From the Erasure to the Rewriting of Indigenous Pasts: The Troubled Life of Archaeology in Uruguay

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.