give that title to julio c. tello. Tello, of humble origins from the Peruvian highlands, began his career in the early decades of the twentieth century and eventually became director of the Museo Nacional de Antropología y Arqueología in Lima, the most prestigious position for an archaeologist in Peru. Though sometimes criticized for a lack of scientific rigor, Tello brought an intelligent, imaginative mind to Peruvian archaeology. He was more concerned with the big picture of Peruvian prehistory and less with the minutiae of the chronology.

Tello was the first to appreciate the widespread distribution of chavín art and iconography. Because of its early date, Tello proposed that Chavín was the oldest of Peru’s civilizations and that it constituted “the mother culture” from which all later Peruvian civilizations developed, a perspective eventually accepted by most Andean scholars. Tello also identified tropical forest creatures in Chavín iconography, which he used to bolster his argument that Peruvian civilization derived more from the eastern Andes and upper Amazon than it did from the coastal setting.

The University of California, Berkeley, continued to be deeply involved in Peruvian archaeology through the 1930s and 1940s, sustained by Kroeber’s interest and that of his students, several of whom, notably Anna Gayton, Lila O’Neal, and william duncan strong, became involved in field research and museum studies. In the mid-1940s, with support from the newly founded Institute for Andean Research, Strong, now a professor at Colombia University, brought together several prominent archaeologists to carry out an intensive cooperative project in the virú valley of Peru.

The list of participating archaeologists reads like a page from who’s who in American archaeology of the time: Strong, junius bird, Donald Collier, Wendell Bennett, gordon willey, james ford, and Clifford Evans. The project benefited from the influence, support, and hospitality of Rafael Larco Hoyle, a wealthy landowner and avocational archaeologist from the north coast of Peru. Larco had amassed a huge private collection of north coast antiquities (many now on display at the Larco Herrera Museum in Lima), and one of Larco’s interests was to try to infer daily life among the ancient populations of the north coast through a detailed study of the scenes depicted on the pottery. With the encouragement of the archaeologists participating in the Virú project, however, he turned his attention to chronology and developed a chronological seriation of Moche stirrup-spout bottles, which with some refinements stands today as the core chronology for that period on the north coast.

Larco hosted a Chiclín conference in 1947 that brought together the participants of the Virú project and resulted in an edited volume, A Reappraisal of Peruvian Archaeology, published as a memoir of the society for american archaeology in 1948. The aspects of the Virú project that had the most long-lasting impact were the Virú Valley survey and settlement pattern study carried out by Gordon Willey, widely regarded as a seminal work, and Junius Bird’s excavation of Huaca Prieta, which for the first time revealed the existence of preceramic, sedentary fisher-farmer settlements on the coast of Peru. The complete report of Bird’s findings was not published until after his death, but his discovery stimulated research on the Peruvian preceramic by Edward Lanning, Thomas Patterson, and eventually Michael Moseley, who proposed that Peruvian civilization was founded on a maritime economy.

As important as the VirúValley project was the meticulous, detailed research on south coast ceramic styles carried out by a group of scholars at Berkeley under the direction of John Rowe. Building on the work of Uhle and Kroeber, by the end of the 1950s this group had worked out detailed chronological seriations for the south coast, which, they argued, allowed them in some cases to discriminate fifty-year segments of time. Using this seriated sequence and the horizon styles worked out by Uhle, John Rowe produced a six-period master sequence for Peru in 1962, and it continues to be used today as the favored chronological framework.

By the late 1950s, the broad outline of Peruvian culture history had been laid out. Most of the research, however, had been carried out on the coast, so despite the fact that both the Huari and Inca empires had their capitals in the highlands,