important descriptions that can be linked to archaeological data. We know of several excavations in the Atacameño territory further south; an Inca fortress in Tagua was explored, and between 1851 and 1900 a series of unscientific excavations (huaqueos) in search of “mummies” or dehydrated corpses and their associated assemblages took place at a cemetery on the Loa River. The collections recovered from these excavations were shipped to museums in Paris, Madrid, Oslo, and New York.

The written accounts of explorers and scientists proved to be of great value, as they constituted the archaeological and ethnohistoric foundation from which an archaeological discourse could be nurtured. During the 1970s, Jorge Hidalgo presented the first proposal for a scientific Chilean ethnohistory and thus became the pioneer of the discipline of archaeology in Chile.

Prescientific Pioneers (1830–1890)

In Europe in 1836, christian jürgensen thomsen published his classic three-age system and thus inaugurated archaeology as a scientific discipline sustained by Darwinian evolutionism. Thomsen’s scheme paralleled the geological concept of sir charles lyell of a greater temporal depth for humanity and was framed within the context of the natural sciences. As a result, two explanatory proposals for human history were postulated. The first propounded the diversity of all living organisms as a consequence of the earth’s antiquity in a gradual evolutionary process. The second was a stratigraphic proposition, which defined an “extended chronology” in accordance with the great French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier’s postulates and surpassing the biblical limits of 6,000 years.

In this postcolonial intellectual environment, recently opened up by universal philosophical reason, European scientific currents of thought made an impact on the debates between Chilean liberals and conservatives. They determined the dispute between “progress” and “backwardness.”

After the mid-nineteenth century, the endorsement of the new scientific doctrines of evolutionism and positivism constituted the mission statement of the “modern” intellectual vanguard. A pioneer in this movement was Rodolfo A. Phillipi, an Austrian exile in Chile whose academic background in the natural sciences (medicine, botany, and zoology) influenced his archaeological observations as an employee of the Chilean government. Another important participant was Letelier, who was not religious and a firm empiricist. Letelier advocated an end to the “short biblical chronology” in favor of a more “extensive” chronology. He went even further and proposed a “prehistory of America,” which would become a reality six years later with the publication of the monumental work of José T. Medina.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the French archaeologist jacques boucher de perthes successfully combined paleontology, geology, and archaeology with stratigraphic methods to create the scientific foundations of the discipline of archaeology, which enabled it to leave behind its antiquarian antecedents. Boucher de Perthes’s proposals reached the New World via evolutionism, but there was no archaeological evidence akin to the spectacular findings in the Old World. Although Indian “megalithic ruins” were common in the Americas, and these exotic and abandoned ruins motivated a series of notable expeditions during the nineteenth century, Chile remained a far away place with limited archaeological attraction.

The natural sciences were influential in the founding of the important Museum of Natural History in Santiago (1830), a similar one in Valparaiso (1876), and a southern replica at Concepción (1902). These museums, the result of modern European ideas, researched and presented the whole evolutionary-biological circuit from fossils to static displays of Indian artifacts, which were regarded as some sort of more recent fossils.

The first scholar to value the archaeological past of Chile was the historian and bibliographer José T. Medina. His analysis, although not strictly linked to the naturalism in vogue, covered all of the national territory except for the north of the state, which was the subject of an ongoing dispute with peru and bolivia. He compiled major ethnohistoric sources to make sense of the various indigenous entities of an ethnological and archaeological