INTRODUCTION

In order to understand the role played by archaeology in Uruguay in the creation of the narratives of nationhood, I must provide some background about both the indigenous people who populated that land in colonial and pre-contact times and the way in which they were and are perceived by mainstream Criollo society. This will help us understand the ideological framework in which archaeology developed as a discipline and how this influenced the way in which it dealt with the indigenous past.

In the territory of Uruguay, most of the groups encountered by European invaders at the time of contact were either nomadic or very mobile, seasonally occupying different sites. They did not practice agriculture at a significant scale and did not depend on it for their subsistence. Moreover, the Amerindians who populated the land did not live in cities, did not build structures of stone, and did not have a penchant for monumental architecture. Consequently, there are no magnificent ruins constructed by indigenous peoples in the remote past.

The absence of impressive stone ruins is experienced both by Uruguayans in particular and by Western society in general, as an inadequacy. It seems that for an indigenous society to be respected by Europeans it must have built palaces or temples (or other architectural structures) in durable materials such as stone. If there are no such structures, the Amerindians who failed to construct them are regarded as backwards or “primitive”. This is why in Uruguay, unlike some other Latin American countries, there are no indigenous sites that can invite its current, Occidentalized inhabitants, to perceive themselves as members of one nation.

Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell.

Springer, New York, 2008

However, the Uruguayan territory is filled by monumental structures of significant size. Unfortunately, they have not been considered indicative of civilization because they are constructed of earth and clay. These mounds, known as cerritos (see Chapter 14 in this volume), have been consistently minimized and ignored, throughout history.

This, together with the low esteem that Uruguay’s ethnic groups received at the time of contact (and still receive), results in an overwhelming disregard for local indigenous societies of the past. The Charrua, the Guenoa, the Guarani, and others, along with unnamed pre-contact societies, all share the stigma of being perceived as primitive, bothersome, backwards, lacking in ambition and industriousness, and incapable of producing impressive and enduring monuments.

Disparaging images of the Amerindians who populated these lands were systematically produced by different discourses (some of which were disciplinary) that recycled the tropes and images produced by the first explorers and colonizers of the Americas. The discourses were part of their strategy to build a nation conceived as a European society, excluding the participation of any ethnic groups that were not European or that did not conform or adapt to Western social organization.

One of the discourses that contributed to the negative image of Amerindians in Uruguay was literature. In that discursive formation, indigenous peoples were represented as either a nuisance or as an anachronistic obstruction from the past. Typical of this attitude is the acclaimed late Romantic poem Tabare, by Juan Zorrilla de San Martin, known as the poet of the fatherland (“el poeta de la patria”). In the poem, the Charrua are presented as an extinct group whose fate was to disappear because they were incapable of understanding or adapting to the Western, capitalist way of life.

The educational system also played a very important role in creating Uruguayan national narratives throughout the years. For roughly a century it promoted a model for the nation that was conceived by the State as a Europeanized country where Amerindians and the non-Western past were ignored. Consequently, it was foreign to the social and cultural realities of the country (Consens and Bello 1998).

Over the last twenty years, concerned individuals began questioning this long-popular model. Some (myself included) believe this critique has to do with an identity crisis provoked by the dictatorship of 1973 to 1984 (Porcecanski 1992; Perelli 1986; Beisso and Castagnola 1987; Consens and Bello 1998). During those years, the way in which society was organized and the ways in which Uruguayan citizens viewed themselves changed dramatically: a country that imagined itself as a democratic anomaly in a politically turbulent continent saw its own institutional stability shattered by a military coup that lasted more than a decade. There are, of course, other elements that explain the declining appeal of the master narratives of Uruguayan nationhood. One of them is the way in which Uruguayan citizens have reacted to a proliferation of others brought by neoliberal globalization. The traditional isolation of the country has ended and its citizens now have to deal with a cultural diversity that was unknown to them until the immersion of the country in the global era.

I will return to these issues later in this chapter, but let us look first at the role played by some expert knowledge in the production of negative images of the region’s Amerindians. Historiography and archaeology were no exception to the negative way of portraying indigenous peoples. On the contrary, these two disciplines are responsible, in great part, for the most popular representations of the Amerindians of Uruguay. This is true, at least, about knowledge produced until very recently—say, until 1986, the year when a series of excavations of cerritos mounds in eastern Uruguay began.

According to archaeologist Leonel Cabrera, investigation conducted in the late nineteenth century was rather naive (Cabrera 1988). It was mostly directed by aficionados and amateurs without the professional background necessary to perform rigorous research.

For example, the aficionados paid little attention to the stratigraphy of the sites they were excavating and their tendency was to ascribe whatever objects they found to the ethnic groups that populated the territory at the time of contact. According to Cabrera, the attitude of those practitioners was closer to that of the antiquarian (or the collector) than that of the archaeological scholar (Cabrera 1988). They limited themselves to collecting objects of indigenous material culture, which they placed in museums or private collections with little information about the context in which they were found, or chronology that could provide a frame for them. This approach did not change dramatically until 1976, when an undergraduate degree program in anthropology, with specialization in archaeology, was created. Only subsequently did archaeology start to develop systematic methods consistent with international academic standards.