<i>Pas encore classiques</i> : The Making of American Antiquities in the Nineteenth Century

Prehispanic antiquities from the Americas became a recognizable aesthetic, scientific, commercial, and legal category over the long nineteenth century. This article maps out the actors, sites, and material and ideological configurations involved in its creation and development. The first section examines the Iberian antiquarian tradition that brought preconquest artefacts into circulation as epistemic objects from the mid-1700s, against the backdrop of growing interest in material vestiges as objects of investigation. The article then turns to the collecting scenes in the newly independent Spanish American countries, where creole elites, local museums, and foreigners competed for antiquities, driven by their own diverse interests. The third section explores the ways in which, by the mid-1800s, “paper technologies” functioned as heuristic tools for knowing, organizing, and interpreting antiquities, affording ontological density to specific objects and groups of objects and leading to the construction of regimes of knowledge and expertise devoted specifically to them. Finally, the fourth section reconstructs the national and international institutionalization of the preconquest past in the late 1800s and early 1900s—through the consolidation of national museums and the establishment of archaeology and ethnography as scientific disciplines—to consider how these processes entrenched these antiquities’ significance and meaning.