expeditions had revealed a horizontal perspective without systematic prospecting. The construction of a respectable image for the national state of Chile had begun. This state sought an understanding of the vernacular, as an instrument of legitimization and as the new non-Indian national symbol, but with no links to the indigenous populations who lived on the fringes and margins of civilization.

The Scientific Systematic Embryo (1890–1919)

Scholars began to place themselves within a naturalistic and inductive-descriptive theoretical-methodological paradigm based on the principle that all qualities are measurable. Since there was no systematic program of archaeological study, archaeologists were self-taught, with enthusiasm and French romanticism making the still largely unknown ethnic and archaeological potential attractive. Expeditions were sponsored by museums of natural sciences, scientific societies, incipient universities, etc. A series of excavations and ethnographic and ethnolinguistic salvage projects were organized under the banner of different evolutionary perspectives (autochthonous versus diffusionist), resulting in the first cultural taxonomies and physical anthropology measurements. During this time, to satisfy the taxonomic obsession of researchers, Indians were forced to live out their lives in museums, thus guaranteeing access to their remains once they died.

Interest in ethnography and physical anthropology increased with the founding of the German Scientific Society directed by Phillipi and the Scientific Society of Chile, of French ideological inclination, directed by A. Obrecht and with the establishment of such institutions as the national museums of natural history and the incipient University of Chile. Thus, an embryo of anthropological studies that would hierarchically structure the intellectual life of Santiago, Valparaiso, and Concepción became apparent.

The evolutionary-positivist paradigm of the natural and empirical sciences initially caused the development of archaeology as a scientific discipline. However, in Europe, this paradigm confronted the metaphysical idealism of the German philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, from which the materialist thesis would emerge, which would eventually have an impact in Chile. The so-called early-twentieth-century cultural history and the North American cultural relativist schools emerged as reactions on the part of Euro-American idealists to late-nineteenth-century positivism.

The debate centered on evolutionists versus anti-evolutionists, between the followers of Lamarck and Charles Lyell and the supporters of Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt. The former were adherents of chrono-stratigraphic reconstructions and their relationship to anthropological vestiges; the latter were followers of a creationist school that lacked sequential profundity. Argentinean evolutionists like Ambrosetti, Debenedetti, Outes, and Lehmann-Nitsche were frequently cited in Chile by the first systematic scholars such as Latcham and max uhle. The same was not the case for the works of Moreno, Bormeidter, and others, which lacked the properly documented, or chronologically arranged, data that were essential for the comparative method, which was in vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century.

However, orthodox Argentinean evolutionists led by the Ameghino brothers were unaware of the precise nature of the Paleolithic artifacts embedded in Miocene strata. During the International Congress of Americanists in Buenos Aires in 1895, ales hrdlicka shattered the largely autochthonous and hyperevolutionist Ameghinian thesis that had dated Argentinean artifacts and human fossil remains back to the Tertiary period. As a consequence, the antiquity of human occupation in Chile would be substantially reduced during this period, to shorter chronologies that remained impervious to substantial changes.

Another trans-Andean debate characteristic of this period was related to the northern Andean regions of argentina and Chile. Monuments are conspicuous in these regions, and the Inca presence was well documented in the preceding period. The debate concerned the nature of the Inca as civilizing agents. Under the banner of pseudonationalism, “Peruvian” influence was denied, particularly in those territories that