school of Vienna, which was characterized by religious anti-evolutionist and overtly racist views. The group’s work was also inspired by the translations of Oyarzún (Orellana 1979), the writings of Koppera and Schmidt and other classics by Ratzel Frobenius and fritz graebner, culminating in the Argentinean studies of Imbelloni, Bórmida, and Menghin.

Adherence to the culturalist current by Chilean intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century becomes understandable because in Argentina at the same time the opposite Ameghinist thesis was in vogue. During this period in Chile, all work that legitimized the superiority of certain peoples and races over others was very popular.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, while those scholars who closely adhered to the cultural-history school produced descriptive and speculative studies, other scholars made systematic contributions to the production of a documented database. Between 1900 and 1938 there was a methodological crisis caused by the abandonment of stratigraphic-naturalistic principles in favor of the hasty excavations of Indian tombs with the sole purpose of recovering artifacts to fill state museums. It has been acknowledged that these excavations were unsystematic and that no refined methods were applied to clarify cultural history in terms of pre-Inca sequences and developments in regional diversity. At the same time, from at least 1911 on, scholars in other countries were using stratigraphic methods, but the application of these methods was not popular in Chile where, with the exception of the northern and southern confines of the country, chronological frameworks were not thought to provide reliable sequences and contexts.

In this milieu, Uhle and Latcham made major contributions to the discipline. These two archaeologists were the products of German and British academic environments, which they would later incorporate with Euro-American influences. Max Uhle based his research in Chile (from 1911 to 1919) on the cultural-history paradigm. His pan-Andean archaeological perspective and his cutting-edge methods, synthesized into the Euro-American stance, enabled him to carry out contextualized excavations that made him the forerunner of modern empiricists. He enhanced the chronological, sequential, and distributive adjustments between peripheral and core cultures, based on the extension of the Tiwanaku and Inca guiding horizons, and as a result he wrote the first pre-Columbian cultural history, with its very own methods. Uhle’s results remained in use until their harmonious integration into the modern investigations of junius bouton bird (1943) and even more recent investigations (Schaedel 1957).

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, then, various distant events had an impact in Chile. The first systematic physical anthropology studies began under Ales Hrdlicka, and the peopling of the Americas was established as a post-Pleistocene event (w. h. holmes). However “ancient” Paleolithic stations were recorded at Taltal in northern Chile, which helped to continue the debate on the earlier origins of humans in the Americas. The first stratigraphic excavations were carried out, and Max Uhle began to work in South America, where he was regarded as the father of Andean archaeology.

The Ameghinian School had been discredited to the point of oblivion by the application of stratigraphy, the discovery of rock art, the excavation of cemeteries, and the recovery of surface collections from ancient workshops. Initial excavations were in the desert, where monumental sites were more visible and profuse, in order to supply collections for state museums and private collectors. These excavations were undertaken with ethnohistoric sources rather than archaeological field-recording methods in mind. The scholars were erudite bibliographers who witnessed the erosion of any great antiquity for humans in the Americas, and in this context, Uhle’s innovative role was decisive for the success of Chilean archaeology.

Transitional Interface (1919–1961)

Uhle’s theories and practice were followed by the majority of Chilean senior researchers such as Ricardo Latcham (1928, 1938), who adopted his chronological sequence in spite of the fact