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(1856–1944)
Born in Dresden, Germany, Max Uhle studied languages at the Universities of Göttingen and Leipzig. He worked in the ethnological museums of Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin, where he became interested in pre-Columbian archaeology.
In 1892, he traveled to South America for the Ethnographic Museum of Berlin to research the inca and the Indians of bolivia. He excavated in peru between 1897 and 1899 at Ancon and Pachacamac and between 1899 and 1901 in the moche and Chincha Valleys and at Huamachuco, Ica, and Pisco. Uhle found ceramics from pre-Spanish cultures at all of these sites—chavín at Ancon and Nazca at Chincha and Ica—and began to interpret the history, cultures, and chronologies of the ancient civilizations that produced them. From 1901 to 1903 he was employed by the University of California, Berkeley, and carried out further excavations of Peruvian coastal cultures and became involved in archaeological research on the shell mounds of California with the American archaeologist nels c. nelson.
From 1906 to 1909, Uhle was director of the National Historical Museum in Lima, Peru. Between 1909 and 1933, he excavated in chile and ecuador, helping to establish an archaeological museum in Santiago, Chile, and working as a professor at the University of Santiago (1912) working at the University of Quito (1919). He returned to Germany, where he was professor at the University of Berlin and worked on Andean archaeology at the Ibero-American Institute until his death during World War II.
References
Menzel, D. 1977. The Archaeology of Ancient Peruand the Work of Max Uhle. Berkeley: R.H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California.
There is a tendency to treat the history of archaeology as a single development on the model of the sciences (Daniel 1950, 1963, 1975; Trigger 1988; Willey and Sabloff 1974, 1980). This is inappropriate. As theory-driven disciplines, the “hard sciences” are to a large degree “culture-free,” and they do share a more or less politically seamless history. Archaeology, despite wishes and claims to the contrary (Kuznar 1997; Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman 1971), is not science (Dunnell 1982, 1992a). Indeed, if there is a single thread to the history of U.S. archaeology, it has been its aspiration to become scientific for nearly all of its existence (Dunnell 1992a). Such motivation notwithstanding, the lack of scientific theory has permitted the cultural background of individual investigators, common sense, to take over most of the functions of theory (Kuzner 1997). One consequence is that archaeology, unlike science, is heavily influenced by its cultural context. Indeed, the postprocessualists seem to revel in this condition otherwise best construed as our most monstrous failing. Herein lies the fatal error
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