notion that distinguished between superior and inferior societies. The best of European evolutionism was appropriated to reconfigure cultural relativism, which represented an inductivist tendency that firmly encouraged praxis in the field and empirical data accumulation. In this context, more-objective analyses based on typological taxonomies emerged and would be the platform from which Chilean cultural ecology would surface, which occurred before the rise of systemic archaeology.

During the first part of this period, all Chile’s archaeologists were Boasian positivists, rejecting rationalism because it had made a spectacle out of archaeology by burdening it with “discoveries” that lacked any professional rigor. At the time, cultures were identified in chronological and spatial order through the utilization of such an overwhelming inductive approach that it prevented any nonempirical prejudice, and thus culture was set at the center of social life. Evolutionary and transcultural changes were inserted into society independent of their social consciousness. Empiricist archaeology was debilitated by this type of idealist analysis, which was completely detached from the material nature of the archaeological data and whose causation studies were based on ethnographic analogy and other sorts of inferences of dubious value. The excessive use of chronologies and chorologies per se was debated, as were the abstract statistical typologies that had reduced societies to largely ceramic cultures. It was in this context that evolutionary functionalism arrived, arranging settlement archaeology hierarchically and opening up new avenues for research from the 1970s onward.

This period also witnessed the emergence of the first multidisciplinary endeavors in collaboration with specialists from the hard sciences. The University of Chile published specialized editions, and methodologies and techniques were optimized owing to more sustained contacts with foreign academics. At the same time, qualified scholars were now distributed across almost all of Chile, and Roberto Montandon, the pioneer of monumental restoration, began his early work in 1950; it would be continued later by Eduardo Muñoz.

It is acknowledged that North American influence started in 1960 when internal, or independent, cultural changes began to be identified as paralleling the appraisal of adaptive roles that went beyond environmental determinism. The European contribution to social evolution, along with methodological renovation by means of the unorthodox analyses of collections, and the concepts of association by superimposition proposed by the gordon childe–mortimer wheeler duo were also important influences. Notions implying that typology was equal to chronology and that similarity was akin to synchronicity were gradually abandoned. Nevertheless, the diffusionist criterion was still prevalent in reference books, which continued to assert a greater antiquity for stone tool industries such as the Gatchi-Atacama without any scientific basis.

The downfall of empiricism and its subsequent return shrouded by a more scientific, neopositivist orientation merited the development of an improved explanatory and predictive capacity, which drew archaeology even closer to the social sciences. This change enabled further advances in Childean materialistic ontological proposals and with the opposed idealistic tendencies that viewed reality in a culture by itself.

In this period, pioneering investigators initiated a renovation movement through the establishment of regional archaeological museums, and the expansion of academic expertise reached its pinnacle with the publication in 1989 of a new Chilean prehistory edited by the Chilean Society of Archaeology. Other events include the beginning of systematic training in archaeology at the Universities of Chile and Concepción and the First International Archaeological Congress held in 1961 in Arica, organized by the Regional Museum of Arica and supported by the University of Chile. Two years later, in 1963, the First National Congress of Archaeology was held in San Pedro Atacama, sponsored by the museum’s founder, Gustavo Le Paige, with the assistance of the Universidad del Norte. This event marked the emergence of the Chilean Archaeological Society to promote and regulate archaeological research and incorporate all scholars in archaeology. The society has