2024-01-13 IAS Lecture - The Three Burials of Julio César Tello (C. Heaney)

We are very pleased to have Dr. Christopher Heaney (Penn State University) present the public lecture "The Three Burials of Julio César Tello" at the 64th Annual IAS Meeting, Saturday, January 13th at 7:00pm in 145 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley. This is open to the public, so please share!

Abstract: When Julio César (1880-1947) was alive, he was as famous as a Peruvian archaeologist could hope: his studies of Chavín de Huantar and the 429 mummy bundles of Paracas established a new early horizon for Andean civilizations and promoted its legacy of medicine and culture worldwide. One American colleague called him “the greatest archaeologist in the New World.” Another, the Franz “Boas of Peru.” When he died in 1947, the New York Times ran his obituary.

But after his death this self-consciously Indigenous archaeologist experienced an afterlife as layered as the bundles he unwrapped. This presentation uses Tello's archives, contemporary newspaper coverage, and museum records to show how the Peruvian state, his students, and American colleagues buried Tello three times over. Two of those burials, a year apart, were literal—first as a “good Indian” in Peru’s pantheon for statesmen and elites, and as a “father of Andean archaeology” in his final museum’s patio, entombed beneath an Andean monolith yards away from the mummies that, according to his Huarochirí countrymen, may have killed him. His third burial was more metaphorical—by Americanist anthropology’s repackaging of his work in the Smithsonian’s Hall of Physical of Anthropology in 1965. All three made his contributions harder to see: an insistence upon a Peruvian present and past beyond the Incas and Spain, still dependent on Andean and Amazonian art, healing, ancestor-gathering, and care. In tracing these interments by both Peruvian nationalism and Americanist anthropology, this presentation suggests a way of making “America’s First Indigenous Archaeologist” (Burger, 2009) apprehensible to the public.