The Wagner Brothers. French archaeologist and original myths in early twentieth century Argentina

MARTINEZ, ANA TERESA; TABOADA, CONSTANZA; AUAT, LUIS ALEJANDRO

Archives, Ancestors, Practices. Archaeology in the Light of its History

Berghahn Books

Lugar: New York-Oxford; Año: 2008; p. 261 - 271

This paper shows briefly a wider work about Emilio and Duncan Wagner brothers, archaeologist during the twenties and thirties at an impoverished province of Argentina, far from the country capital. Sons of a french diplomatic, they officiated as ambassadors of latinity in american lands. After they have performed a large fieldwork in Santiago del Estero, in which they exhumed thousands of ceramic pieces of rare beauty according their view, they constructed the idea of a “Chaco-Santiagueña Civilization”, that would had dominated the region in remote times. Starting from a mythological epistemology elaborated around the opposition Civilization-Kultur as an idealization of german-french conflict, they claimed for the archaeology a discourse nearer to art than to science, expressed in a method they called “visual and geographic”, that carried them to link their “civilization” to Schliemann’s Troya and to an imagined “primordial culture” of humanity. Theses claims caused the tacit expulsion of the brothers from argentine archaeological field, but did not prevent to be considered by the elites of ‘santiagueña’ province as wise founders of the science. In times of constrution of identity discourse at Argentina, the “Chaco-Santiagueña Civilization” gave a glorious past to the region and, at the same time, exempted it to link their ancestors to their contemporary indigenous, to which they looked as hinderance and atavism. As in the case of “mount builders” at the Apalaches in the United States, in the Argentine of recent european inmigration the so constructed origin myth settled a historical cut between indigenous past and the present, while it founded to the province the condition of “identity reserve” for the nation.