the work of Bird and Uhle through the use of a modern chronological, ecological, and adaptive analysis in the northern half of the country. Meanwhile, W. Mulloy’s proposals about Easter Island drew Chile even closer to North American methodologies, and in this context, the Center of Anthropological Studies became the generator of scientific groundwork groups in Chile led by Carlos Munizaga, Francisco Reyes, Alberto Medina, Jorge Kaltwasser, Bernardo Berdichewsky, Ximena Bunster, Mario Orellana, Gonzalo Figueroa, and Juan Muziaga, the founder of scientific physical anthropology in Chile. Although Osvaldo Menghin’s visit to this center clarified matters and methods related to issues of parietal (rock and cave) art, the Patagonian sequence, and his exploration in the south-central part of the country, his cultural-history proposals did not become popular.

A scientific movement originating in the provinces linked up with the scientific circle of the capital. This movement had its antecedents in the foundation of museums in Valparaiso, Viña del Mar, Angol, Punta Arenas, and La Serena, of which the Museum of Archaeology of La Serena constituted the most prestigious center of research and periodical publications. Like the museum in La Serena, the Museum of Viña del Mar was a front-line research center when it began using the excavation methods of “contextual cross-sections” and “determination of original floors” in 1955. In 1957, R.P. Le Paige founded the Archaeological Museum at the Casa Parroquial de San Pedro Atacama, and in 1959, Percy Dauelsberg founded the Regional Museum of Arica. During the following period, a process of regionalization took place in Chilean archaeology.

North American diffusionist explanations had ceased to be satisfactory explanations for the peopling of the Americas before 1961. The idea that all forms of progress and civilization were dispersed to marginal areas from Mesoamerican and Andean heartlands came under serious critical scrutiny. Psychological explanations of the past became inadequate, and the hierarchical ordering of differences began to compete with the search for regularities. This was a response to an inductivist approach that led more to descriptivism per se and resulted in a growing awareness that a dialectic deductive-inductive approach was needed, which would move closer to theories that would provide the next generation of archaeologists with better research objectives for sites and collections.

Professional Scientific Development (1961– )

The American ethnologist and archaeologist julian steward had an enormous influence on the generation of the 1950s and 1960s through the publication of his book the Handbook of South American Indians, but there were also other major influences. Carlos Ponce, working with a team of national colleagues, was applying stratigraphic excavation methods at Tiwanaku; Luis Lumbreras excavated Chavín and proposed a critical reading of the North American-Andean literature; Stig Rydén finished his monograph on Chile and Bolivia; and in Argentina, Alberto Rex González published his chrono-stratigraphic work. These young scholars, who kept in permanent contact with each other, were the authors of publications that became compulsory reading for the archaeological generation of the 1950s and 1960s. Many new technical and methodological strategies would emerge from this interrelationship, such as Childean evolutionism and a reevaluation of “garbage collections” as opposed to belles pieces, or great art objects. Most important, the chronological archaeology that would set this generation apart began, and the first modern and reliable synthesis of regional sequences emerged.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, reactions against unilineal evolutionism were channeled through the diffusionist school, which was inclined toward the hierarchical transmission of change rather than conservative social structures. The important issue for this school was the determination of cultural “emission” and “reception,” which denied local creativity or the existence of autochthonous evolutionary developments mature enough to assimilate and internally process change. There was a growing need to look for more pluralist theses, which would complement Boasian ideas that firmly opposed the idea of the biological inferiority of the American Indian and the evolutionary