The Life and Writings of Julio C. Tello: America's First Indigenous Archaeologist | Biography & Historical Research | Perfect for Anthropology Students & Latin American History Enthusiasts
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Product Description
The father of Peruvian archaeology, Julio Tello was the most distinguished Native American scholar ever to focus on archaeology. A Quechua speaker born in a small highland village in 1880, Tello did the impossible: he received a medical degree and convinced the Peruvian government to send him to Harvard and European universities to master archaeology and anthropology. He then returned home to shape modern Peruvian archaeology and the institutions through which it was carried out. Tello’s vision remains unique, and his work has taken on additional interest as contemporary scholars have turned their attention to the relationship among nationalism, ethnicity, and archaeology. Unfortunately, many of his most important works were published in small journals or newspapers in Peru and have not been available even to those with a reading knowledge of Spanish. This volume thus makes available for the first time a broad sampling of Tello’s writings as well as complementary essays that relate these writings to his life and contributions. Essays about Tello set the stage for the subsequent translations. Editor Richard Burger assesses his intellectual legacy, Richard Daggett outlines his remarkable life and career, and John Murra places him in both national and international contexts. Tello’s writings focus on such major discoveries as the Paracas mummies, the trepanation of skulls from Huarochirí, Andean iconography and cosmology, the relation between archaeology and nationhood, archaeological policy and preservation, and the role of science and museums in archaeology. Finally, the bibliography gives the most complete and accurate listing of Tello’s work ever compiled. With its abundance of coups, wars, political dramas, class struggle, racial discrimination, looters, skulls, mummies, landslides, earthquakes, accusations, and counteraccusations, The Life and Writings of Julio C. Tello will become an indispensable reference for Andeanists.
Customer Reviews
Julio Cesar Tello Rojas, was a controversial Peruvian Indian polymath, physician, and Harvard educated archaeologist, who wrote during the first half of the twentieth century. Freda Wolf de Romero makes careful translations that capture the flavor of his thought as the great man realized he was discovering and mapping entire, theretofore unknown, indigenous civilizations. As a publicist and museum conservator for his own discoveries, he wrote many explanatory articles in local Peruvian newspapers and journals. Since his death in 1947, his unfinished writings and notebooks have been edited and published little by little by his collaborators (pp. 352-3). Papers I found most worthwhile analyze the Chavin symbolism, including detailed images from the famous Tello Obelisk and the Yauya Stela; an examination of ancient brain surgery with corresponding obsidian surgical instruments showing purposeful physical operations from which many patients recovered; and a delightful description of a lovely ceramic figurine of ancient Nazca pilgrims. Those on Chavin show Tello was not afraid to change his views. He revised his interpretation of the images carved on the Obelisk from that of a jaguar (pp. 165-234), to those of male and female crocodilians, or caymans, adorned with manioc, hot peppers, and peanuts. He asserted they symbolized agricultural fertility (pp. 158-9), the Pleiades, the moon, the sun, the rain and, of course, human blood (pp. 228-232). The American anthropologists Donald Lathrap and John Rowe closely followed Tello in their decipherments, if not their footnotes, of the Obelisk figures writing in English over a quarter century later. Thus, Tello sometimes jumped to interpretations, or forcefully advocated hypotheses, to construe figures and materials for which he failed to provide sufficient background explanation, analysis, or evidence, to our loss.Editor Richard Burger provides a view of Tello in context and a lightly annotated bibliography, thankfully including the posthumous publications up to 2005. Papers by John Murra and Richard Daggett add to the biographic and intellectual sketch of Tello. Regards the specific readings, it is a severe disappointment that Burger fails to offer any introductions, textual explanatory notes, corrections of fact, or references for further reading.
