In the years immediately before the First World War, American fascination with the Maya gave way for a period to an almost equal passion for the Andean civilizations of Peru. The reason was the discovery, and early photographic coverage in National Geographic magazine, of the spectacular. Inka site of Macchu Picchu, long hidden by dense jungle overgrowth.

It was an event that fired the imagination of the world and launched Macchu Picchu's discover, college professor Hiram Bingham, on a glorious career that ended on Capitol Hill.

While Bingham was growing famous for his exploits, less freewheeling archaeologists working on the coast of Peru were painstakingly reconstructing a long sequence of pre-Inka civilizations. Largely through the efforts of Max Uhle between 1892 and 1912, Peru became the first region in the world for which a broad archaeological synthesis was developed.

Uhle's first encounter with Andean prehistory came when he met the traveller Alphons Stubel, recently returned from the impressive ruins of Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca in highland Bolivia, at one time the capital of a short-lived empire that extended south into Chile and Argentina.

The site had a substantial ancient population and its elaborate stone carvings of deities and supernatural creatures, ceremonial plazas and pyramids formed a sacred precinct that attracted pilgrims for centuries, between AD 300 and 1000.

Together, Uhle and Stubel worked up Stubel's notes, publishing the results in 1892, the year Uhle left for Peru, the country where he spent the next twenty years researching for the universities of Pennsylvania and California. When it came to building a regional chronology, Uhle proved as committed to stratigraphic excavation and the ordering of finds in their correct evolutionary sequence as he had been in California. Particularly important was his excavation in 1896-97 of the great ceremonial and urban site of Pachacamac, near Lima, home until the
Spanish conquest of an oracle consulted by pilgrims from the entire Andean region.

Digging stratigraphically, Uhle was able to document an orderly sequence of artifact styles that changed over time. Stratified beneath Inka remains, he found Tiahuanaco-like artifacts that he judged inferior in quality to the originals with which he was familiar; he called these `Epigone', using them in his developing regional chronology to characterize the pre-Inka period on the Peruvian coast.

 

Pachacamac in this way generated the first chronological sequence in Andean archaeology, one with far-reaching implications. Uhle moved on to Mochica and Chimú sites further north, later extending his work into the highlands and to Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile. The framework he established for Andean civilization revolutionized South American archaeology as a whole and has only recently been superseded.

The period from 1860 to 1920 can thus be seen in many ways as archaeology's `golden age' of discovery, packed with pioneering finds, from Paleolithic art to Pachacamac and from Mycenae to Macchu Picchu, and resounding with many of the greatest names in the history of the subject - Lartet, Schliemann, Evans, Petrie, Koldewey, Uhle. Yet it also saw the development of a more negative aspect, the rise of extreme nationalism - a spectre that was to cast ugly shadows in the years that followed.

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Cecilia dos Guimaraes Bastos

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