Toward a Critical History of Peruvian Archaeology

Recorded: April 11, 2025
Event: Whither Global Antiquity? Retrospection and Future Directions
Citation: Tantaleán, Henry. “Toward a Critical History of Peruvian Archaeology,” Global Antiquity: Whither Global Antiquity (April 11, 2025).

by Henry Tantaleán (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos)

Peruvian archaeology is (re)known worldwide due to its extraordinary discoveries. Few attempts have been made, however, to understand the background, genesis and development of its theoretical and methodological practices. Even when such historiographical efforts have been attempted, there is a tendency to reproduce the history only of “great men”, “great treasures,” or the discovery of “lost cities.” In the contemporary world, new methodological but also ethical-political approaches have emerged, which encourage new reflection on how Peruvian archaeology was generated and how it is indebted not only to the history of science but also to other marginalized agents. Among them, we have the “proto-archaeologists”, “local archaeologists”, women, indigenous and Afro-Peruvian communities and other groups made invisible by official, disciplinary, hegemonic and Western histories. In this paper, I review contemporary efforts to complete the history of Peruvian archaeology, propose a new periodization, and outline new paths (and their obstacles) along which the field of Peruvian archaeology should travel in order to generate a more complex, democratic and global perspective.

About the Speaker

Henry Tantaleán is Full Professor at the Professional School of Archaeology of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Peru). He graduated with a degree in Archaeology from the same university and obtained his master’s degree and PhD in Prehistoric Archaeology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. He has been a professor in different Peruvian universities and in Spain, France, Ecuador, Brazil and the USA. He is a research associate at the French Institute of Andean
Studies (IFEA) in Lima, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, and the University of South Florida. Tantaleán currently co-directs the Chicama Archaeological Program on the northern coast of Peru and is founder and principal investigator of the Peruvian Institute of Archaeological Studies (IPEA). He has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the National University of San Marcos and is a corresponding member of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Institute of Andean Studies based at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published numerous scientific articles in different, specialized journals and a dozen books. Tantaleán’s recently published the book, El Pasado Excavado: Una Introducción a la Arqueología Peruana (The Excavated Past: An Introduction to Peruvian Archaeology) (National University of San Marcos, Lima 2023), will have an English translation to be published by Routledge this year.