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2. The International Relevance of Julio C. Tello
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tello’s international relevance || 55 in 1982 our peruvian colleagues celebrated the centennial of Julio C. Tello’s birth. Even during his lifetime, his contributions were widely appreciated both in his native country and abroad. If we check the two biographical notes published soon after his death (Mejía 1948; Lothrop 1948), we find that Tello’s ideas about the cultural development of Andean societies received early professional attention as well as popular acclaim. Few prophets have enjoyed such echo in their own land. The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Harvard University, where the recently graduated Tello traveled to study in 1909, was, in those days, a research rather than a teaching institution , and a rather autonomous part of Harvard University. Directed by Frederic Ward Putnam, the Peabody Museum was then and, in some ways, still is a neighbor and ally of disciplines like botany and geology. Such courses as were offered took place in the laboratory and were attended by young men initially trained in biology with clinical experience , maybe even fieldwork. The importance highlander Julio C. Tello attributed to the geographic dimension in explaining the achievements of Andean people was thus confirmed in Cambridge. There was another influence that affected the new graduate student. Putnam taught anthropology, but he was also a great organizer of institutions . Putnam not only encouraged anthropology at his own institution but also helped organize museums with a natural history emphasis at Chicago, New York, and Berkeley, and he always made place for The International Relevance of Julio C. Tello An Account of His Rise to Prominence in Peruvian Archaeology john v. murra chapter two 55 56 || biographical essays anthropology. In 1909 there were only three postgraduate departments and around ten professionals in the field. To train researchers in the new discipline, he imported specialists from abroad. In his youth, Putnam had collaborated with Lewis Henry Morgan; now he sponsored the immigration to the United States of researchers like Franz Boas and Ales Hrdlicka, whom he protected and advised during the difficult decades when there was no tradition of graduate work. The organization of natural history that Tello found at Harvard when he arrived strengthened and validated the one he already shared from his medical training at San Marcos University in Lima. There, he had not only helped José Sebastián Barranca collect archaeological materials but also sought out wild and cultivated plants, and vocabularies of Kauki, a language then still spoken in the village of Tupe. In Europe, archaeology, linguistics, and ethnology had each developed as separate inquiries, each part of a different faculty. In contrast, at the Harvard Peabody Museum, Tello saw firsthand a natural history endeavor that considered these different inquiries as facets of a single strategy for better understanding ancient American civilization. The anthropological tasks, apparently so different one from the other, owed their convergence in the Harvard Peabody Museum and in Peru to the fact that they were part of a single strategy for better understanding the pre-Columbian world. In the ceremonies organized on the occasion of the Tello centenary, archaeology received the lion’s share of the participants’ attention. However, we should recall that all of the many journals Tello edited during his lifetime (Inca, Chaski, Wira-Kocha, and so forth) also published articles on folklore, linguistics, and history, and they were written not only by Tello but also by his collaborators. The thesis that Tello defended at Harvard to obtain his master’s in anthropology dealt with the trephination of the skulls from Huarochir í, a topic that connected his medical thesis at Lima with museum experience (fig. 2.1). Tello was made an honorary conservator at the Harvard Peabody Museum, a position he enjoyed for the rest of his life. In his last will and testament, Tello recalled the foreign universities that had welcomed him, and in the Harvard Peabody Museum collections, we still find the skulls that Tello donated. While in Cambridge, Tello met a whole generation of scholars, primarily archaeologists, who would later undertake the study of various regions of the New World, and especially Mesoamericanists. Here I will mention only Samuel K. Lothrop, who accompanied Tello in some of his excavations at Paracas and who, after Tello’s [3.15.147.53] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 06:55 GMT) tello’s international relevance || 57 death in 1947, searched for ways of financing the publication of his unpublished work (Lothrop 1953). Those of us who, in recent years, have attended the...