February 1, 2021 • 44 mins
Tello is often called some variation of the father of Peruvian archaeology or the first indigenous Peruvian archaeologist. And his work was playing out across a backdrop of constant unrest and conflict, both for his country and his profession.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy P. Wilson. Tracy, I've
been wanting to do an archaeology topic for a while. Yeah, um,
(00:22):
I mean I always like them, but it can be
difficult to pick and choose. But then, through a little
bit of coincidence, Julio Teo came up three different times
in completely random places. For me, I took this as
a sign sure Like one was in relation literally to
the Disney movie The Emperor's New Group, which has an
(00:44):
anniversary this year, which is set in Peru, so that
makes sense. One was like, I was watching a completely
different documentary like as my background stuff while I was
working in the sewing room, and it was about kind
of a more general survey of archaeology and came up
and then I was like looking through things in the
Great Courses, and then there was a whole discussion of
(01:05):
one of Theo's biggest um and most significant projects, and
so I was like, Okay, I get it, Universe, It's time.
Julio Teo, if you've not heard of him, is often
called some variation of the father of proving archaeology or
the first Indigenous proving archaeologists are sometimes the first Indigenous
(01:26):
American archaeologist, and those are well learned names. But as
I started researching him, because I didn't really know a
lot about him, what really struck me was how his
work was playing out across this backdrop of constant unrest
and conflict, both for his country and his profession, because
the two were pretty tightly wound together. And so today
(01:49):
we're going to talk about Teo and his work, but
two level set, we're not going super deep on the
actual archaeology. Um. That is because they are literal books
and books and books about any given sight he worked on,
all of which have their own incredibly complex layers of
nuance and discovery from when Teo worked on them to
now um and parsing them into a show alongside his
(02:12):
life story is really outside the scope of this episode,
because I promise you excavating his story is plenty challenging
on its own. Teo was born on April eleven, eight eight.
His full name was Julio Cesar Teo Rojas and he
was born in Huaruchery, which is a mountainous province in
Peru's Lima region. His father was actually the mayor of
(02:35):
Huara Cherry. We don't really have a whole lot of
specifics about his early life, but we do know that
his family recognized very early on that he was really smart. Yeah,
so smart that when Julio was twelve, his father took
him on horseback to Lima so that he could be
enrolled at the Calio de Lima to begin formal schooling.
(02:56):
This actually took three days to make this journey, and
his father was aunt staying, so it meant that Julio
was going to be living away from his family for
the first time. His father got him set up, he
arranged for a place for him to live, got him
enrolled in school, and then he headed home and for context,
Julio turned thirteen just ten days after he got to
Lima all by himself. This move had actually been initiated
(03:20):
by his aunt Maria, who worked in Lima at the
Presidential Palace as a maid. She had made the case
to Julio's parents that a kid like Julio should really
get a good education, and she convinced them of that
and then started out pretty okay in this arrangement, but
not long after things got started with his education, Julio's
(03:41):
father died, and that was a fairly sudden and unexpected death,
and aside from dealing with the grief of losing a parent,
this meant that Julio also lost his financial support as
a consequence. His aunt Maria did step in to cover
the cost of his education, but she couldn't afford to
also pay for his living expenses. So Julio, who literally
(04:01):
really just a kid still at this time a young
teenager who wanted to stay in Lima and continue his schooling,
did so by supporting himself, and he did all kinds
of odd jobs to pay for his room and board.
So he would work at the train station carrying people's baggage,
he sold papers on the streets, and he even worked
in a doctor's office as an assistant. He was also
(04:23):
hired to deliver mail to prove in scholar and politician
Ricardo Palma, Julio had become friends with Palma's son at school,
and Palma had seen in Julio just a lot of potential,
so much so that he became invested in seeing that
this young man was able to stay afloat. The story
goes that the mail delivery job he hired tail Flour,
(04:45):
had the second purpose. Palma had Julio deliver his mail
every day at noon so that the timing would work
out so that Julio was always offered lunch when he
made the delivery, and that way Palma knew that Julio
was getting a good meal every day. This was not
the only way that Ricardo Palma would prove to be
Julio's benefactor. Just after Teo had enrolled at the University
(05:07):
of San Marcos, the family helped that he had been
receiving was no longer available. Those funds just dried up,
and his family at this point really kind of thought
things were over for him in Lima, and they urged
him to return to Huado Chiri. But it appears that
Palma once again stepped in. Although we should note that
this story is apocryphal. It's not really documented that this
(05:27):
was Palma's doing, but Julio was, according to some accounts,
hired on Palma's insistence to work in the library the
Biblioteca Nacion. Now Ricardo Palma was director at this time,
and he may have actually just created a job for Julio.
But the important thing was that he was able to
continue his education. So whether that is really what enabled
(05:49):
him to stay in Lima and continue his studies is
not clear, but we know he did stay enrolled at
the university and he was working at the Biblioteca. It
also turned out that his early life in the Peruvian
mountains meant that Julio Teo had a skill that was
really valuable to one of his college professors, and that's
that he spoke Quechua. Quechua, which is called runa simi
(06:10):
in the Quechuan language, is sometimes described as the most
spoken indigenous language in the Americas, and it's really a
group of languages. There are several different varieties spoken today
by an estimated eight million people. This is all different
varieties of this language and different geographical locations like Bolivia, Colombia,
(06:30):
and German toa Julio's story in Peru. But all these
different varieties of Quechua all trace their roots back to
the Inca Empire and even before. Yeah, and when when
we were um, you know, handing off our our outlines,
Tracey asked me, would you say he's Ketchuan or Quechua,
and The thing is, he never identified that way, at
(06:51):
least not in his his life as we know it.
That's documented. He always said that he was, and I'm quoting,
a Mountain Indian. This is an interesting thing that I
have seen some theorization on, but not really UM. I
know there are some papers written about it, but I
did not dig into those super deep. That some of
this may have been an effort on his part to
(07:13):
sidesteps some of the racism that would have inherently happened
had he identified that way. Because keep in mind, this
is a kid from a mountain village who is in
school mostly with very, very privileged kids. So if he
was really like doing the identity of yes, I'm Quechua,
it may have caused some strife and even later in
(07:33):
his career that could have been problematic as well. So
for his purposes, he always just said, if someone asked,
that he was a Mountain Indian. Um. But what's interesting
is that his knowledge of Quechua was really, really valuable.
It led one of his professors to ask him to
assist with some of his linguistics work, and this consequently
gave Teo his first taste of field studies. Because he
(07:55):
was traveling to various locations to study specific dialects. In
two Teo entered medical school and he was also promoted
at the Bibliothech and Nacionale, and that promotion was into
a conservator position. One of his projects in this new
job was cataloging the anthropological collection, and while he was
(08:17):
doing this, he came across a book that had been
published in the United States and it included a section
on Trepi nation. He recognized one of the skulls that
was featured in that section as one that his brother
had found years before. The skull had been sent to
Lima as part of a program in which the Lima
(08:38):
government had asked the people of Wyo Chery to gather
these kinds of things. They had not known the purpose
of the program, but now Julio Teo saw that there
was interest in the study of Peru's culture through history
on a global scale. Yeah. He They had no thought
that like, oh, this is going to get chipped off
(08:59):
to the United States's for some researcher there to work with.
They were just doing what they were asked to do.
And he came away from this revelatory discovery wanting to
study cultural history himself, and he also resolved to learn English.
While he had regularly traveled home on school breaks to
visit his family, those vacations took on a completely different purpose.
(09:21):
Once Teo had become interested in studying the skulls of
his ancestral home. He started exploring quadra chity on these
vacations with this focus, and sometimes he visited archaeological sites,
and then he began collecting skulls for his own study
of Trepi Nation in historical context. He gave his first
presentation of his work in this field at the Lima
(09:42):
Geographical Society in May of nineteen o six. Too's timing
and all of this was for too. It is he
became interested in studying Peru's cultural history at the same
time that a lot of the Western world outside of
Peru was also turning its attention to the area. In
nineteen o five, the Historical Institute of Peru had been founded,
(10:04):
and just a few months later, the National Historical Museum
was founded to operate under the Historical Institute's umbrella. Tao's
presentation entrepre Nation took place less than two months before
this new museum opened, and he was still doing his
medical school coursework during all of this, and he did
this kind of creative thing where he had actually found
ways to blend his research in cultural history with his
(10:27):
medical schooling to him they weren't necessarily separate disciplines. His thesis,
for example, was about syphilis in Peru in the area's
ancient history, and as he had prepared this thesis, in
which he had collected skulls to examine them for evidence
of the disease, he had amassed a really significant collection
because by the time he was ready to present he
(10:49):
had gathered during his research roughly fifteen thousands skulls and mummies.
Too's work got a lot of positive attention. Part of
this was because his mentors really championed it. For example,
after he presented his thesis, members of the faculty committee
who heard it suggested to government officials that his skull
and mummy collection should be purchased to establish a pathological
(11:13):
anatomy museum. The government did not follow through with this
plan due to financial limitations. Though Additionally, Ricardo Palma continued
to assist his career trajectory by introducing Julio and his
work to people who were in positions of power and influence. Yeah,
particularly when people came to visit from outside of Peru
(11:33):
and if Ricardo Palma met with them, he would be like, Hey,
do you know about this kid and the work he's doing.
It's quite amazing. And this was a period when, of
course Julio Teo's star was on the rise, but at
the same time the political climate of Peru was extremely volatile.
In the late spring of nineteen o nine, there was
a coup attempt in the ongoing conflict in its aftermath
(11:54):
made Teo very happy to take advantage of a scholarship
that he was awarded that was intended to supped him
in study abroad after he had finished his medical degree.
Harvard offered him free tuition, and so he made the
decision that he would head to Massachusetts for two years
starting in the fall of nineteen o nine. Teo's time
at Harvard was spent studying anthropology with some of the
(12:16):
field's best teachers. He was also tutored in English by
one of those academics, who was Roland Burridge Dixon. Teo
used this time to conduct a study of the South
American Aarrowack language, visited remains of Pueblo villages in Arizona
and also became a member of the American Anthropological Association.
After two years of work, Teo had earned a master's
(12:38):
degree in anthropology from Harvard and that collection of skulls
that the Peruvian government had passed on, at least some
of it ended up at Harvard. Yeah, he mentioned it
later on in a paper that, oh, these are in
this museum, and uh, that's kind of the evidence that
we have that transaction took place. But Teo did not
return home to Peru after his time in Massachusetts. He
(13:01):
was granted permission once again through the influence of his
high powered friends back home, to continue working abroad. His
next stop was England. Through all his life he had
maintained his friendship with the son of Ricardo Palma, who,
confusingly a little bit, was also named Ricardo Palma, and
the two young men had been part of a lot
of the same study efforts and projects, And when Teo
(13:23):
went to London, the younger Ricardo Palma, who had also
received a scholarship for study abroad, traveled with him. In London, too,
presented a paper at the eighteenth International Congress of Americanists.
It's an academic conference that's focused on the study of
the America's that started in eighteen seventy five and continues today.
That presentation, which once again covered the subject of trepidation
(13:47):
and the skulls from dig sites in Peru, was given
on May twenty eight of nineteen twelve, and the time
that he spent in London leading up to it he
worked with English anthropologists he took classes from and with
them shared his knowledge of South America. After London, Teo
continued his travels around Europe, stopping first at the University
(14:07):
of Berlin and then expanding his studies at the University
of Paris. The end of nineteen twelve was a really
exciting time for Julio Teo. He returned to London once again,
this time for his wedding. He had met a student
of London University during his time there named Olive Mabel Cheeseman,
and on November twentieth, nineteen twelve, the two were married.
(14:29):
Julio also established a new relationship with Harvard During the
final months of nineteen twelve, he would be paid a
stipend to continue the work he had been doing before
leaving Peru, but this time he would be sending specimens
that he found back to Harvard for the collection of
the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. So nineteen thirteen
(14:50):
started with a new wife and a new direction for
his work, and we'll talk about Julio Teo's returned to
his home country and how his career blossomed from there.
But first we will as for a sponsor break. In
the time that Teo had been away from Peru, a
(15:11):
lot had happened that would impact his field of work.
For one, the Museo de Historia Nacionale had closed after
its head, who was German, was dismissed in a scandal
that accused him of sending artifacts to museums in other
countries for personal gain. The museum was eventually reopened, this
time with a historian rather than an archaeologist as its director.
(15:33):
This will become a thing as julio story plays out. Additionally,
Ricardo Palma had retired from his job at the BiblioTech
and Naco now, so one of Teo's strongest advocates just
did not have the same poll that he had once had.
And as we mentioned earlier, Peru was still in the
(15:53):
period of political upheaval. Teo, though immediately got to work
once he arrived back in his home country. He arrived
there in January of nineteen and he traveled with an
existing expedition to cover a lot of ground, initially visiting
multiple archaeological sites along the way and writing up a
report of this endeavor in March of that year. And
he also used this report to make the case, uh
(16:16):
and this report was published in the papers in Lima
for the public that anthropological science should be used to
examine and interpret all archaeological finds. This was sort of
a way for Teo to establish his own unique expertise
in the area. There was no one else in Peru
with the level of experience or education that he had
an anthropology, and so he was sort of saying, Hey,
(16:39):
if we really want to understand our historical record, we
should make an official project of that nature and then
give that project to an expert. And that expert is me.
I'm sorry that got me tickled. I mean, he really
was the only person to at this level of schooling,
certainly by this point in Peru and really worldwide. I
(16:59):
would say he had more education in anthropology at that
point than even most other anthropologists. So he followed that
publication up with direct action in the matter. Less than
two weeks after his article was published, he reached out
to Guiermo billing Hurst, who had become Peru's president in
September of nineteen twelve. His proposal was that the Museum
(17:20):
to Historica Nascio Now should establish an anthropology section and
that he should be the one to run it. Billing
Hurst degree that was in June of nine, but by
November of nineteen thirteen, the museum was shut down, and
this was due to feuding between Teo, who wanted to
re establish the museum with a focus on archaeology and anthropology,
(17:42):
and museum director Emilio Gutierrez, who wanted to focus on
history as the museum's primary mission. This is one of
those moments where I'm like, you kind of all want
the same thing, just from different angles. It's really a
much of a fight. But it really was that much
of a fight, as you'll see. In December, Julioteo was
a director of a newly established museum by the Peruvian
(18:03):
government that was the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. So
the National History Museum opened, which you know we've sometimes
referred to by its its Spanish name Museo to historian.
As you know, Gautierras was still running that museum, so
they kind of had been separated, like given their own
projects at this point. But even so these two adversaries
were not really free of one another because both of
(18:25):
those entities were still housed in the same building. I
feel like they put tape down the floor. It's how
it feels like. You'd work on your part, you work
on your boys play nice. So in addition to all
this sort of infighting at the museum, Peru's governmental conflict
continued during this time, and in early nine fourteen, President
(18:49):
Gammo Billinghurst was ousted in a coup and replaced as
head of government by Colonel Oscar Binavits that in and
of itself put to in kind of an unstable position.
He had been appointed by the ousted president, and the
new government did not seem particularly interested in the museum,
archaeology or anthropology at all. To make matters worse, Teo
(19:12):
then got into a public debate in the press about
whether history or the science of anthropology was the better
background from which to study archaeological finds. When Teo's argument
was challenged as being disrespectful to the work of innumerable
Peruvian scholars on the subject. He really doubled down and
talked about his education outside the country. That only hurt
(19:35):
his case. The historian that Teo had been having a
back and forth in the press with was Harassio or Tiaga,
and he very quickly seized on Too's work outside of
Peru to characterize him as out of touch with Peruvian
scholarship and snooty and not really as well educated as
who believed himself to be. Teo's reputation suffered significantly, and
(19:59):
by the end of mar to nineteen fifteen he had
resigned from his position in the museum. Tao was still
doing work with Harvard during this time, so once he
had closed out his duties at the museum and secured
some additional funding, he planned an expedition south to Nasca
in search of artifacts that he could send back to Cambridge.
Teo visited a number of spots along the way, kind
(20:21):
of taking an indirect route to Nasca, and while he
may have intended this to be sort of a getaway
from the stresses of his conflicts in the capital city
of Lima, he just ended up with more problems. As
he had been working at some dig sites in Nasca.
Questions had arisen about whether Julio Teo had the permits
to do so, and the possibility that Teo's excavations were
(20:44):
happening without proper paperwork really started to hit the press.
It turned out that he had not gotten the proper permits,
and Too's expedition was cut short. By the end of July,
he was back in Lima. The government ruled that he
could bring his excavated artific acts back to the capital
for exhibition, but they could not be shipped out of
the country. It seems that Teo did try to make
(21:06):
arrangements to send some of the pieces to Harvard, but
his primary contact at the Peabody Museum died before those
arrangements could be finalized. Yeah, this is a time when,
as we discussed a little while ago, there was more
and more interest from outside of Peru happening regarding their
dig sites. There was also a lot of grave robbing happening,
and they were trying to crack down on it. So
(21:28):
even though people knew Teo, they were like, you don't
have a permit to do this. We're scared, You're sending
our stuff away, which he was. He was. Yeah. Uh.
This all unsurprisingly continued to hurt Teo's reputation, which was
already kind of limping along. But he was by no
means of pariah, we should say. He had plenty of
(21:49):
supporters remaining, and he was, as a consequence, able to
get his proper permits arranged. And by October of nineteen
fifteen he was back in Nasca, returning to the excavations
that he had started early year. In the year, and
he was also again this reflects that he was not
really like in the bad guys status you might think.
He was sent by the government to the nineteenth International
(22:10):
Congress of Americanists in Washington, d C. In December of
that year, and while he was there he presented a
paper about Nasca burial practices. If you recall our episode
on the Nasca lines, that particular aspect of the area's
history wouldn't be identified until the nineteen twenties, so more
than a decade after he was giving this paper. And
while he was in the United States, Julio also arranged
(22:32):
to take part in an expedition in northern Peru that
was being sponsored by Harvard The late nineteen teens also
saw Julioteo make a move into politics. In January nineteen seventeen,
he announced his run for a seat in the Chamber
of Deputies, representing Huaro Cherry. The Chamber of Deputies is
the lower house of the previewing Congress. There By, cameral
(22:54):
legislature is similar to that of the US, with a
Senate as the upper house. He won the seat, although
the election was contested, but when the dust had settled
he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies and
he was immediately back in his old conflict with his
former colleague Emilio Gutierrez. This is kind of a savvy
move on his part, because as a politician, Teo immediately
(23:19):
proposed legislation that would reorganize Peru's National History Museum and
put the National University of San Marcos in charge of it.
Because he was also working with the university, this would
have essentially put Teo in charge of it and in
charge of his rival Gutierrez, who we should note had
plenty of his own supporters in the Chamber to argue
(23:39):
about this. This ended up becoming a fairly embarrassing series
of snipes at one another, where Gutierrez claimed that when
Teo resigned from the museum, they found a lot of
suspicious discrepancies in his records. Teo countered this by suggesting
that some of the shipments that Gutierrez was making from
the museum were also suspicious. Were actually investigations initiated through
(24:02):
these allegations, but they turned up nothing. Teo moved on
to other matters, but he would, however, take up this
cause again during his political career. He kind of would
periodically introduce this idea of like, hey, the university should
be running that. One of the projects to you next
focused on was an excavation at the Warm Valley. He
asked the rector of the National University of San Marcos
(24:24):
for funding, and while the university was interested, there was
a problem Too's affiliation with the school was through the
College of Medicine. Then, to be part of an archaeological
expedition that was funded by the school, he needed to
be affiliated with the College of Science or the College
of Letters. So Teo quickly remedied this whole situation by
presenting a doctoral thesis at the College of Letters on
(24:47):
the use of mummies and ancient art. His expedition plan
was soon accepted and funded, and he started nineteen nineteen
by traveling with a group of students to the Warm Valley.
The various pieces that the group excavated helps see the
university's Museum of Archaeology, which was founded in the autumn
of that same year. Also in nineteen nineteen, there was
(25:09):
more political upheaval in Peru. Augusta Bernardino Legiacedo, who had
been exiled after he was overthrown in nineteen o nine,
returned to the country and he was elected president. That's
a very short version. There was, of course, a lot
of conflict over it. Uh Teo was also reelected to
his seat in the Chamber of Deputies, and once again
(25:30):
those results were contested before his election was certified. As
nineteen nineteen drew to a close, Teo was instrumental in
setting up a new museum with Victor Larco Herrera. This
is actually different from the Rafael Larco Herrera Archaeological Museum
that was founded several years later. Rafael and Victor were brothers,
(25:52):
and Rafael's son, Rafael Larco Hoyle, established the museum named
after his father with advice from Victor. So if you
were confused by the very similar names. That's what's up
with that. But the relationship between Teo and Victor Laco
Herrera soured really quickly when Victor destroyed a set of
(26:13):
tracings during an argument. Yeah, that would end it for
an argument, y, I would think. Teo promptly resigned as
museum director and he went back to focusing exclusively on
his work at the university, although that too was fraught
due to conflict with President Ligia. Because of political protests
on campus, the president had fired most of the faculty
(26:34):
and shut the school down. It eventually reopened, but there
were ongoing issues with the government for several years. But
though Teo seemed to be perpetually embroiled in drama, he
was also producing some really important work during this time
in his life. He was the first in his field
to argue that Peruvian culture was not simply the result
(26:56):
of an existing culture relocating to the area, but that
it had developed on its own. It was also during
this time that he founded the Peruvian Association for the
Progress of Science, and he used that platform to argue
for university reform. He wanted museums to have better organization
and guidelines for doing so, and He also felt that
(27:17):
the education system of the country was falling behind and
not prioritizing science, and that it needed also to be
offering education to everyone, not just society's elite families. The
attention that this movement got once again ignited the feud
between Teo and Emilio Gutierrez, who felt that he had
been personally attacked when his museum was used by Teo
(27:40):
as a problematic example. In retaliation, Teo made a government
issue out of the book that Gautierrez had written to
defend himself. That book had been produced with government funding,
with the directive that it was supposed to be about
the history of the National History Museum and not an
opportunity to grind an axe against Teo. In this instance,
(28:01):
it was Gautier's reputation that really really suffered. The nineteen
twenties continued to be busy for Julio too. He started
an archaeology magazine through the university called Inca, and also
started actively teaching archaeology, something that just hadn't been possible before,
given that prior to him, the archaeologists in Peru were
(28:23):
foreigners who were there for expeditions and not for teaching jobs. Yeah,
this really lays like the bedrock foundation for archaeologists in
Peru because they just weren't coming from the country before this.
And he also worked to really trace the histories and
provenance of various objects that have been discovered in Peru,
some of which had left the country, and his work
(28:45):
in this area was a bit controversial because it often
meant that he was having meetings with people that had
stolen items or had robbed graves and then sold pieces
to private collectors. Obviously that is problematic in a variety
of ways. It Teo really believed that learning the providence
and getting this information was important to Peruvian history, so
(29:07):
to him, it was worthwhile to get that information however
he could. In ur Teo became director of the Peruvian
Museum of Archaeology. This was actually a rename of the
museum that Victor Larco Herrera had once hired Teo to run.
Larco had to sell it and under the new management,
Teo was reinstated. He had also just gotten a position
(29:30):
of professor of anthropology at the National University of San
Marco and the College of Science, So this is a
really good time in his career, and it was also
during this time that Taribo Mahia Cespy became a student
of Teos And if that name is familiar, he was
the first person to study the Nascal lines in depth,
and he worked with Teo for years. Yeah, reading through
(29:54):
like Teo's work in in his career. After this, it's
like constantly like and then he sent Mehia here, and
then he sent Mehia here, like he really relied on
him for a lot. Before we talk about one of
the most famous fines that's associated with Julio Tejo, we
will pause here and have a little sponsor break. So,
(30:21):
despite some of the bumpy moments earlier on, Teo's workload
and opportunities really exploded in the mid nineteen twenties. He
headed up numerous expeditions and excavations. He further expanded the
university's offerings in archaeology and the anthropology, and he worked
to inventory the university Museum's collections more thoroughly. He and
(30:41):
his team also worked on the famed Paracas mummy bundles.
It was a Teo team that found them first, and
over time, various archaeological teams would unearth hundreds of mummy
bundles from Paracas including additional fines by Teo's teams. If
you've never seen photos or diagrams of the mummy bundles,
they are indeed fascinating. They date back to the Paracas culture,
(31:04):
which I think came up on an earth to this
most recent time that sounds correct, that existed from roughly
eight hundred BC to one thousand C. And they're called
bundles because that's exactly what they are. The body inside
of each is set inside of a basket in the
fetal position, with various artifacts around them, and then there
(31:25):
are layers of textiles that are wrapped around them, from
very finely embroidered pieces that are the closest to the
body to fairly rough plain cloth as the exterior. One
of the interesting aspects of Tero's treatments of the Paracas
mummy bundles is the way he characterized and treated them.
He spoke of them as ancestors, and when the pieces
(31:48):
were prepared for display, they were each represented in a
very humanized way. He always wanted it to be clear
that these were people who lived rather than relics or artifacts,
and these mummies were a revelation to the world. One
of the cool things about them. If you ever go looking,
is it because of the climate. The mummification of preservation
(32:09):
is amazing. Um. Some of them literally just looked like
a person that curled up and went to sleep, and
there's very little degrading of the body. Several of them
were shipped to various museums. They were kind of called
ambassadors of goodwill, and Teo was able to use the
ongoing excavation of them as a means to ensure funding
for the university museum program because they got a lot
(32:31):
of attention. So at this point everything in his life
seemed to be going pretty ideally. However, Teo had over
the years continued to have conflicts with various people over
political and archaeological ideologies, and in nineteen thirty things really
reached a crescendo. Starting in August of that year, several
(32:51):
articles were printed in the periodical Libertad. Libertad blasted the
information that Teo had aligned briefly with President Augusto Lugia,
and this had, according to Teo, been a matter of
the two men just agreeing on the importance of rights
for Peru's indigenous population. But Lugia was deeply unpopular by
(33:13):
the points and was ousted as Libertide was outing all
of his allies, and the allegations against Teo regarding his
association with Lagia grew with every subsequent article. He was
accused of theft, of having sold museum artifacts, of helping
Lagia build a fortune through this illicit work, of having
(33:35):
built a fortune for himself this way, and of illegal
exportation of important artifacts to the United States. His previous
run ins with both Larco and Gutierrez were also revisited.
He had continued to have some conflicts with Larco as well,
uh and he was accused of using his museum staff
to plot with Lagia against detractors. On October ninth, Talo
(33:58):
lost his job as museum director as a consequence of
all this bad press and his association with the overthrown Lugia,
although he did remain director of the National Institute of
Anthropology at the university. The entire museum staff resigned in solidarity.
Luis Miguel Sanchez Seto was the new president of Peru
(34:18):
at this point, and under his government, the national museum
system was overhauled, combining many of the disparate entities into
one called the Museo Nacional and under the re ord
because Teo had retained his position as institute director, he
became director of the Institute of Anthropological Investigation. In May
of nineteen thirty two, the Parakha site was looted by Hwakro's,
(34:42):
which are tomb raiders. Then the National University of San
Marcos was closed because of ongoing civil unrest in the capital.
Sanchez was assassinated in April thirtieth, nineteen thirty three, and
the university stayed closed for three years. During that time,
Teo was cut off from university resources and from his
own work. During the years of the National University's closure,
(35:05):
he taught at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Yeah,
the early nineteen thirties were just a mess for him.
Um that looting was really problematic. He spoke out about
it a lot, and it became kind of a issue
that he tried to address on and on and on.
Uh Teo then asked for permission to do archaeological research
(35:28):
at Chevin de Jantar, one of the most important sites
in Peru that sits in a high valley in the Andes.
At the time, Teo thought that it was the civilization
from which South American culture had spread, but we know
today that there are cultural sites that pre date Chevin
Julio Teo spent the mid nineteen thirties conducting research at
this site and others around Peru. He had been there before,
(35:49):
but he had some very focused time there during this period,
and then he toured the United States in the summer
of nineteen thirty six, giving lectures on archaeology and Peru
and visiting music a ums to drum up financial support
for his work. The Institute of Andian Research was formed
later that year in New York by Teo alongside a
number of US based scholars, and it was formally established
(36:12):
the following year. The American Museum of Natural History let
them occupy office space free of charge, and the staff
of the Institute of Indian Research worked on a volunteer
basis to secure grants and funding for various research and projects,
many of which were projects that Teo was undertaking. In
seven Back in Peru, Teo made the acquaintance of Nelson Rockefeller,
(36:34):
who was traveling on business, and the story goes that
when he saw the sad underfunded state of things at
the Institute for anthropological investigation. The wealthy American immediately offered
to help fund their efforts. This resulted in a deal
where five of the Paracas mummy bundles were to be
sent to New York, specifically to the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. Ultimately, though,
(36:58):
they ended up at the American Museum of Natural History
because the met did not have anyone on staff with
the expertise that was needed for their preservation and their
ongoing maintenance. In ninety nine, the second session of the
twenty seven International Congress of Americanists took place in Lima,
and in addition to presenting a paper, Teo also served
(37:19):
as host to the delegates, taking them out to various
sites in the area both during and after the convention.
And this entire event went really well and it reinvigorated
the archaeology community of Peru, and so the decision was
made to form a new entity, the Peruvian Archaeology Association,
which would oversee all archaeological projects in Peru. In nineteen
(37:41):
forty one, the historic importance of the Chevine de Juantar
site led to its being declared state property, and this
was controversial. Teo made the case that Chavine and other
historically and culturally significant sites should be established as protected
national parks modeled after the ones he had seen while
traveling in the US, and now a lot of them
(38:02):
are parks. Uh. Chauvin incidentally as a UNESCO World Heritage
Site now as well. Throughout the nineteen forties, Teo remained
busy directing and commissioning excavations and serving as an ambassador
of Peruvian archaeology on the international stage. He had by
this point kind of uh you know, shuffled off the
(38:22):
shadow of the various controversies he had been embroiled in
and had become the nation's premier expert on its archaeological history,
while always maintaining that he was a mountain Indian, something
that at that point he was kind of using to
separate himself from the rest of the academic world. Teo
was diagnosed with an illness in July of nineteen forty six.
(38:42):
Don't have a lot of detail on it, but he
traveled to the US two months later for treatment. He
didn't really improve, but he returned to Lima to work
in November anyway, and then he died six months later
on June third, ninety seven. Yeah, at least in the
English language in formation I had access to. They never
name what this issue was, so we're not sure it
(39:05):
could be any number of things, but but we know
that he had basically just a really rough illness at
the end of his life. And Teo's death was reported
in a lot of papers across the United States, which
speaks to how well known he was at the time,
although these mentions were generally brief, and I looked at
a whole lot of different papers from around the country
(39:26):
and they all ran a pretty close replica or some
slight variation of quote. Julio Teo, sixty seven, archaeologist, anthropologist,
and author who was an authority on prehistoric Peru, died today,
but at home in Peru. The nation really mourned. A
year after his death, his remains were moved to a
mausoleum at the National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. Today,
(39:49):
there is a museum named in his honor on the
Paractice Peninsula at the entrance to the Practice National Reserve.
And I wanted to close out with an excerpt from
one of Teo's own writings, which he included at the
beginning of a paper about the art of the Chevine culture,
and he wrote quote, Chevine art, characterized by its perfection
(40:10):
of lines, its richness of fantasy, the symbolism of its representations,
the proportion and harmony of the whole, and the material used,
which is almost always hardstone, is the richest historical source
and the best evidence of the high degree of civilization
reached by the Peruvian race. The significance of its sculptural
and pictorial works, and the mastery with which they were
(40:32):
executed all lead us to suppose that the culture of Chevine,
illustrated in its art, is the product of a long
process of gestation and elaboration which must have been intimately
bound to the material, emotive, and intellectual history of man,
perhaps since his appearance on this part of the continent.
It was such a good summation of the way he
(40:53):
portrayed ancient Peruvian culture as being this really vital, rich thing,
which was very different from how it had been characterized before,
as like no, people moved here and they brought their stuff.
He's like, no, no, they were developing like right along
with everything else, which is really cool. Um that is
Julio Teo. It's interesting people still talk about him and
his some of his controversies today, obviously because he was
(41:16):
so tied up in the ongoing shifting politics, which were
very dramatic in peru Um. It can be problematic in
some ways, but I always kind of perceived him as
someone that was just trying to get his archaeology done,
however he had to do it. We want to note
as we wrapped this episode that Harvard University, which was,
(41:39):
as you've heard, a significant part of Teo story and
was the recipient of some of the skulls and mummies
he collected, issued a statement after we recorded this one,
but before we published, about the human remains in their collection.
Harvard estimates that between the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology and the Warren Anatomical Museum UM, there are remains
(42:01):
of more than twenty two thousand individuals in the school's
museum collections, many of which have no associated biographical information.
To address this situation, Harvard has created a Steering Committee
on Human Remains in the Collection, which will complete quote,
a comprehensive survey of human remains present across all university
(42:22):
museum collections, as well as their use in current teaching
and research. That Steering committee will also develop quote a
university wide policy on the collection, display, and ethical stewardship
of human remains in the university's museum collections, and will
propose quote principles and practices that address research, community consultation, memorialization,
(42:46):
possible repatriation, burial or reburial, and other care considerations. Do
you have some listener mail for us? I do? I do.
This is from our listener Mark Um, who wrote to
us after our discussion of waffles. Your Hi, Holly and Dracy.
My partner Emily and I are longtime enjoyers to the podcast.
It's our go to when we have long drives together.
(43:08):
We were recently inspired by your episode on the history
of waffles, where you mentioned that they were served alongside stews.
As it happens, Emily had just come across a cornmeal
scallion waffle recipe recently and we thought it paired excellently
with a vegetarian chili recipe. We thought you might enjoy
hearing about it, so I've attached a picture. Uh. And
Mark also makes a suggestion for a possible episode, which
(43:31):
may or may not happen, but he mentioned that it
it might be uh, you know, uh, difficult topics. So
he also sent pictures of their adorable dog, Lily, so
that it would comfort us as we do any research
on unfortunate things. That dog is so cute. I would
give it power of Attorney. Mark. Thank you so much
(43:51):
for sharing this with us, and also that must be
looks amazing. They also have these beautiful slices of fresh
avocado on top. I love us, I love a savory waffle.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History, and if you would like to subscribe to
the podcast and haven't yet, I promise it's super easy,
(44:13):
you can do that on the I heart radio app,
at Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy P. Wilson. Tracy, I've
been wanting to do an archaeology topic for a while. Yeah, um,
(00:22):
I mean I always like them, but it can be
difficult to pick and choose. But then, through a little
bit of coincidence, Julio Teo came up three different times
in completely random places. For me, I took this as
a sign sure Like one was in relation literally to
the Disney movie The Emperor's New Group, which has an
(00:44):
anniversary this year, which is set in Peru, so that
makes sense. One was like, I was watching a completely
different documentary like as my background stuff while I was
working in the sewing room, and it was about kind
of a more general survey of archaeology and came up
and then I was like looking through things in the
Great Courses, and then there was a whole discussion of
(01:05):
one of Theo's biggest um and most significant projects, and
so I was like, Okay, I get it, Universe, It's time.
Julio Teo, if you've not heard of him, is often
called some variation of the father of proving archaeology or
the first Indigenous proving archaeologists are sometimes the first Indigenous
(01:26):
American archaeologist, and those are well learned names. But as
I started researching him, because I didn't really know a
lot about him, what really struck me was how his
work was playing out across this backdrop of constant unrest
and conflict, both for his country and his profession, because
the two were pretty tightly wound together. And so today
(01:49):
we're going to talk about Teo and his work, but
two level set, we're not going super deep on the
actual archaeology. Um. That is because they are literal books
and books and books about any given sight he worked on,
all of which have their own incredibly complex layers of
nuance and discovery from when Teo worked on them to
now um and parsing them into a show alongside his
(02:12):
life story is really outside the scope of this episode,
because I promise you excavating his story is plenty challenging
on its own. Teo was born on April eleven, eight eight.
His full name was Julio Cesar Teo Rojas and he
was born in Huaruchery, which is a mountainous province in
Peru's Lima region. His father was actually the mayor of
(02:35):
Huara Cherry. We don't really have a whole lot of
specifics about his early life, but we do know that
his family recognized very early on that he was really smart. Yeah,
so smart that when Julio was twelve, his father took
him on horseback to Lima so that he could be
enrolled at the Calio de Lima to begin formal schooling.
(02:56):
This actually took three days to make this journey, and
his father was aunt staying, so it meant that Julio
was going to be living away from his family for
the first time. His father got him set up, he
arranged for a place for him to live, got him
enrolled in school, and then he headed home and for context,
Julio turned thirteen just ten days after he got to
Lima all by himself. This move had actually been initiated
(03:20):
by his aunt Maria, who worked in Lima at the
Presidential Palace as a maid. She had made the case
to Julio's parents that a kid like Julio should really
get a good education, and she convinced them of that
and then started out pretty okay in this arrangement, but
not long after things got started with his education, Julio's
(03:41):
father died, and that was a fairly sudden and unexpected death,
and aside from dealing with the grief of losing a parent,
this meant that Julio also lost his financial support as
a consequence. His aunt Maria did step in to cover
the cost of his education, but she couldn't afford to
also pay for his living expenses. So Julio, who literally
(04:01):
really just a kid still at this time a young
teenager who wanted to stay in Lima and continue his schooling,
did so by supporting himself, and he did all kinds
of odd jobs to pay for his room and board.
So he would work at the train station carrying people's baggage,
he sold papers on the streets, and he even worked
in a doctor's office as an assistant. He was also
(04:23):
hired to deliver mail to prove in scholar and politician
Ricardo Palma, Julio had become friends with Palma's son at school,
and Palma had seen in Julio just a lot of potential,
so much so that he became invested in seeing that
this young man was able to stay afloat. The story
goes that the mail delivery job he hired tail Flour,
(04:45):
had the second purpose. Palma had Julio deliver his mail
every day at noon so that the timing would work
out so that Julio was always offered lunch when he
made the delivery, and that way Palma knew that Julio
was getting a good meal every day. This was not
the only way that Ricardo Palma would prove to be
Julio's benefactor. Just after Teo had enrolled at the University
(05:07):
of San Marcos, the family helped that he had been
receiving was no longer available. Those funds just dried up,
and his family at this point really kind of thought
things were over for him in Lima, and they urged
him to return to Huado Chiri. But it appears that
Palma once again stepped in. Although we should note that
this story is apocryphal. It's not really documented that this
(05:27):
was Palma's doing, but Julio was, according to some accounts,
hired on Palma's insistence to work in the library the
Biblioteca Nacion. Now Ricardo Palma was director at this time,
and he may have actually just created a job for Julio.
But the important thing was that he was able to
continue his education. So whether that is really what enabled
(05:49):
him to stay in Lima and continue his studies is
not clear, but we know he did stay enrolled at
the university and he was working at the Biblioteca. It
also turned out that his early life in the Peruvian
mountains meant that Julio Teo had a skill that was
really valuable to one of his college professors, and that's
that he spoke Quechua. Quechua, which is called runa simi
(06:10):
in the Quechuan language, is sometimes described as the most
spoken indigenous language in the Americas, and it's really a
group of languages. There are several different varieties spoken today
by an estimated eight million people. This is all different
varieties of this language and different geographical locations like Bolivia, Colombia,
(06:30):
and German toa Julio's story in Peru. But all these
different varieties of Quechua all trace their roots back to
the Inca Empire and even before. Yeah, and when when
we were um, you know, handing off our our outlines,
Tracey asked me, would you say he's Ketchuan or Quechua,
and The thing is, he never identified that way, at
(06:51):
least not in his his life as we know it.
That's documented. He always said that he was, and I'm quoting,
a Mountain Indian. This is an interesting thing that I
have seen some theorization on, but not really UM. I
know there are some papers written about it, but I
did not dig into those super deep. That some of
this may have been an effort on his part to
(07:13):
sidesteps some of the racism that would have inherently happened
had he identified that way. Because keep in mind, this
is a kid from a mountain village who is in
school mostly with very, very privileged kids. So if he
was really like doing the identity of yes, I'm Quechua,
it may have caused some strife and even later in
(07:33):
his career that could have been problematic as well. So
for his purposes, he always just said, if someone asked,
that he was a Mountain Indian. Um. But what's interesting
is that his knowledge of Quechua was really, really valuable.
It led one of his professors to ask him to
assist with some of his linguistics work, and this consequently
gave Teo his first taste of field studies. Because he
(07:55):
was traveling to various locations to study specific dialects. In
two Teo entered medical school and he was also promoted
at the Bibliothech and Nacionale, and that promotion was into
a conservator position. One of his projects in this new
job was cataloging the anthropological collection, and while he was
(08:17):
doing this, he came across a book that had been
published in the United States and it included a section
on Trepi nation. He recognized one of the skulls that
was featured in that section as one that his brother
had found years before. The skull had been sent to
Lima as part of a program in which the Lima
(08:38):
government had asked the people of Wyo Chery to gather
these kinds of things. They had not known the purpose
of the program, but now Julio Teo saw that there
was interest in the study of Peru's culture through history
on a global scale. Yeah. He They had no thought
that like, oh, this is going to get chipped off
(08:59):
to the United States's for some researcher there to work with.
They were just doing what they were asked to do.
And he came away from this revelatory discovery wanting to
study cultural history himself, and he also resolved to learn English.
While he had regularly traveled home on school breaks to
visit his family, those vacations took on a completely different purpose.
(09:21):
Once Teo had become interested in studying the skulls of
his ancestral home. He started exploring quadra chity on these
vacations with this focus, and sometimes he visited archaeological sites,
and then he began collecting skulls for his own study
of Trepi Nation in historical context. He gave his first
presentation of his work in this field at the Lima
(09:42):
Geographical Society in May of nineteen o six. Too's timing
and all of this was for too. It is he
became interested in studying Peru's cultural history at the same
time that a lot of the Western world outside of
Peru was also turning its attention to the area. In
nineteen o five, the Historical Institute of Peru had been founded,
(10:04):
and just a few months later, the National Historical Museum
was founded to operate under the Historical Institute's umbrella. Tao's
presentation entrepre Nation took place less than two months before
this new museum opened, and he was still doing his
medical school coursework during all of this, and he did
this kind of creative thing where he had actually found
ways to blend his research in cultural history with his
(10:27):
medical schooling to him they weren't necessarily separate disciplines. His thesis,
for example, was about syphilis in Peru in the area's
ancient history, and as he had prepared this thesis, in
which he had collected skulls to examine them for evidence
of the disease, he had amassed a really significant collection
because by the time he was ready to present he
(10:49):
had gathered during his research roughly fifteen thousands skulls and mummies.
Too's work got a lot of positive attention. Part of
this was because his mentors really championed it. For example,
after he presented his thesis, members of the faculty committee
who heard it suggested to government officials that his skull
and mummy collection should be purchased to establish a pathological
(11:13):
anatomy museum. The government did not follow through with this
plan due to financial limitations. Though Additionally, Ricardo Palma continued
to assist his career trajectory by introducing Julio and his
work to people who were in positions of power and influence. Yeah,
particularly when people came to visit from outside of Peru
(11:33):
and if Ricardo Palma met with them, he would be like, Hey,
do you know about this kid and the work he's doing.
It's quite amazing. And this was a period when, of
course Julio Teo's star was on the rise, but at
the same time the political climate of Peru was extremely volatile.
In the late spring of nineteen o nine, there was
a coup attempt in the ongoing conflict in its aftermath
(11:54):
made Teo very happy to take advantage of a scholarship
that he was awarded that was intended to supped him
in study abroad after he had finished his medical degree.
Harvard offered him free tuition, and so he made the
decision that he would head to Massachusetts for two years
starting in the fall of nineteen o nine. Teo's time
at Harvard was spent studying anthropology with some of the
(12:16):
field's best teachers. He was also tutored in English by
one of those academics, who was Roland Burridge Dixon. Teo
used this time to conduct a study of the South
American Aarrowack language, visited remains of Pueblo villages in Arizona
and also became a member of the American Anthropological Association.
After two years of work, Teo had earned a master's
(12:38):
degree in anthropology from Harvard and that collection of skulls
that the Peruvian government had passed on, at least some
of it ended up at Harvard. Yeah, he mentioned it
later on in a paper that, oh, these are in
this museum, and uh, that's kind of the evidence that
we have that transaction took place. But Teo did not
return home to Peru after his time in Massachusetts. He
(13:01):
was granted permission once again through the influence of his
high powered friends back home, to continue working abroad. His
next stop was England. Through all his life he had
maintained his friendship with the son of Ricardo Palma, who,
confusingly a little bit, was also named Ricardo Palma, and
the two young men had been part of a lot
of the same study efforts and projects, And when Teo
(13:23):
went to London, the younger Ricardo Palma, who had also
received a scholarship for study abroad, traveled with him. In London, too,
presented a paper at the eighteenth International Congress of Americanists.
It's an academic conference that's focused on the study of
the America's that started in eighteen seventy five and continues today.
That presentation, which once again covered the subject of trepidation
(13:47):
and the skulls from dig sites in Peru, was given
on May twenty eight of nineteen twelve, and the time
that he spent in London leading up to it he
worked with English anthropologists he took classes from and with
them shared his knowledge of South America. After London, Teo
continued his travels around Europe, stopping first at the University
(14:07):
of Berlin and then expanding his studies at the University
of Paris. The end of nineteen twelve was a really
exciting time for Julio Teo. He returned to London once again,
this time for his wedding. He had met a student
of London University during his time there named Olive Mabel Cheeseman,
and on November twentieth, nineteen twelve, the two were married.
(14:29):
Julio also established a new relationship with Harvard During the
final months of nineteen twelve, he would be paid a
stipend to continue the work he had been doing before
leaving Peru, but this time he would be sending specimens
that he found back to Harvard for the collection of
the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. So nineteen thirteen
(14:50):
started with a new wife and a new direction for
his work, and we'll talk about Julio Teo's returned to
his home country and how his career blossomed from there.
But first we will as for a sponsor break. In
the time that Teo had been away from Peru, a
(15:11):
lot had happened that would impact his field of work.
For one, the Museo de Historia Nacionale had closed after
its head, who was German, was dismissed in a scandal
that accused him of sending artifacts to museums in other
countries for personal gain. The museum was eventually reopened, this
time with a historian rather than an archaeologist as its director.
(15:33):
This will become a thing as julio story plays out. Additionally,
Ricardo Palma had retired from his job at the BiblioTech
and Naco now, so one of Teo's strongest advocates just
did not have the same poll that he had once had.
And as we mentioned earlier, Peru was still in the
(15:53):
period of political upheaval. Teo, though immediately got to work
once he arrived back in his home country. He arrived
there in January of nineteen and he traveled with an
existing expedition to cover a lot of ground, initially visiting
multiple archaeological sites along the way and writing up a
report of this endeavor in March of that year. And
he also used this report to make the case, uh
(16:16):
and this report was published in the papers in Lima
for the public that anthropological science should be used to
examine and interpret all archaeological finds. This was sort of
a way for Teo to establish his own unique expertise
in the area. There was no one else in Peru
with the level of experience or education that he had
an anthropology, and so he was sort of saying, Hey,
(16:39):
if we really want to understand our historical record, we
should make an official project of that nature and then
give that project to an expert. And that expert is me.
I'm sorry that got me tickled. I mean, he really
was the only person to at this level of schooling,
certainly by this point in Peru and really worldwide. I
(16:59):
would say he had more education in anthropology at that
point than even most other anthropologists. So he followed that
publication up with direct action in the matter. Less than
two weeks after his article was published, he reached out
to Guiermo billing Hurst, who had become Peru's president in
September of nineteen twelve. His proposal was that the Museum
(17:20):
to Historica Nascio Now should establish an anthropology section and
that he should be the one to run it. Billing
Hurst degree that was in June of nine, but by
November of nineteen thirteen, the museum was shut down, and
this was due to feuding between Teo, who wanted to
re establish the museum with a focus on archaeology and anthropology,
(17:42):
and museum director Emilio Gutierrez, who wanted to focus on
history as the museum's primary mission. This is one of
those moments where I'm like, you kind of all want
the same thing, just from different angles. It's really a
much of a fight. But it really was that much
of a fight, as you'll see. In December, Julioteo was
a director of a newly established museum by the Peruvian
(18:03):
government that was the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. So
the National History Museum opened, which you know we've sometimes
referred to by its its Spanish name Museo to historian.
As you know, Gautierras was still running that museum, so
they kind of had been separated, like given their own
projects at this point. But even so these two adversaries
were not really free of one another because both of
(18:25):
those entities were still housed in the same building. I
feel like they put tape down the floor. It's how
it feels like. You'd work on your part, you work
on your boys play nice. So in addition to all
this sort of infighting at the museum, Peru's governmental conflict
continued during this time, and in early nine fourteen, President
(18:49):
Gammo Billinghurst was ousted in a coup and replaced as
head of government by Colonel Oscar Binavits that in and
of itself put to in kind of an unstable position.
He had been appointed by the ousted president, and the
new government did not seem particularly interested in the museum,
archaeology or anthropology at all. To make matters worse, Teo
(19:12):
then got into a public debate in the press about
whether history or the science of anthropology was the better
background from which to study archaeological finds. When Teo's argument
was challenged as being disrespectful to the work of innumerable
Peruvian scholars on the subject. He really doubled down and
talked about his education outside the country. That only hurt
(19:35):
his case. The historian that Teo had been having a
back and forth in the press with was Harassio or Tiaga,
and he very quickly seized on Too's work outside of
Peru to characterize him as out of touch with Peruvian
scholarship and snooty and not really as well educated as
who believed himself to be. Teo's reputation suffered significantly, and
(19:59):
by the end of mar to nineteen fifteen he had
resigned from his position in the museum. Tao was still
doing work with Harvard during this time, so once he
had closed out his duties at the museum and secured
some additional funding, he planned an expedition south to Nasca
in search of artifacts that he could send back to Cambridge.
Teo visited a number of spots along the way, kind
(20:21):
of taking an indirect route to Nasca, and while he
may have intended this to be sort of a getaway
from the stresses of his conflicts in the capital city
of Lima, he just ended up with more problems. As
he had been working at some dig sites in Nasca.
Questions had arisen about whether Julio Teo had the permits
to do so, and the possibility that Teo's excavations were
(20:44):
happening without proper paperwork really started to hit the press.
It turned out that he had not gotten the proper permits,
and Too's expedition was cut short. By the end of July,
he was back in Lima. The government ruled that he
could bring his excavated artific acts back to the capital
for exhibition, but they could not be shipped out of
the country. It seems that Teo did try to make
(21:06):
arrangements to send some of the pieces to Harvard, but
his primary contact at the Peabody Museum died before those
arrangements could be finalized. Yeah, this is a time when,
as we discussed a little while ago, there was more
and more interest from outside of Peru happening regarding their
dig sites. There was also a lot of grave robbing happening,
and they were trying to crack down on it. So
(21:28):
even though people knew Teo, they were like, you don't
have a permit to do this. We're scared, You're sending
our stuff away, which he was. He was. Yeah. Uh.
This all unsurprisingly continued to hurt Teo's reputation, which was
already kind of limping along. But he was by no
means of pariah, we should say. He had plenty of
(21:49):
supporters remaining, and he was, as a consequence, able to
get his proper permits arranged. And by October of nineteen
fifteen he was back in Nasca, returning to the excavations
that he had started early year. In the year, and
he was also again this reflects that he was not
really like in the bad guys status you might think.
He was sent by the government to the nineteenth International
(22:10):
Congress of Americanists in Washington, d C. In December of
that year, and while he was there he presented a
paper about Nasca burial practices. If you recall our episode
on the Nasca lines, that particular aspect of the area's
history wouldn't be identified until the nineteen twenties, so more
than a decade after he was giving this paper. And
while he was in the United States, Julio also arranged
(22:32):
to take part in an expedition in northern Peru that
was being sponsored by Harvard The late nineteen teens also
saw Julioteo make a move into politics. In January nineteen seventeen,
he announced his run for a seat in the Chamber
of Deputies, representing Huaro Cherry. The Chamber of Deputies is
the lower house of the previewing Congress. There By, cameral
(22:54):
legislature is similar to that of the US, with a
Senate as the upper house. He won the seat, although
the election was contested, but when the dust had settled
he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies and
he was immediately back in his old conflict with his
former colleague Emilio Gutierrez. This is kind of a savvy
move on his part, because as a politician, Teo immediately
(23:19):
proposed legislation that would reorganize Peru's National History Museum and
put the National University of San Marcos in charge of it.
Because he was also working with the university, this would
have essentially put Teo in charge of it and in
charge of his rival Gutierrez, who we should note had
plenty of his own supporters in the Chamber to argue
(23:39):
about this. This ended up becoming a fairly embarrassing series
of snipes at one another, where Gutierrez claimed that when
Teo resigned from the museum, they found a lot of
suspicious discrepancies in his records. Teo countered this by suggesting
that some of the shipments that Gutierrez was making from
the museum were also suspicious. Were actually investigations initiated through
(24:02):
these allegations, but they turned up nothing. Teo moved on
to other matters, but he would, however, take up this
cause again during his political career. He kind of would
periodically introduce this idea of like, hey, the university should
be running that. One of the projects to you next
focused on was an excavation at the Warm Valley. He
asked the rector of the National University of San Marcos
(24:24):
for funding, and while the university was interested, there was
a problem Too's affiliation with the school was through the
College of Medicine. Then, to be part of an archaeological
expedition that was funded by the school, he needed to
be affiliated with the College of Science or the College
of Letters. So Teo quickly remedied this whole situation by
presenting a doctoral thesis at the College of Letters on
(24:47):
the use of mummies and ancient art. His expedition plan
was soon accepted and funded, and he started nineteen nineteen
by traveling with a group of students to the Warm Valley.
The various pieces that the group excavated helps see the
university's Museum of Archaeology, which was founded in the autumn
of that same year. Also in nineteen nineteen, there was
(25:09):
more political upheaval in Peru. Augusta Bernardino Legiacedo, who had
been exiled after he was overthrown in nineteen o nine,
returned to the country and he was elected president. That's
a very short version. There was, of course, a lot
of conflict over it. Uh Teo was also reelected to
his seat in the Chamber of Deputies, and once again
(25:30):
those results were contested before his election was certified. As
nineteen nineteen drew to a close, Teo was instrumental in
setting up a new museum with Victor Larco Herrera. This
is actually different from the Rafael Larco Herrera Archaeological Museum
that was founded several years later. Rafael and Victor were brothers,
(25:52):
and Rafael's son, Rafael Larco Hoyle, established the museum named
after his father with advice from Victor. So if you
were confused by the very similar names. That's what's up
with that. But the relationship between Teo and Victor Laco
Herrera soured really quickly when Victor destroyed a set of
(26:13):
tracings during an argument. Yeah, that would end it for
an argument, y, I would think. Teo promptly resigned as
museum director and he went back to focusing exclusively on
his work at the university, although that too was fraught
due to conflict with President Ligia. Because of political protests
on campus, the president had fired most of the faculty
(26:34):
and shut the school down. It eventually reopened, but there
were ongoing issues with the government for several years. But
though Teo seemed to be perpetually embroiled in drama, he
was also producing some really important work during this time
in his life. He was the first in his field
to argue that Peruvian culture was not simply the result
(26:56):
of an existing culture relocating to the area, but that
it had developed on its own. It was also during
this time that he founded the Peruvian Association for the
Progress of Science, and he used that platform to argue
for university reform. He wanted museums to have better organization
and guidelines for doing so, and He also felt that
(27:17):
the education system of the country was falling behind and
not prioritizing science, and that it needed also to be
offering education to everyone, not just society's elite families. The
attention that this movement got once again ignited the feud
between Teo and Emilio Gutierrez, who felt that he had
been personally attacked when his museum was used by Teo
(27:40):
as a problematic example. In retaliation, Teo made a government
issue out of the book that Gautierrez had written to
defend himself. That book had been produced with government funding,
with the directive that it was supposed to be about
the history of the National History Museum and not an
opportunity to grind an axe against Teo. In this instance,
(28:01):
it was Gautier's reputation that really really suffered. The nineteen
twenties continued to be busy for Julio too. He started
an archaeology magazine through the university called Inca, and also
started actively teaching archaeology, something that just hadn't been possible before,
given that prior to him, the archaeologists in Peru were
(28:23):
foreigners who were there for expeditions and not for teaching jobs. Yeah,
this really lays like the bedrock foundation for archaeologists in
Peru because they just weren't coming from the country before this.
And he also worked to really trace the histories and
provenance of various objects that have been discovered in Peru,
some of which had left the country, and his work
(28:45):
in this area was a bit controversial because it often
meant that he was having meetings with people that had
stolen items or had robbed graves and then sold pieces
to private collectors. Obviously that is problematic in a variety
of ways. It Teo really believed that learning the providence
and getting this information was important to Peruvian history, so
(29:07):
to him, it was worthwhile to get that information however
he could. In ur Teo became director of the Peruvian
Museum of Archaeology. This was actually a rename of the
museum that Victor Larco Herrera had once hired Teo to run.
Larco had to sell it and under the new management,
Teo was reinstated. He had also just gotten a position
(29:30):
of professor of anthropology at the National University of San
Marco and the College of Science, So this is a
really good time in his career, and it was also
during this time that Taribo Mahia Cespy became a student
of Teos And if that name is familiar, he was
the first person to study the Nascal lines in depth,
and he worked with Teo for years. Yeah, reading through
(29:54):
like Teo's work in in his career. After this, it's
like constantly like and then he sent Mehia here, and
then he sent Mehia here, like he really relied on
him for a lot. Before we talk about one of
the most famous fines that's associated with Julio Tejo, we
will pause here and have a little sponsor break. So,
(30:21):
despite some of the bumpy moments earlier on, Teo's workload
and opportunities really exploded in the mid nineteen twenties. He
headed up numerous expeditions and excavations. He further expanded the
university's offerings in archaeology and the anthropology, and he worked
to inventory the university Museum's collections more thoroughly. He and
(30:41):
his team also worked on the famed Paracas mummy bundles.
It was a Teo team that found them first, and
over time, various archaeological teams would unearth hundreds of mummy
bundles from Paracas including additional fines by Teo's teams. If
you've never seen photos or diagrams of the mummy bundles,
they are indeed fascinating. They date back to the Paracas culture,
(31:04):
which I think came up on an earth to this
most recent time that sounds correct, that existed from roughly
eight hundred BC to one thousand C. And they're called
bundles because that's exactly what they are. The body inside
of each is set inside of a basket in the
fetal position, with various artifacts around them, and then there
(31:25):
are layers of textiles that are wrapped around them, from
very finely embroidered pieces that are the closest to the
body to fairly rough plain cloth as the exterior. One
of the interesting aspects of Tero's treatments of the Paracas
mummy bundles is the way he characterized and treated them.
He spoke of them as ancestors, and when the pieces
(31:48):
were prepared for display, they were each represented in a
very humanized way. He always wanted it to be clear
that these were people who lived rather than relics or artifacts,
and these mummies were a revelation to the world. One
of the cool things about them. If you ever go looking,
is it because of the climate. The mummification of preservation
(32:09):
is amazing. Um. Some of them literally just looked like
a person that curled up and went to sleep, and
there's very little degrading of the body. Several of them
were shipped to various museums. They were kind of called
ambassadors of goodwill, and Teo was able to use the
ongoing excavation of them as a means to ensure funding
for the university museum program because they got a lot
(32:31):
of attention. So at this point everything in his life
seemed to be going pretty ideally. However, Teo had over
the years continued to have conflicts with various people over
political and archaeological ideologies, and in nineteen thirty things really
reached a crescendo. Starting in August of that year, several
(32:51):
articles were printed in the periodical Libertad. Libertad blasted the
information that Teo had aligned briefly with President Augusto Lugia,
and this had, according to Teo, been a matter of
the two men just agreeing on the importance of rights
for Peru's indigenous population. But Lugia was deeply unpopular by
(33:13):
the points and was ousted as Libertide was outing all
of his allies, and the allegations against Teo regarding his
association with Lagia grew with every subsequent article. He was
accused of theft, of having sold museum artifacts, of helping
Lagia build a fortune through this illicit work, of having
(33:35):
built a fortune for himself this way, and of illegal
exportation of important artifacts to the United States. His previous
run ins with both Larco and Gutierrez were also revisited.
He had continued to have some conflicts with Larco as well,
uh and he was accused of using his museum staff
to plot with Lagia against detractors. On October ninth, Talo
(33:58):
lost his job as museum director as a consequence of
all this bad press and his association with the overthrown Lugia,
although he did remain director of the National Institute of
Anthropology at the university. The entire museum staff resigned in solidarity.
Luis Miguel Sanchez Seto was the new president of Peru
(34:18):
at this point, and under his government, the national museum
system was overhauled, combining many of the disparate entities into
one called the Museo Nacional and under the re ord
because Teo had retained his position as institute director, he
became director of the Institute of Anthropological Investigation. In May
of nineteen thirty two, the Parakha site was looted by Hwakro's,
(34:42):
which are tomb raiders. Then the National University of San
Marcos was closed because of ongoing civil unrest in the capital.
Sanchez was assassinated in April thirtieth, nineteen thirty three, and
the university stayed closed for three years. During that time,
Teo was cut off from university resources and from his
own work. During the years of the National University's closure,
(35:05):
he taught at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Yeah,
the early nineteen thirties were just a mess for him.
Um that looting was really problematic. He spoke out about
it a lot, and it became kind of a issue
that he tried to address on and on and on.
Uh Teo then asked for permission to do archaeological research
(35:28):
at Chevin de Jantar, one of the most important sites
in Peru that sits in a high valley in the Andes.
At the time, Teo thought that it was the civilization
from which South American culture had spread, but we know
today that there are cultural sites that pre date Chevin
Julio Teo spent the mid nineteen thirties conducting research at
this site and others around Peru. He had been there before,
(35:49):
but he had some very focused time there during this period,
and then he toured the United States in the summer
of nineteen thirty six, giving lectures on archaeology and Peru
and visiting music a ums to drum up financial support
for his work. The Institute of Andian Research was formed
later that year in New York by Teo alongside a
number of US based scholars, and it was formally established
(36:12):
the following year. The American Museum of Natural History let
them occupy office space free of charge, and the staff
of the Institute of Indian Research worked on a volunteer
basis to secure grants and funding for various research and projects,
many of which were projects that Teo was undertaking. In
seven Back in Peru, Teo made the acquaintance of Nelson Rockefeller,
(36:34):
who was traveling on business, and the story goes that
when he saw the sad underfunded state of things at
the Institute for anthropological investigation. The wealthy American immediately offered
to help fund their efforts. This resulted in a deal
where five of the Paracas mummy bundles were to be
sent to New York, specifically to the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. Ultimately, though,
(36:58):
they ended up at the American Museum of Natural History
because the met did not have anyone on staff with
the expertise that was needed for their preservation and their
ongoing maintenance. In ninety nine, the second session of the
twenty seven International Congress of Americanists took place in Lima,
and in addition to presenting a paper, Teo also served
(37:19):
as host to the delegates, taking them out to various
sites in the area both during and after the convention.
And this entire event went really well and it reinvigorated
the archaeology community of Peru, and so the decision was
made to form a new entity, the Peruvian Archaeology Association,
which would oversee all archaeological projects in Peru. In nineteen
(37:41):
forty one, the historic importance of the Chevine de Juantar
site led to its being declared state property, and this
was controversial. Teo made the case that Chavine and other
historically and culturally significant sites should be established as protected
national parks modeled after the ones he had seen while
traveling in the US, and now a lot of them
(38:02):
are parks. Uh. Chauvin incidentally as a UNESCO World Heritage
Site now as well. Throughout the nineteen forties, Teo remained
busy directing and commissioning excavations and serving as an ambassador
of Peruvian archaeology on the international stage. He had by
this point kind of uh you know, shuffled off the
(38:22):
shadow of the various controversies he had been embroiled in
and had become the nation's premier expert on its archaeological history,
while always maintaining that he was a mountain Indian, something
that at that point he was kind of using to
separate himself from the rest of the academic world. Teo
was diagnosed with an illness in July of nineteen forty six.
(38:42):
Don't have a lot of detail on it, but he
traveled to the US two months later for treatment. He
didn't really improve, but he returned to Lima to work
in November anyway, and then he died six months later
on June third, ninety seven. Yeah, at least in the
English language in formation I had access to. They never
name what this issue was, so we're not sure it
(39:05):
could be any number of things, but but we know
that he had basically just a really rough illness at
the end of his life. And Teo's death was reported
in a lot of papers across the United States, which
speaks to how well known he was at the time,
although these mentions were generally brief, and I looked at
a whole lot of different papers from around the country
(39:26):
and they all ran a pretty close replica or some
slight variation of quote. Julio Teo, sixty seven, archaeologist, anthropologist,
and author who was an authority on prehistoric Peru, died today,
but at home in Peru. The nation really mourned. A
year after his death, his remains were moved to a
mausoleum at the National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. Today,
(39:49):
there is a museum named in his honor on the
Paractice Peninsula at the entrance to the Practice National Reserve.
And I wanted to close out with an excerpt from
one of Teo's own writings, which he included at the
beginning of a paper about the art of the Chevine culture,
and he wrote quote, Chevine art, characterized by its perfection
(40:10):
of lines, its richness of fantasy, the symbolism of its representations,
the proportion and harmony of the whole, and the material used,
which is almost always hardstone, is the richest historical source
and the best evidence of the high degree of civilization
reached by the Peruvian race. The significance of its sculptural
and pictorial works, and the mastery with which they were
(40:32):
executed all lead us to suppose that the culture of Chevine,
illustrated in its art, is the product of a long
process of gestation and elaboration which must have been intimately
bound to the material, emotive, and intellectual history of man,
perhaps since his appearance on this part of the continent.
It was such a good summation of the way he
(40:53):
portrayed ancient Peruvian culture as being this really vital, rich thing,
which was very different from how it had been characterized before,
as like no, people moved here and they brought their stuff.
He's like, no, no, they were developing like right along
with everything else, which is really cool. Um that is
Julio Teo. It's interesting people still talk about him and
his some of his controversies today, obviously because he was
(41:16):
so tied up in the ongoing shifting politics, which were
very dramatic in peru Um. It can be problematic in
some ways, but I always kind of perceived him as
someone that was just trying to get his archaeology done,
however he had to do it. We want to note
as we wrapped this episode that Harvard University, which was,
(41:39):
as you've heard, a significant part of Teo story and
was the recipient of some of the skulls and mummies
he collected, issued a statement after we recorded this one,
but before we published, about the human remains in their collection.
Harvard estimates that between the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology and the Warren Anatomical Museum UM, there are remains
(42:01):
of more than twenty two thousand individuals in the school's
museum collections, many of which have no associated biographical information.
To address this situation, Harvard has created a Steering Committee
on Human Remains in the Collection, which will complete quote,
a comprehensive survey of human remains present across all university
(42:22):
museum collections, as well as their use in current teaching
and research. That Steering committee will also develop quote a
university wide policy on the collection, display, and ethical stewardship
of human remains in the university's museum collections, and will
propose quote principles and practices that address research, community consultation, memorialization,
(42:46):
possible repatriation, burial or reburial, and other care considerations. Do
you have some listener mail for us? I do? I do.
This is from our listener Mark Um, who wrote to
us after our discussion of waffles. Your Hi, Holly and Dracy.
My partner Emily and I are longtime enjoyers to the podcast.
It's our go to when we have long drives together.
(43:08):
We were recently inspired by your episode on the history
of waffles, where you mentioned that they were served alongside stews.
As it happens, Emily had just come across a cornmeal
scallion waffle recipe recently and we thought it paired excellently
with a vegetarian chili recipe. We thought you might enjoy
hearing about it, so I've attached a picture. Uh. And
Mark also makes a suggestion for a possible episode, which
(43:31):
may or may not happen, but he mentioned that it
it might be uh, you know, uh, difficult topics. So
he also sent pictures of their adorable dog, Lily, so
that it would comfort us as we do any research
on unfortunate things. That dog is so cute. I would
give it power of Attorney. Mark. Thank you so much
(43:51):
for sharing this with us, and also that must be
looks amazing. They also have these beautiful slices of fresh
avocado on top. I love us, I love a savory waffle.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History, and if you would like to subscribe to
the podcast and haven't yet, I promise it's super easy,
(44:13):
you can do that on the I heart radio app,
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Tracy Wilson
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