Abstract: Triangles and circles are employed to describe the Kinship of many cultures and the comprising family units. Yet the kinship of the archaeologists themselves is not examined to the same standard. And the few times it has been (such as in Willey and Sabloff A History of American Archaeology (1974)), intellectual incest (my term, not theirs) - the imprint of our mentors and colleagues - is largely ignored as it is seen as our epistemology and the fundamental building blocks that allow new theories and interpretations to be put forth. It is these relationships between mentor and student, colleagues, project / expedition participants and even who was and who was not in attendance at a particular symposium or conference that influences our understanding of the cultures studied.
Kroeber: History and Science in Anthropology (1935)
Students and scholars familiar with the Great Debate in anthropology from the mid 1930s to the early 1960s are probably moaning by now. My intention is not to re-hash "historical reconstruction", the attack on James Albert Ford (1911 - 1968), Walter Willard Taylor, Jr. (1913 - 1997) epic 1948 tome, Louis Robert Binford (1931 - 2011) 1962 publication on new archaeology (processual archaeology), the cultural ecology of Julian Haynes Steward (1902 - 1972) or the cultural evolution theories of Leslie Alvin White (1900 - 1975). (Hopefully, I have done sufficient name-dropping to convince readers I am familiar with the development and history of archaeology and anthropology.)
Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876 - 1960) noted that history in Europe is the subject and that archaeology is the discipline while history in the United States is both a subject and a discipline. Duality, which I think Americans are particularly good at (or biased by), many times translates into confusion and can be a very muddled message. Archaeologists are at times decent second or third tier historians, especially individuals like John Victor Murra (1916 - 2006) and ethnographers as a whole. However, I do not know of a historian who has a professional affiliation as an archaeologist. (See my comments on Philip Ainsworth Means (1892 - 1944) further into this post as his credentials would certainly suggest the designation of historian / archaeologist.) Certainly, one could argue that Franklin Pease G.Y. (1939 - 1999) came the closest, but his background was neither pure history (humanities) or his work archaeological in nature, rather his work enhanced the archaeological record. The same can be said of Nobel David Cook (BA 1962, MA 1964 & PhD 1973) another cross-disciplinarian who comes to mind and known in Latin American and Iberian studies as a demographer and ethnographer - already acknowledged for their archival abilities. The fact that Pease and Cook were friends is not missed by the author and really my point for this essay. Cook benefited from his introduction to Franklin and Mariana Pease in 1968 and, I would argue, enhanced his own scholarship and studies through the scholarship and studies of Pease.
(Side note: I have realized in the past year that my missed opportunity in archaeology was my own love for history. IF I could go back in time and re-set my career path, the three individuals named above -Murra, Pease & Cook - would have been logical choices with whom to pursuit graduate studies. Murra retired in 1982 and Pease and Cook were never discussed as options, let alone explored if viable. For that matter, University of Texas, Cornell, Berkeley and Florida International University were not presented or discussed either and I believe all could have been excellent fits for my own dual interests in history and archaeology.)
The study of Peru is perhaps the perfect laboratory for understanding the discipline while researching the subject as the History of Archaeology in Peru correlates seamlessly with the development of Archaeology and Anthropology as disciplines. First, the dates overlap. Adolph F A Bandelier (1840 - 1914) did some brief survey work in Peru in the 1890s just as archaeology and anthropology were defining their own parameters and perimeters within other disciplines. Funded by Henry Villard (1835 - 1900) and affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History (New York), this work was very preliminary and I would suggest even sketchy as to its overall contributory significance. Still, it provided a foundation and it created an interest as he challenged some of the conventional thoughts about the antiquity of Peru. Importantly, he was influenced by Louis Henry Morgan (1818 - 1881), who's own scholarship is considered anthropology. Although Bandelier did some myth-busting he also created and perpetuated some myths that Kroeber and Strong would work hard to dis-credit in the 1920s and 1930s and replace with a more accurate understanding of the passage of time.
German contemporaries of Bandelier included Arthur Baessler (1857 - 1907) a German ethnographer who travels in Peru, 1896 to 1898, resulted in his 4 volume publication in 1902 and 1903, Ancient Peruvian Art: Contributions to Archaeology of the Empire of the Incas, and Adolph Bastian (1826 - 1905) who employed a young Franz Boas (1858 - 1942) at Berlin's Royal Museum and most likely passed through Peru in the 1870s or 1880s and who's writings had profound effect on the emerging anthropology discipline.
Then there is Uhle, Friedrich Max Uhle (1856 - 1944) , who did more at the time to show the antiquity of Peru and lay the foundation for modern archaeological work in Peru than anyone else. If John H Rowe (1918 - 2004) is the Father of Peruvian archaeology, which I and many contend, then Max Uhle was grandfather or perhaps a better analogy would be great-uncle. And, to enrich the very topic of intellectual incest, his relationship with benefactor Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson Hearst (1842 - 1919) - the monetary founder of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley - also plays upon the East Coast v West Coast rivalry. The Uhle-Hearst-Berkeley relationship is truly a matter of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction and one that the yellow journalism of her son's empire could not even approach in terms of complexity. (Compare Villard & the America Museum of Natural History (AMNH) with that of Hearst & the Lowie Museum of Anthropology.)
To be thorough, I do need to back up a few decades and mention William Hickling Prescott (1796 - 1859) and his epic A History of the Conquest of Peru (1847). Prescott, of course, was the historian's historian of the day and identified as the first American scholar to employ scientific methodology to his research and writings. Today, his account is still lauded as a fabulous read, but his interpretations are disputed as too European Centric in content and lacking everything but military and political narration.
And in terms of popular writings and paintings of the mid- to late 19th century I should also mention US Navy Lt William Lewis Herndon & Midshipman Lardner Gibbon 1851 travels from Lima to the mouth of the Amazon via the Andes and their subsequent 1853 publication documenting this journey for the average U.S. reader, James Orton's (1830 - 1877 and who died in Peru) Andes and the Amazon (first edition 1870), Dr. Francis Land Galt (1833 - 1915) early 1870s treatise "Medical Notes on the Upper Amazon" and his subsequent The Indians of Peru included in the Smithsonian's 1877 Annual Report . Frederic Church's Heart of the Andes landscape painting exhibited in New York in 1859 add the visual dimension to the emerging literary dimension and was soon followed by landscapes by George Catlin, James Whistler, Titian Peale and Louis Mignot.
This built upon the rich travel account / natural history appeal begun by Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769 - 1859) and his five year journey through Latin America, 1799 - 1804. Perhaps the most notable contribution of Alexander von Humboldt to the development of Peru was realization of the guano deposits on small islands off the coast of Peru and the commercial fertilizer potential they represented. Guano, the droppings of sea birds and the subsequent build up of hundreds of feet of the stuff over thousands of years, is a fascinating side bar to this study for its political, economic and, yes, archaeological role it would play by a very unlikely suspect, noted art historian George Kubler (1912 - 1996).
Equally as well known as Alexander von Humboldt is the 1863 appointed U.S. Commissioner to Peru Ephraim George Squier (1821 - 1888). His Peru: Incidents and Explorations in the Land of the Incas (1877) is a descriptive blend of travel, archaeological sites and ethnographic observations & notes. His background in newspapers and affiliation with Frank Leslie fleshed out his ability to highlight, promote and sensationalize. The real value of his work is his period photographs (published as lithographs) and descriptions from that time period although they can hardly be taken as gospel.
Then, of course, was that other travel account, The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839 by the grandson of a potter (Wedgewood) and a physician (Darwin) and his later works of 1859 (The Origin of Species) and 1871 (The Descent of Man) which had a profound affected on archaeology, anthropology and our understanding of earth antiquity.
All of this set the stage for the development of archaeology in Peru as archaeology itself was evolving. Add in the emerging role of anthropological collections and museum theories, Peru becomes a birthplace for modern archaeological employment. That is not to say Peru is the birthplace, but rather archaeology as a discipline in Peru did not suffer from decades and centuries of pre-conceived ideas about culture, history and the development of civilization. Or to be blunt, unlike the Middle East, Egypt, Europe and Meso-America where studies had been carried out for a long period of time, Peru was remote enough, rugged enough and distant enough (a lost corner) that no one had really mucked about it until some assemblance of modern archaeology had been conceived and employed.
(True students of the early development of archaeology will want to substitute other letters in the word mucked!)
Peru, of course, did suffer from centuries of European pre-conceived structure and the passage of time. Early anthropological awareness in the 19th century suggested some cultures as being child-like in their development and lacking maturity and complexity. It was common for museum collections to be arranged in an uni-linear fashion, showcasing the rise of technology with cultural achievement, meaning that those using the bow-and-arrow could be expected to have a specific level of accomplishment while possession of the wheel suggested a different level of sophistication. Some of the great museums and anthropological (ethnographic) collections of the world were arranged on a grid system so that the student of culture had only to shuffle forward or back and then side to side in order to gain visual comparison of cultures and their placement in evolutionary time. (see Willey & Sabloff, 1993 publication - 3rd edition)
My history advisor at Beloit College, Nelson Van Valen, would mention Philip Ainsworth Means as an example of the duality between anthropology and history just as he would mention Charles Austin Beard (1874 - 1948) as an example of the duality between history and political science. Although I never had the personal relationship with Van that I had with my anthro advisor, Dan Shea, I did have an enjoyable and rewarding academic relationship with him. He taught me a lot about the discipline of history and how to assess historical works and their authors. In fact, my earlier comments about first tier, second tier and third tier historians is terminology I learned from him. He also introduced me to Kroeber's 1935 work I referenced above and much more than Dan, he tried to provide me with a synthesis between history and archaeology.
Wendell Clark Bennett (1905 - 1953) wrote a tribute to P. A. Means in the American Anthropologist that I believe is very fair and a better assessment than what I could write here. Bennett noted and even praised him for his publications, love of Peru & scholarship and then noted "Means had little interest in the technicalities and details used by the “dirt” archaeologists in their chronological studies" (Bennett, American Anthropologist (1946) Vol. 48, Issue 2, page 235). Means had intended to write a trilogy on Peru, the first being Ancient Civilizations of the Andes (1931) and the second Fall of the Inca Empire and the Spanish Rule in Peru: 1530 - 1780 (1932). Like so many authors, Means became distracted by other projects and larger works as he began the final volume and it was never developed. These two publications on Peru followed his very helpful and insightful Biblioteca Andina, Part One (1928).
Means was a member of Bingham's 1914-1915 Yale Peruvian Expedition (Hiram Bingham III, 1875 - 1956), the first of five journeys into and around Peru with his final trip being in 1933 - 1934. (Bingham had re-discovered Machu Picchu in 1911; again more explorer than archaeologist.) He supervised excavations at Piura and then served as the Director of the National Museum from 1920 to 1921. Bennett notes his approach was synthetic, not descriptive and he never published an excavation or survey report. He goes on to mention Means would supplement his field research in the leading centers of the United States and Europe and that chronology was based on artistic development and universal art trends, not the "dirt" approach stated above. Again, this tribute is very balanced and Bennett states Means realized some of the short-comings of his scholarship and had intended to revise it using archaeological evidence and analysis developed after 1930.
So, Means a historian - absolutely. Means as an archaeologist - only in the 19th century style or "armchair archaeology" sense.
Chroniclers had been present in Peru since the beginning of the historical era (November 16, 1532) but the writings were not well known or accessible until the later half of the 19th century. This was really a matter of re-discovery of what had been published in the 16th and 17th centuries and then largely ignored for many different reasons. Prescott, himself, relied heavily on the known works of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539 - 1616), Pedro Cieza de Leon (c 1520 - 1554) - part one only, Pedro Sarimento de Gamboa (1532 - 1592) and Diego Fernandez (c 1520 - c 1581).
As it was when re-published or in the case of Pedro Cieza de Leon's Volumes 2 through 4 did not see publication until the mid-1800s through the early 1930s, these works suffered from poor translations and sloppy para-phrasing and interpretation by scholars of the time. Perhaps the one stain on his otherwise stellar career and scholarship was John H Rowe's 1945 Absolute Chronology in the Andean Area article in which he dismissed ("diss-ed" to be exact for his rather snotty tone) a number of excellent chroniclers and their penned works as being inferior interpretations (mere book reports) of other earlier works OR suspect in their content and accuracy. Two points must be added to Rowe's criticism; first, the translations he refers to were inferior examples of the true works and, secondly, it was early in his career and perhaps the "young whippersnapper" defense should be employed. (And, third, who I am to criticise John Howland Rowe?)
John Murra, born Isak Lipschitz in Odessa and raised in Bucharest, realized the true potential and scholarship of so many chroniclers and the vast, untapped archival resources available to Andeanists. Craig Morris noted that until Murra, the chroniclers were seen as being definitive in their history of the Inca, but were not valued for the insight they could provide on the earlier cultures of Peru. Murra represents the greatest attribute of Archaeology in Peru and why I contend its short history is so worthy of study; the Archaeology of Peru is a diverse, eclectic field encompassing many disciplines and many individuals.
Why Murra did, what he did, when he did it can be best summarized by the phrase, "his past caught up with him" and as a result he was forced to sit on the sidelines. He spent this time in research repositories and wrote two of his greatest works, The Economic Organization of the Inca State (1956) and Cloth and Its Functions in the Inca State (1962). Thus, after having spent years doing field work in the Andean world, this "research time" was really a supplement to a tremendous knowledge base he had already acquired. He returned to fieldwork in Peru with a three year grant in 1964 during which time my undergraduate advisor Daniel Edward Shea (1941 - 2012) worked with him, Donald Enrique Thompson (1931 - ) and Edward Craig Morris (1939 - 2006) at Huanaco Pampa (Huanaco Viejo as it is more commonly referred to by Andeanist). (Dan Shea was a grad student of Don Thompson at UW-Madison at the time.)
The work at Huanaco was part of Murra's Provincial Inka Life project and included a "staff" of professionals coming and going as needed and as funding would allow. The complete "team" also included Manuel Chavez Ballon (1918- 2000) , Luis Barreda Murillo (1928 - ), Ramiro Matos Mendieta (1937 - ), Gordon Haddon, Rogger Ravines (1942 - ), John Cotter (1911 - 1999), Cesar Fonseca, Peter Jenson (1936 - 2010); the ethnobotantist Robert Bird and two historians, Emilio Mendizabal Losack (1922 - 1979) and Juan Ossio Acuna (1943 - ).
The research at Huanaco Pampa is probably best known by the 1987 publication Huánuco Pampa: An Inca City and Its Hinterland written by Morris and Thompson as well as additional articles penned by them both together as well as solo on Hernando Pizarro's passing through Huanaco in 1533. Murra would also go on to research and write Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino (1975) with its incredible fold out chart of the qolqa contents at Huanaco Viejo. Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco (1915 - ?; historian) and John Hyslop (1945 - 1993; archaeologist) both wrote about the Huanaco Pampa area in reference to the Royal Highway ("Highway of the Sun" in von Hagen speak) as have numerous others.
As part of Craig Morris' 1967 PhD dissertation on Inka warehousing, titled Storage in Tawantinsuyu he took a look at a supposed chicha party Hernando Pizarro and his men had at Huanaco. (Chicha is a beer made from maize.) He would go on to write an article in 1979 titled Maize Beer in the Economics, Politics and Religion of the Inka Empire, published in a book titled Fermented Food Beverages in Nutrition by Gastineau, et al, (editors).
Although I had the first-hand opportunity to taste and enjoy chicha a number of times in Peru (and the best I found was in Cabanaconde!), my fasicination with Morris' chicha referrences is purely academic (an argument used for the consumption of alcohol by generations of undergrads!) Dan Shea's Master thesis was a statistical analysis of the above named chicha party, the ceramic vessels of beer having been smashed to sherds as they leaned against walls. What makes me curious is the added inter-change of Dan Shea and Craig Morris' names in subsequent editions of John Hemming & Edward Ranney's Monuments of the Incas. In the first edition (1982 printing), Dan Shea is credited with being the grad student responsible for the restoration of the kallankas - the entrance structures to the royal lodgings - at the eastern end of the plaza. The second and third editions swap out Dan Shea for Craig Morris and Hemming and Ranney comment on the "admirable job of rebuilding the walls".
I remember well the lecture Dan gave one Friday afternoon in his 300 level course on South American Archaeology about his graduate research at Huanaco Viejo. It was the Spring of 1984 and my participation in Dan's fall sabbatical in Peru was already secure so anything he talked about in reference to in-country work, I was all ears. I know it was a Friday as we always adjourned to a local watering hole on Friday after the 4 PM class for additional academic research and I got into a long discussion with him about statistical analysis and how it was going to be a fundamental part of the work in Colca that Fall.
In my opinion, there was always some friction between Shea and Morris. A few years later, we ran into Morris and Murra at an Andeanist conference and Dan did not introduce me to them, something he always did. Dan had a lot of respect for John Murra. Dan had me buy Murra's Formaciones económicas from a vendor on the streets of Arequipa in September of 1984 and he used the chart on the qolqa contents to teach me the fundamentals of analysis of variance (ANOVA) when we were first in the Colca and before we had enough data sets of our own to do comparisons. (We were using a solar-power TI 35 calculator with a pre-set statistical package for the number crunching; creating the data sets on paper and re-entering them every time we wanted to run an analysis.) During these tutoring sessions, Dan would talk a lot about his work at Huanaco and I heard "his stories" a number of times.
I am not saying there was inappropriate use of intellectual property; I am saying that whatever happened in Huanaco Viejo in the mid-1960s between two grad students has had an effect on subsequent students decades later. Again, my point of this blog and really the hypothesis of my argument is that the personal relationships between professional scholars has had a greater impact on the discipline than most people know or probably would like to admit.
Triangles and Circles
Now think of the context of Murra, Thompson, Morris and Shea as Triangles and Circles showing intellectual kinship and professional affiliation. Donald Enrique Thompson, son of Sir J. Eric S. Thompson (1898 - 1975) of Meso-American archaeology fame, was a 1962 PhD graduate of Harvard University. The younger Thompson had his own affiliations with the Carnegie Institute (separate from his famous father) and their on-going research projects in Central America during the 1950s. E Craig Morris (1939 - 2006), a 1967 PhD graduate of the University of Chicago who became affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in 1975 until his too early passing in 2006. And Murra, a 1956 PhD graduate of University of Chicago (U-C) under the guidance of Donald Collier (1911 - 1995) and who benefited from an earlier friendship with Faye-Cooper Cole (1881 - 1961) during the 1930s.
Collier was student of A L Kroeber (himself a student of Franz Boas and the first PhD awarded from Columbia University in 1901) at Berkeley for his undergraduate degree (1933) and worked with the native Peruvian archaeologist Julio C Tello (1880 - 1947; the first indigenous archaeologist in the Western Hemisphere) in 1937 as a result of his relationship with Kroeber before completing a PhD at University of Chicago in 1954. In the early 1940s he worked with John Murra in Ecuador and then completed survey work with Gordon R Willey (1913 - 2002) as part of the Viru Valley Project (1946).
Willey worked with James Ford in Georgia during the 1930s and again in the Viru Valley. Ford was a master of Seriation and, who after teaching his seriation technique to a young Clifford E Evans (1920 - 1981) became life-long friends with Evans and his wife, Betty Jane Meggers (1921 - 2012). Meggars and Evans, of course, would go on to publish a controversial study in 1962 that followed up on the 1961 publication by Ecuadorian "archaeologist" Victor Emilio Estrada (? - 1961) claiming trans-Pacific migration from the Japanese island of Honshu to the Valdivia complex in Ecuador. Emilio Estrada, as he was commonly known, was a wealthy playboy of Ecuador hired by Thor Hyerdal (1914 - 2002) to assist in the construction of the reed raft Kon-Tiki which sailed from Ecuador to Polynesian Islands in 1947. Ford, Evans and Meggers would also be remembered for their diffusion-ist theories. There is, of course, that 1957 photo of Clifford Evans with Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (1912 - 1994) and his wife Alicia. Reichel-Dolmatoff, an Austrian, emigrated to Colombia in 1939 and eventually founded the anthropology department at the University of Bogota. Recently his ties to Nazi German and role in the SS during the mid-1930s were revealed.
Faye-Cooper Cole was the founder of the anthropology department at U of C and also a student of Franz Boas. Known for his early work in the Philippines, he later became known for his study and writings on the archaeology of Illinois, in particular the Kincaid Mound Group in southern Illinois. Although not directly connected to Andean archaeology, Cole and his students had great influence on archaeology and in particular anthropology as whole during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Leslie Alvin White (1900 - 1975), his student at U-C, went on to do great things at Ann Arbor as well as leave a lasting imprint on the discipline that broke from Boas-ian traditions.
Again, plot out all of the names mentioned here using a flow chart or Triangles and Circles schematic to show relationships and the story of archaeology in Peru takes on a very different appearance.
