Max Uhle
Friedrich Max Uhle ( born March 25, 1856 in Dresden, † May 11, 1944 in Praise ) is considered the " father of archeology in South America" and " the founder of Andean archeology " as it was in more than 40 years of his life as a researcher in South America in numerous excavations in Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia, a plethora of archaeological finds unearthed and scientific and museological auswertete.
Uhle was originally trained as a philologist and linguist, then was Altamerikanist and performed as such significant contributions to the knowledge of the chronology and the pre-Hispanic cultures and peoples präinkaischer in western South America. He was one of the most important German Altamerikanisten.
As a linguist and ethnologist Museum in Dresden and Berlin
Uhle was born in 1856 as the son of a respected surgeon and Royal Saxon chief staff physician and his wife in Dresden. He passed his Abitur in 1875 in St. Afra in Meissen and studied philology and general linguistics at the universities of Leipzig (1875 and 1877-1880 ) and Göttingen (1876 /77). He put his focus on Eastern and East Asian languages . He received his doctorate in 1880 with Hans Georg Conon of the Gabelentz on pre-classical Chinese texts.
From 1881 to 1888 he worked at the Royal Zoological and Anthropological- Ethnographic Museum in Dresden as a museum anthropologist. It dealt primarily with ethnographic and archaeological objects from distant cultural regions, including Americana. During his tenure he met in 1882 returned from South America scholar and explorer Alfonso Stübel, who had left a part of his collection to the Museum of Ethnology.
In 1888, he moved to the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, which became a center of German American Studies under its founder Adolf Bastian. Uhle was at this time an expert on pre-Columbian cultures of the South American west coast. He is particularly interested in the cultural links and the time quite uncertain chronological sequences of cultures.
With the sinologist Wilhelm pit he was in correspondence.
Research in South America
In 1891 he planned stimulated by Stübel a research trip that should last from 1892 to 1895 originally, but Uhle - with some interruptions - for 41 years held in South America. He explored in 1892 and 1893, northern Argentina, reached 1894 La Paz in Bolivia, where a financial bottleneck prevented the onward journey. Uhle used the time to linguistic study of the Aymara language. Appalled at the condition of the monuments of Tiahuanaco, he demanded the Bolivian government in a letter to their more determined protection.
Finally, he was able to continue his journey after a change of ownership had succeeded to the University of Pennsylvania with the help of Bastian and Zelia Nuttall Americanist. In January 1896 Uhle reached Lima in Peru. After a few trips he began in March with a dig in Pachacamac, a pre-Hispanic pilgrimage 30 km south of Lima. Because of the different excavation layers he was able to provide evidence of a pre-Columbian culture sequence at the end was the Inca culture.
After creation, Uhle held some time in Philadelphia, where he documents his excavations in a 1903 monograph published, lectured and his translator, the German -born Charlotte Grosse, married. In 1902, he also conducted excavations at the San Francisco Bay, and turned it as the first stratigraphic method in the United States, as he dug up shell middens and documented.
Since 1904 he was funded by the University of California at Berkeley another research trip to Trujillo in Peru undertake that should serve nominally to expand the holdings of the building located in the Anthropological Museum in Berkeley. 1905 this contract was not renewed, probably because new Peruvian regulations hindered the export of archaeological finds.
Uhle was now head of the archeology department of the Museo Nacional de Historia in Lima and primarily explored the southern Sierra of Peru. Since 1909, increasing financial problems and intrigue made him change 1912 to Santiago de Chile, where he established the Museo de Antropología y etnologia. In addition to the museum's work, he explored the antiquities especially north of Chile.
These excavations he intensified during temporary unemployment before he was invited in 1919 by the Ecuadorian historian, politician and archaeologist Jacinto Jijón y Caamano to Ecuador. After Jijón y Caamano 1924 due to personal political problems the contract with Uhle announced, the Ecuadorian government established a Department of Ecuadorian archeology at the Universidad Central in Quito, the Uhle had held since 1925. Here he established an archaeological museum and made numerous excavations.
Among other things, Uhle discovered the remains of the Inca Tumipampa in Cuenca and explores pre-Columbian cultures on the Pacific coast and the Ecuadorian Sierra. He emphasized in his scientific work and lectures the influences he had from Central America to the pre-Inca cultures in Ecuador and deepened his already outlined in the 1890s model of South American culture development.
Return to Germany
As Uhle 1933 now 77 -year-old returned to Germany, he was largely depleted. He got a job at the recently founded shortly Ibero -American Institute, and held university lectures. 1935 and 1936, he was honored several times. Even in 1935 and 1939 he traveled to Americanists congresses to Seville and Lima. Due to the Second World War, he was until 1942 to return from Lima to Berlin. Because of the bombing Uhle first moved to Saxony and Silesia, where he died in May 1944 in a sanatorium and nursing institution in praise. The estate is located in Uhle's Ibero -American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage in Berlin.
Honors and Memberships
The German school in Arequipa in Peru is called " Max Uhle ".
Uhle was a member of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory.