as in part the ancestors and authentic indigenous heritage of the nation. By contrast, Peruvian narratives emphasized their Incan ancestry and viewed the empire as agents of civilization, comparable to classic Greek and Roman empires. These conflicting discourses of race and nation in Chile and Peru were reinforced by antiquaries, who were often politicians, that had an interest in the material culture and history of pre-Columbian peoples and cultures. Gänger adds complexity to these heated debates over the nation, noting that both countries wrestled with discourses about modernity and progress during the era of scientific racism. Both nations’ racial makeup did not neatly fit into European racial theories. Instead, nation-building narratives of the indigenous peoples portrayed them as “living relics” at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Gänger’s work excels at the challenging task of comparative history, while also tracing transatlantic connections. The insightful findings are also placed within the secondary literature on Chilean and Peruvian history and archaeology while engaging with historical debates and issues associated with the history of science and more broadly Atlantic history. Gänger clearly and persuasively weaves together the different themes being examined across disciplines and national boundaries. This is no easy task, which makes Relics of the Past an exemplary model of comparative and transnational analysis for other scholars engaged in such work.
