were subject to territorial disputes. The patrimony of living indigenous peoples was totally and deliberately ignored, perceived as a separate entity without any history or links to archaeological remains. This “Chileanization” of ethnic territories, which legitimized the official view of racial and cultural uniformity, transformed Chile into a country devoid of Indians or ethnic diversity. Santiago became the place where centers of exclusive exotic Indian (dead or alive) exhibits were staged for the gratification of a still essentially ethnocentric anthropological science. The materials for these exhibitions came from the vanquished ethnic territories or from far away relic areas where only missionaries, some state officials, and daring travelers would venture.

With the collapse of the evolutionists, a new way of doing archaeology was inaugurated, primarily by Max Uhle, who provided a modern diachronic reconstitution of pre-Inca populations of northwestern Argentina through the identification of ceramic styles and diagnostic indicators that enabled him to establish sequences and correlations with the Peruvian-Bolivian Andes. Uhle was a field investigator who, on the basis of his anti-evolutionary diffusionist thesis, was able to see the evidence reflected in the data, and thus he inaugurated comparative analysis between the Andean core and the marginal zones. Uhle enlightened this epoch with his sound German prehistoric methodology, completely detached from approaches such as those of Eric Boman, whose explanations of the archaeological context of the sites were based solely on the ethnohistoric documentation and who relegated archaeology to bibliographical research.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, these changes in archaeological practice were marked by events such as the Fourth Scientific Congress held in Santiago in 1908. This congress brought together renowned scholars involved in the initial stages of anthropology and archaeology in South America, including Max Uhle, Ricardo Latcham, Aureliano Oyarzún, and Martin Gusinde. In 1911, the Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology was founded in Santiago, a result of Max Uhle’s appointment in Chile, after his successful and prestigious performance over seven years in the United States, Peru, Bolivia, and argentina. Also in 1911, the Museum of Ethnology’s cultural-history approach was initiated by the appointment of the German ethnologist Martin Gusinde, who was the finest representative of the Vienna model of cultural cycles. Throughout twelve years of intensive ethnological and physical anthropology fieldwork, Gusinde amassed one of the most valuable museum collections, in its day considered to be one of the most ancient in the Americas.

By 1910, the Ameghinian thesis had been completely discredited in the face of Euro-American proposals that made unilineal evolutionism unsustainable. It was only then that ethnic or archaeological issues, per se, were pursued as worthy objects of study under the new Euro-American historicist approach, which was dedicated to the compilation of national cultural values in the context of the ascent of the new scientific-academic intelligentsia. Between 1909 and 1911, new publications were edited by the Chilean Society for Folklore, the Chilean Society of History and Geography, the Natural Sciences Society, the national museums, and the University of Chile. By 1910, there had been a subtle shift toward the chronological models of North American archaeology. This type of archaeology was based on explanatory models drawn from theories on diffusion and migration, based on the widely held and common belief that people do not make innovations on their own but instead rely on foreign influences.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, articles published in the journals Ethnologica (Colonna) and Anthropos (Vienna) generated critical theoretical changes in archaeology in Chile. These journals disseminated the current methods of cultural history and greatly influenced Gusinde in Chile and later O. Menghin in Argentina, who initiated a new style of scientific-totalitarianism alien to any form theoretical and ideological pluralism. The vacuum left by nineteenth-century evolutionist and positivist-rationalist views was filled by a group from the Museum of Ethnology headed by Uhle, Oyarzún, and Gusinde. This group joined together under the banner of the historic-particularist paradigm and the tenets of the cultural-history