1. Adrien Prévost de Longpérier, Notice des monuments exposés dans la salle des antiquités américaines (Mexique et Pérou), au musée du Louvre (Paris: Impr. de Vinchon, 1850). Longpérier published two versions of the catalogue; the second edition came out in 1852 with a supplement on donations received after 1850. See also Annie Caubet, “Adrien de Longpérier et le musée des antiquités américaines au Louvre,” in Artistes, musées et collections. Un hommage à Antoine Schnapper, ed. Véronique Powell (Paris: PUPS, 2015), 407–16; and Carole Duclot, “Les prémices de l’archéologie mexicaine en France. Un musée américain au Louvre en 1850,” Bulletin monumental 151, no. 1 (1993): 115–19. The following short account of the collection of American antiquities at the Louvre is based on Longpérier’s “avant-propos” to the Notice des monuments, 5–10.

2. In his Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris: F. Schoell, 1810–1813), Alexander von Humboldt compiled a similar collection on paper, bringing together plates depicting Mexican and Andean sites, codices, and sculptures.

3. Prévost de Longpérier, Notice des monuments, 10.

4. Jomard had been proposing the formation of an ethnographic museum, along the lines of taxonomies used by the natural sciences, since the 1830s. See Ernest-Théodore Hamy, Les origines du musée d’Ethnographie. Histoire et documents (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1890), 125–62. The museum that Jomard envisioned did not take shape until 1878, as described below.

5. Longpérier also stated that the teocalli of “Tcholula” was “three meters higher” than the pyramid of Gizeh. Prévost de Longpérier, Notice des monuments, no. 107, pp. 32–33 and no. 738, p. 95.

6. Ibid., 9. For Longpérier’s ambivalence about American antiquities’ relation to classicism, see Elizabeth A. Williams, “Art and Artifact at the Trocadéro: Ars Americana and the Primitivist Revolution,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 146–66, here p. 149; Henrik Karge, “El arte americano antiguo y el canon de la antigüedad clásica. El ‘Nuevo Continente’ en la historiografía del arte de la primera mitad del siglo xix,” in Herencias indígenas, tradiciones europeas y la mirada europea. Actas del Coloquio de la Asociación Carl Justi y del Instituto Cervantes Bremen, Bremen, del 6 al 9 de Abril de 2000, ed. Helga von Kügelgen Kropfinger (Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2002), 315–76, here p. 328.

7. Prévost de Longpérier, Notice des monuments, 12.

8. Stéphane Van Damme, “The Pillar of Metropolitan Greatness: The Long Making of Archaeological Objects in Paris (1711–2001),” History of Science 55, no. 3 (2017): 302–35, here p. 302.

9. For the purposes of this article, the term “American antiquities” refers mostly to artifacts now identified as Andean and Mesoamerican (which, until the mid-twentieth century were grouped together as “Mexican” and included antiquities of Mexica, Zapotec, Mayan, Teotihuacán, and other provenances). The decision to limit the scope of our research was determined by our combined areas of expertise (Mesoamerica and the Andes), but also by the conviction that artifacts associated with North American Amerindian cultures followed very different trajectories from those of Amerindian cultures that came under Spanish rule and later became part of Latin American nation-states. For important work on the collection of North American artifacts, see especially Christian Feest, Premières nations, collections royales. Les Indiens des forêts et des prairies d’Amérique du Nord (Paris: Musée du quai Branly, 2007).

10. While antiquarianism and object-centered engagements with the past have been the subject of important scholarship over the past few decades, Spanish American antiquarianism has received comparatively scant attention. See, for instance, Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology [1993], trans. Ian Kinnes and Gillian Varndell (London: British Museum Press, 1996); Alain Schnapp, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Peter N. Miller, and Tim Murray, eds., World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013). For notable exceptions, see especially José Alcina Franch, Arqueólogos o anticuarios. Historia antigua de la arqueología en la América Española (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 1995); and Irina Podgorny, “The Reliability of the Ruins,” Journal of the Spanish Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2007): 213–33.

11. See, for instance, Rogger Ravines, Los museos del Perú. Breve historia y guía (Lima: Dirección general de museos, Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1989), 79–98 and 167–208; Enrique Florescano, Memoria mexicana (Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica, 1999); Luis Vázquez León, El Leviatán arqueológico. Antropología de una tradición científica en México (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2003). For a masterful summary of national historiographies on Spanish America, see Margarita Díaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

12. As such, this essay seeks to contribute to an ongoing reworking of the historiography of Spanish American antiquities collecting. See, for instance, Natalia Majluf, “Los fabricantes de emblemas. Los símbolos nacionales en la transición republicana. Perú, 1820–1825,” in Visión y símbolos. Del virreinato criollo a la República peruana, ed. Ramón Mujica Pinilla (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 2006), 203–41; Jon Beasley-Murray, “Vilcashuamán: Telling Stories in Ruins,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 212–31; Miruna Achim, From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017); Stefanie Gänger, Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Study of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

13. See, for instance, Peter B. Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 9–10; Gabriela Ramos Cárdenas, “Los símbolos de poder Inca durante el Virreinato,” in Los incas, reyes del Perú, ed. Tom Cummins et al. (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 2005), 43–65; Frank Salomon and Karen Spalding, “Cartas atadas con Quipus. Sebastián Francisco de Melo, María Micaela Chinchano y la represión de la rebelión de Huarochirí de 1750,” in El hombre y los Andes. Homenaje a Franklin Pease G. Y., ed. Javier Flores Espinoza and Rafael Varón Gabai (Lima: Fondo editorial PUCP, 2002), 857–70.

14. Alessandra Russo, “An Artistic Humanity: New Positions on Art and Freedom in the Context of Iberian Expansion, 1500–1600,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65/66 (2014–2015): 352–63, here p. 355; Russo, “Cortés’s Objects and the Idea of New Spain: Inventories as Spatial Narratives,” Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 2 (2011): 229–52; Isabel Yaya, “Wonders of America: The Curiosity Cabinet as a Site of Representation and Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Collections 20 (2008): 173–88, here p. 174. Albrecht Dürer famously evoked the “wonderful things” that speak to the “subtle ingenia of people in foreign lands”: Albrecht Dürer’s Tagebuch der Reise in die Niederlande, ed. Friedrich Leitschuh (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1884), 58.

15. Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 161.

16. There are exceptions starting in the late seventeenth century, when early narratives about an indigenous classical “antiquity” surfaced among members of Mexico’s creole elites like Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700). See, for instance, Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish American Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

17. Natalia Majluf, “De la rebelión al museo. Genealogías y retratos de los incas, 1781–1900,” in Cummins et al., Los incas, reyes del Perú, 253–319.

18. For the “material turn” in antiquarianism, see in particular Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past.

19. Díaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology, 56.

20. Alcina Franch, Arqueólogos o anticuarios.

21. Joanne Pillsbury and Lisa Trever, “The King, the Bishop, and the Creation of an American Antiquity,” Ñawpa Pacha 29 (2008): 191–219; Pablo Macera dall’Orso, “El tiempo del Obispo Martínez Compañón,” in Trujillo del Perú. Baltazar Jaime Martínez Compañón, ed. Pablo Macera dall’Orso, Arturo Jiménez Borja, and Irma Franke (Lima: EDUBANCO, 1997), 13–80. According to Alcina Franch, the first stratigraphic excavation in the Americas was that conducted by Miguel Feijóo de Sosa in the so-called Huaca de Tantalluc between 1763 and 1765, the results of which were published in Martínez de Compañón’s atlas: Alcina Franch, Arqueólogos o anticuarios, 173. For early antiquarian literature in Peru, see, for instance, José H. Unanue, “Idea general de los monumentos del antiguo Perú, e introducción a su estudio,” El Mercurio Peruano 22, no. 1 (1791): 201–208.

22. Miruna Achim, “La literatura anticuaria en la Nueva España,” in Historia de la literatura mexicana, vol. 3, Cambios de reglas, mentalidades y recursos retoricos en la Nueva España del siglo xviii, ed. Nancy Vogeley and Manuel Ramos Medina (Mexico City: Siglo veintiuno editores, 2011), 549–69; Juan Pimentel, “Stars & Stones: Astronomy and Archaeology in the Works of the Mexican Polymath Antonio León y Gama, 1735 –1802,” Itinerario 33, no. 1 (2009): 61–77.

23. Antonio de Ulloa, “Cuestionario para la formación del complete conocimiento de noticias sobre Nueva España e instrucciones sobre el modo de formarlas,” in Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias, siglos xvi–xix, ed. Francisco de Solano and Pilar Ponce (Madrid: CSIC, 1988), 177–83, here pp. 180–81.

24. Carlos Navarrete, Palenque, 1784. El inicio de la aventura arqueológica maya (Mexico City: UNAM, 2000), 17–23. In time, as information started traveling from the field to the centers of accumulation and processing, guidelines would begin to be modified to reflect the findings. See María E. Constantino and Juan Pimentel, “Cómo inventariar el (Nuevo) Mundo. Las instrucciones como instrumentos para observar y coleccionar objetos naturales,” in Piedra, papel y Tijera. Instruments en las ciencias en México, ed. Laura Cházaro, Miruna Achim, and Nnuria Valverde (Mexico City: Universidad autónoma metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, 2018), 65–97, here p. 87.

25. On the lack of discursive coherence in eighteenth-century antiquarianism, see Lucy Peltz and Martin Myrone, “‘Mine Are the Subjects Rejected by the Historian’: Antiquarianism, History and the Making of Modern Culture,” in Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1700–1850, ed. Lucy Peltz and Martin Myrone (1999; repr. New York: Routledge, 2018).

26. See, for instance, Arndt Brendecke, Imperium und Empirie. Funktionen des Wissens in der spanischen Kolonialherrschaft (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009).

27. Van Damme, “The Pillar of Metropolitan Greatness,” 311–12.

28. David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 448; Alcina Franch, Arqueólogos o anticuarios, 191; Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 [1973], trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

29. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 4:158.

30. Francisco Javier Clavijero, Storia antica del Messico, cavata da’ migliori storici spagnuoli e da’ manoscritti e dalle pitture antiche degl’ Indiani … corredata di carte geografiche e di varie figure e dissertazioni sulla terra, sugli animali e sugli abitatori del Messico (Cesena: G. Biasini, 1780–1781).

31. Majluf, “De la rebelión al museo,” 266.

32. Silvia Sebastiani, “Enlightenment America and the Hierarchy of Races: Disputes over the Writing of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–1788),” Annales HSS (English Edition) 67, no. 2 (2012): 217–51.

33. Majluf, “De la rebelión al museo,” 257. See also Brading, The First America.

34. Majluf, “De la rebelión al museo,” 260; Rebecca A. Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 32.

35. Majluf, “Los fabricantes de emblemas,” 232–39. On the making of that divide, see, in particular, Cecilia Méndez G., “Incas Sí, Indios No: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and Its Contemporary Crisis,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 1 (1996): 197–225; Brading, The First America. See also Mark Thurner, “Peruvian Genealogies of History and Nation,” in After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, ed. Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 141–75.

36. In the former Peruvian Viceroyalty, the demise of the Indian elites of Inkan descent in the decades following the suppression of the 1780–1782 rebellion led by Túpac Amaru (1738–1781) furthered the dissociation between “antiquities” and contemporary Indian societies: Majluf, “De la rebelión al museo.” Johannes Fabian has made the similar point that the primitive, the primordial, and the pristine are categories, not objects, of Western thought: Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

37. The tensions expressed here, between creoles—self-proclaimed intellectual heirs of America’s past—and contemporary indigenous peoples cut off from that past, represents an important reconfiguration of the triad between “moderns,” “ancients,” and “savages,” which François Hartog has studied in relation to the European construction of modernity. In the American case, the vestiges of past civilizations, especially as framed through the vestiges of the classical world, participated in the division of contemporary societies into “moderns” and “savages” and would contribute to legitimating new political elites vis-à-vis both Europe and indigenous populations. See François Hartog, Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris: Galaade, 2005).

38. Diego Armus and John Lear, “The Trajectory of Latin American Urban History,” Journal of Urban History 24, no. 3 (1998): 291–301; Maria M. Lopes and Irina Podgorny, “The Shaping of Latin American Museums of Natural History, 1850–1990,” Osiris 15, no. 1 (2000): 108–18, here p. 110.

39. These terms were used in the circular dispatched on April 8, 1826, by Peru’s Ministry of Government and Foreign Affairs to the country’s “prefects, intendants, municipalities, and parish priests,” asking for donations of “the natural rarities in their possession” for the national museum. Lima, Archivo del Museo nacional de arqueología, antropología e historia del Perú, 1261, Lima Z-W-1826, José Serra, “Circular,” April 8, 1826. On Chile, see Daniela Serra Anguita, De la naturaleza a la vitrina: Claudio Gay y el Gabinete de Historia Natural de Santiago (Santiago de Chile: Universitaria, 2022).

40. On the Argentine case, see Irina Podgorny and Maria M. Lopes, El desierto en una vitrina. Museos e historia natural en la Argentina, 1810–1890 (Mexico City: Limusa, 2008), 52. On the Peruvian National Museum in its second, “cabinet” phase, see Stefanie Gänger, “Of Butterflies, Chinese Shoes and Antiquities: A History of Peru’s National Museum, 1826–1881,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 51 (2014): 292–96. On the early history of Mexico’s museum, see Achim, From Idols to Antiquity. On similar changes in the logic of the Chilean National Museum over the nineteenth century, see Patience A. Schell, “Capturing Chile: Santiago’s Museo Nacional During the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2001): 45–65.

41. Miruna Achim, “The Art of the Deal, 1828: How Isidro Icaza Traded Pre-Columbian Antiquities to Henri Baradère for Mounted Birds and Built a National Museum in Mexico City in the Process,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (2011): 78–95, here p. 78.

42. Gänger, “Of Butterflies, Chinese Shoes and Antiquities,” 286; Achim, From Idols to Antiquity. These shortcomings were often brought up by museum directors in an effort to attract more funding: see Lopes and Podgorny, “The Shaping of Latin American Museums,” 111.

43. G. E. Müller, E. G. Squier, and C. J. Thompson, Catalogue des objets formant le musée aztéco-mexicain de feu M. Charles Uhde à Handschuhsheim, près Heidelberg (Paris: Martinet, 1857); Adam T. Sellen, “Fraternal Curiosity: The Camacho Museum, Campeche, Mexico,” in Nature and Antiquities: The Making of Archaeology in the Americas, ed. Philip L. Kohl, Irina Podgorny, and Stefanie Gänger (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 91–109; Stefanie Gänger, “The Many Natures of Antiquities: Ana María Centeno and Her Cabinet of Curiosities, Peru, ca. 1830–1874,” in Kohl, Podgorny, and Gänger, Nature and Antiquities, 110–24; Achim, From Idols to Antiquity, 86.

44. Fernando Sologuren owned 2,234 archaeological specimens, today in Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology. See Adam T. Sellen, “La colección arqueológica del Dr. Fernando Sologuren,” Acervos. Boletín de los archivos y bibliotecas de Oaxaca 29 (2005): 4–15. On Christian Theodor Wilhelm Gretzer, see Corinna Raddatz, Ein Hannoveraner in Lima. Der Sammler praecolumbischer Altertümer Christian Theodor Wilhelm Gretzer (1847–1926). Ausstellungskatalog (Hanover: Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, 1985). On José Mariano Macedo, see Stefanie Gänger, “Conversaciones sobre el pasado. José Mariano Macedo y la arqueología peruana, 1876–1894,” Nuevo mundo mundos nuevos (2014): https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.67124.

45. Gänger, Relics of the Past, 111, 46–47, and 123; Pascal Riviale, “Charles Wiener o el disfraz de una misión lúcida,” Bulletin de l’Institut français d’études andines 32, no. 2 (2003): 539–47.

46. Sellen, “Fraternal Curiosity”; Gänger, Relics of the Past, 68–69.

47. Gänger, “The Many Natures of Antiquities,” 116.

48. See, for example, Armando Guevara Gil, “La contribución de José Lucas Caparó Muñíz a la formación del museo arqueológico de la universidad del Cuzco,” Boletín del Instituto Riva-Agüero 24 (1997): 167–226, here p. 172; Brian S. Bauer, Avances en arqueología andina (Cusco: CBC, 1992), 2–3. For Miguel Garcés’s purchase of antiquities from the “Indians” on his landed estates, see his “Letter to Adolph Bandelier, New York, n.d.,” New York, American Museum of Natural History, Division of Anthropology Archives, Secretary of the Natural History Museum 1896-31.

49. On engineers and antiquarianism, see Podgorny, “The Reliability of the Ruins,” 24–28; Pillsbury and Trever, “The King, the Bishop, and the Creation of an American Antiquity.” On the textile merchant Gretzer and his eye for ancient textiles, see Beatrix Hoffmann, “Posibilidades y limitaciones para la reconstrucción y recontextualización de la colección Gretzer del Museo Etnológico de Berlin,” Baessler-Archiv 55 (2007): 165–96.

50. Achim, From Idols to Antiquity, 40.

51. Gänger, Relics of the Past, 90.

52. See the decree Torre-Tagle and E. B. Monteagudo, “2 de Abril de 1822. Los Monumentos que Quedan de la Antigüedad de Perú …” in Colección de leyes, decretos y ordenes. Publicadas en el Perú desde el año de 1821 hasta 31 de Diciembre de 1859, ed. Juan Oviedo, 16 vols. (Lima: Felipe Bailly, 1861–1872), 9:95, no. 427.

53. In Peru, these laws were followed by stricter ones in 1893 and 1911, the first prohibiting excavations without the permission of the government and the second banning the export of antiquities discovered during legal excavations. In Mexico, the 1827 law was reinforced by others passed in 1897 and 1898. See Earle, The Return of the Native, 138; Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz and Ruth Solís Vicarte, Antecedentes de las leyes sobre monumentos históricos (1536–1910) (Mexico City: INAH, 1988).

54. Margaret M. Miles, “Greek and Roman Art and the Debate About Cultural Property,” in The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture, ed. Clemente Marconi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 499–515, here pp. 502 and 506.

55. William Bullock, for instance, made reference to antiexport legislation—claiming his were the last preconquest artifacts to leave Mexico—in an effort to stir interest in the auction of his collection of Mexican antiquities in London. See the first two chapters of Achim, From Idols to Antiquity, respectively 21–54 and 55–94.

56. Glenn H. Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 2 and 59. For Garcés’s initial unwillingness to sell, see Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Ethnologisches Museum, Sammlung Centeno Pars I B. Litt. A, Alfred Hettner, “Letter to Adolf Bastian, September 25, Copacabana, 1888.” On Garcés’s financial troubles, see Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Ethnologisches Museum, Sammlung Centeno Pars I B. Litt. A, Alfred Hettner, “Letter to Adolf Bastian, Sorata, February 6,” 1889.

57. Achim, From Idols to Antiquity, 92.

58. Miles, “Greek and Roman Art and the Debate About Cultural Property,” 504.

59. New York, American Museum of Natural History, Division of Anthropology Archives, Bandelier 1896-31, Adolph F. Bandelier, “Letter to the Secretary’s Office at the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Winser,” Lima, February 9, 1898.

60. On the acquisition of the Gretzer and Macedo collections, see Beatrix Hoffmann, “Introduction into the History of the Textile Collection at the Ethnological Museum Berlin,” in PreColumbian Textile Conference VII/Jornadas de Textiles PreColombinos VII, ed. Lena Bjerregaard and Ann Peters (Lincoln: Zea Books, 2017), 176–90, here p. 186; Hoffmann, Das Museumsobjekt als Tausch- und Handelsgegenstand. Zum Bedeutungswandel musealer Objekte im Kontext der Veräusserungen aus dem Sammlungsbestand des Museums für Völkerkunde Berlin (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012), 124. For Mexican collections in Berlin, see inventory logs IV-CA 1-6988, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Ethnologisches Museum. On Chile, see Rudolph A. Philippi, “Historia del Museo Nacional de Chile,” Boletín del Museo nacional de historia natural, Chile 1, no. 1 (1908): 3–30, here p. 23.

61. John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán (London: John Murray, 1841), 115–16.

62. On archaeological tourism to Latin America over the late 1800s and early 1900s, see, for instance, Margarita Díaz-Andreu, A History of Archaeological Tourism: Pursuing Leisure and Knowledge from the Eighteenth Century to World War II (New York: Springer, 2019), 57–84.

63. Von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères. On the publication history and reception of the Vues des Cordillères, see Tobias Kraft, Figuren des Wissens bei Alexander von Humboldt. Essai, Tableau und Atlas im amerikanischen Reisewerk (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014).

64. Jean Henri Baradère and Guillermo Dupaix, Antiquités mexicaines. Relation des trois expéditions du capitaine Dupaix, ordonnées en 1805, 1806, et 1807 (Paris: Bureau des Antiquités mexicaines, 1832–1834).

65. Edward King, Lord Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico, 9 vols. (London: R. Havell, 1831–1848). Mexican scholars complained bitterly about the price of this publication and suggested the necessity of a cheaper edition, which never made it into print. See José F. Ramírez, “Carta a Rafael Gondra, 1 de Enero, 1850,” in Libros y exilio. Epistolario de José Fernando Ramírez and Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed. Emma Rivas Mata and Edgar O. Gutiérrez L. (Mexico City: INAH, 2011), 126.

66. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán; Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustariz and Johann Jacob von Tschudi, Antigüedades peruanas (Vienna: Impr. Imperial, 1851). Rivero y Ustariz had intended an earlier, 1841 edition of Antigüedades peruanas, focusing on preconquest sites in the country’s north, as the first of a two-volume set: Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustariz, Antigüedades peruanas. Parte primera (Lima: Imprenta de José Masias, 1841). He authored a second version, covering both north and south, with the Swiss scholar Johann Jacob von Tschudi. It was published in Spanish in 1851 and in an English translation in 1853: Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustariz and Johann J. von Tschudi, Peruvian Antiquities [1851], trans. Francis L. Hawks (New York: Georges P. Putnam & Co., 1853).

67. The expression goes back to Flinders Petrie, who suggested that archaeology’s purpose was to produce “portable antiquities”: plans, words, drawings, and photographs that would connect the objects to their place of origin. See Irina Podgorny, “Portable Antiquities: Transportation, Ruins, and Communications in Nineteenth-Century Archaeology,” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 15, no. 3 (2008): 577–95.

68. For the vicissitudes surrounding the sale of Latour-Allard’s collection, see Marie-France Fauvet-Berthelot, Leonardo López Luján, and Susana Guimarães, “Six personnages en quête d’objets. Histoire de la collection archéologique de la Real Expedición Anticuaria en Nouvelle-Espagne,” Gradhiva 6 (2007): 104–26.

69. Prévost de Longpérier, Notice des monuments, 7.

70. Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). On the “visual turn” in Americanist archaeology, see Joanne Pillsbury, ed., Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas (Dumbarton: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012).

71. Miruna Achim, “Writing Lessons in Antiquarianism: Guillermo Dupaix’s Manuscripts,” Colonial Latin American Review 29, no. 2 (2020): 316–39.

72. Von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères, 4–7.

73. Eduard Seler’s iconographic studies of pre- and postconquest codices produced new taxonomies for the recognition of Mexican deities. See Seler, Inventario de las colecciones arqueológicas del Museo Nacional [1907], ed. Bertina Olmedo and Miruna Achim (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2018), entries 61–81.

74. In the same way, as the historian of Mesoamerican art Esther Pasztory wrote in a seminal article, fakes, which are a special class of replicas, “tell us what we want to see in the authentic.” Pasztory, “Truth in Forgery,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 42 (2002): 159–65, here p. 160.

75. Léonce Angrand, “Rapport,” in Monuments anciens du Mexique et du Yucatan. Palenque, Ococingo et autres ruines de l’ancienne civilisation du Mexique, ed. Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1866), vii–xi, here p. viii.

76. For a history of the joint development of photography and archaeology, see Frederick N. Bohrer, Photography and Archaeology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).

77. Christine Barthe, Le Yucatan est ailleurs. Expéditions photographiques (1857–1886) de Désiré Charnay (Paris/Arles: Musée du quai Branly/Actes Sud, 2007); Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, introduction to Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites, ed. Claire L. Lyons et al. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 2–21.

78. Many of the photographs in the collection are signed “E. G. S. Phot.,” attesting to Ephraim George Squier’s authorship, though a few are from sets sold at local commercial studios at the time of Squier’s stay in Lima—indicating the presence of a market for photographs of specific objects or series of objects. See Keith McElroy, “The History of Photography in Peru in the Nineteenth Century, 1839–1876” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1977), 167; McElroy, “Ephraim George Squier: Photography and the Illustration of Peruvian Antiquities,” History of Photography 10, no. 2 (1986): 99–129, here p. 104.

79. See, for instance, Thomas J. Hutchinson, Two Years in Peru, with Exploration of Its Antiquities, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston Low & Searle, 1873); Désiré Charnay, Les anciennes villes du Nouveau Monde. Voyages d’exploration au Mexique et dans l’Amérique centrale (Paris: Hachette, 1885); Alfred P. Maudslay, Biologia Centrali-Americana, or Contributions to the Knowledge of the Flora and Fauna of Mexico and Central America, 4 vols. (London: R. H. Porter, 1895–1902). See also Natalia Majluf and Luis E. Wuffarden, “El primer siglo de la fotografía. Perú, 1842–1942,” in La recuperación de la memoria. El primer siglo de fotografía: Perú 1842–1942, vol. 1, ed. Natalia Majluf et al. (Lima: Museo de arte de Lima/Fundación Telefónica, 2001), 20–133.

80. Bohrer, Photography and Archaeology, 59–63.

81. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Ethnologisches Museum, Sammlung Macedo Pars I. B. Litt. J, José M. Macedo, “Carta a Adolf Bastian, París, 7 de Enero, 1882.”

82. Ramon Almaraz, Memoria acerca de los terrenos de Metlaltoyuca (Mexico City: Imprenta imperial, 1866), 7.

83. Wilhelm Reiss and Alphons Stübel, Das Todtenfeld von Ancon in Perú, ein Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Kultur und Industrie des Inca-Reiches nach den Ergebnissen eigener Ausgrabungen, 3 vols. (Berlin: A. Asher & Co., 1880–1887). See Joanne Pillsbury, “Finding the Ancient in the Andes: Archaeology and Geology, 1850–1890,” in Kohl, Podgorny, and Gänger, Nature and Antiquities, 47–68, here p. 54.

84. Nicole Zapata-Aubé, “Victorien Pierre Lottin de Laval et la Lottinoplastie,” in Le Caire dessiné et photographié au xix^e siècle, ed. Mercedes Volait (Paris: Picard, 2013), 139–56.

85. Peter Matthews, “Pilot Study of the Maudslay Casts in the British Museum,” FAMSI, 1998, http://www.famsi.org/reports/97082/97082Mathews01.pdf.

86. Charnay, Les anciennes villes du Nouveau Monde, 190–92.

87. Charlotte Schreiter, “Competition, Exchange, Comparison: Nineteenth-Century Cast Museums in Transnational Perspective,” in The Museum Is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums, 1750–1940, ed. Andrea Meyer and Bénédicte Savoy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 31–44.

88. On the heuristic potential of “paper technologies”—lists, series, replicas—see Miruna Achim, “Los empeños de una lista. El Museo Nacional en sus inventarios (1825–1907),” in Seler, Inventario de las colecciones arqueológicas, 11–50; Volker Hess and Andrew Mendelsohn, “Case and Series: Medical Knowledge and Paper Technology, 1600–1900,” History of Science 48 (2010): 287–314.

89. Caubet, “Adrien de Longpérier et le musée des antiquités américaines,” 415.

90. Noémie Étienne makes similar distinctions based on her examination of the Museum of Natural History in New York. See Étienne, Les autres et les ancêtres. Les dioramas de Franz Boas et d’Arthur C. Parker à New York, 1900 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2020).

91. Hamy, Les origines du musée d’Ethnographie, 297.

92. Williams, “Art and Artifact at the Trocadéro,” 155.

93. On Ernest-Théodore Hamy, see, for instance, Jean-Philippe Priotti and José Contel, eds., Ernest Hamy, du Muséum à l’Amérique. Logiques d’une réussite intellectuelle (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018); on Adolf Bastian, see Penny, Objects of Culture; on Franz Boas, see Étienne, Les autres et les ancêtres.

94. On the Trocadéro, see Nélia Dias, Le musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878–1908) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1991); on the German ethnographic museums, including the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, see Penny, Objects of Culture.

95. Guillermo Palacios, “El dragado del cenote sagrado de Chichén Itzá, 1904–ca. 1914,” Historia mexicana 67, no. 2 (2017): 659–740. On Machu Picchu, see Christopher Heaney, Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

96. See, for example, the Fusang theory—which argued for the presence of Buddhist monks in Mexico as builders of civilizations—as debated by various participants in the Congress: note by M. Foucaux, “Le bouddhisme en Amérique,” in Congrès international des américanistes. Compte-rendu de la première session, Nancy, 1875 (Paris/Nancy: Leblond/Maisonneuve, 1875), 131–49; Étienne Logie and Pascal Riviale, “Le Congrès des américanistes de Nancy en 1875. Entre succès et désillusions,” Journal de la Société des américanistes 95, no. 2 (2009): 151–71.

97. José Fernando Ramírez, “Noticias históricas y estadísticas de Durango,” Boletín de la Sociedad mexicana de geografía y estadística 5 (1857): 6–116, here p. 8.

98. See Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Antiquités américaines,” in Désiré Charnay, Cités et ruines américaines. Mitla, Palenqué, Izamal, Chichen-Itza, Uxmal (Paris: Gide, 1863), 1–104.

99. See, for example, Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Uta R. Kresse, “Intellectual Imperialism in the Andes: German Anthropologists and Archaeologists in Peru, 1850–1920” (PhD diss., Temple University, Philadelphia, 2007).

100. Van Damme, “The Pillar of Metropolitan Greatness,” 303.

101. Justo Sierra Méndez, “Letter to Roberto Núñez, Vice-Secretary of Finance,” May 18, 1909, Obras completas XIV. Epistolario y papeles privados (Mexico City: UNAM, 1991), 189–90.

102. Earle, The Return of the Native. For a survey of the debates on nationalism and archaeology, see Díaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology.

103. Achim, From Idols to Antiquity, 230–32.

104. Julio C. Tello and Toribio Mejía Xesspe, Historia de los museos nacionales del Perú, 1822–1946 (Lima: Museo Nacional de Antropología y Arqueología e Instituto y Museo de Arqueología de la Universidad nacional de San Marcos, 1967), 45 (our emphasis). Manuel Pardo decreed the foundation of a Society of Fine Arts (Sociedad de Bellas Artes) on December 17, 1872. The decree is cited in Hutchinson, Two Years in Peru, 2:289–91.

105. Christina Bueno, The Pursuit of Ruins: Archaeology, History, and the Making of Modern Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2016), 76–77.

106. Natalia Majluf, “Nacionalismo e indigenismo en el arte americano,” in Pintura, escultura y fotografía en Iberoamérica, siglo xix y xx, ed. Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales and Ramón Gutiérrez (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997), 247–58, here p. 249.

107. There are numerous studies devoted to the Spanish American participation in the world’s fairs. See, for example, Sven Schuster, “The World’s Fairs as Spaces of Global Knowledge: Latin American Archaeology and Anthropology in the Age of Exhibitions,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (2018): 69–93, here p. 71; Mauricio Trillo Tenorio, Artilugio de la nación moderna. México en las exposiciones universales, 1880–1930 (Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica, 1998); Earle, The Return of the Native.

108. On Mexico, see Bueno, The Pursuit of Ruins, 42. On ethnic nationalism and the Inka in South America, see Mónica Quijada Mauriño, “Los ‘incas arios.’ Historia, lengua y raza en la construcción nacional hispanoamericana del siglo xix,” Historica 20, no. 2 (1996): 243–69. See also Díaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology, 20–22 and 79–80.

109. Bueno, The Pursuit of Ruins, 33; Natalia Majluf and Luis E. Wuffarden, Elena Izcue. El Arte Precolombino en la Vida Moderna (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 1999), 23–24.

110. Williams, “Art and Artifact at the Trocadéro”; Pascal Riviale, Los viajeros franceses en busca del Perú antiguo (1821–1914) (Lima: IFEA, 2000), 336.

111. Both Boas and Seler became associated with the National Museum in Mexico and participated in the foundation of the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology (Escuela internacional de arqueología y etnología americanas), in 1910. See Mechthild Rutsch, Entre el campo y el gabinete (Mexico City: INAH/IIA-UNAM, 2007). Max Uhle, who trained at and was long associated with the Berlin Museum, excavated repeatedly in Peru between 1896 and 1911 and went on to direct Lima’s Museum of National History from 1906 to 1911: Peter Kaulicke, ed., Max Uhle y el Perú antiguo (Lima: Fondo editorial PUCP, 1998).