This paper examines the emotional and intellectual work of U.S. archeologists who elevated Peruvian Indigeneity as a sign of the nation’s ancient heritage. As early as the late eighteenth century, creole and republican scholars constructed the Andes as a location rooted in the ancient civilizations of the Inca and their lineages (Thurner 2006, Thurner 2015). The construction of the nation with or as an ancient “Inca” civilization defined an exclusive Peruvian past (Poole 1997, Riviale 2000) that, as a political discourse and a historical construction, replaced the political and social contributions of Asian-Peruvians, Afro-Peruvians, and those culturally identified along a continuum of mestizaje (de la Cadena 2000).

Archeologists were at the forefront of the twentieth-century construction of the Peruvian narrative as rooted in an ancient past. I closely read the fieldnotes along with the archeological data located in the archives of Dr. Thomas Patterson, housed in the Special Collections of the Tomás Rivera Library of the University of California, Riverside. I explore how Patterson and others admired, but also denied and dismissed contemporary Peruvian intelligence in their attempt to affix an ascribed Indigeneity. The archeologists’ feelings, as suggested by Sara Ahmed (2015), made claims about Peruvians to advance their project of creating the ancient past. Their patterns of denial, illustrative of archeological epistemology of the 1950s and 1960s, included emotional responses of confusion and frustration that required what José Esteban Muñoz elaborates as the illegibility of brown (and Black) subjects (2006). Practicing dismissive yet dependent responses when engaged with Peruvian workmen, villagers, and officials, Patterson and other archeologists made Peru and Peruvians into knowable artifacts of the ancient past through their emotional practices of repression and displacement.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine where she teaches classes on colonial Latin America, the African Diaspora, and sex and gender. Her monograph, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru received the 2013 Latin American Studies Association Peru Section Flora Tristán book prize. With Sherwin Bryant and Ben Vinson III, she co-edited Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora (2012) and with Ivonne del Valle and Anna More, she co-edited Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization (2019). She has published articles on the construction of whiteness, masculinity within slavery, African Diaspora identities, indigenous politics, and gender influences on racial constructions, and currently is completing her second monograph regarding the meanings of freedom in colonial Peru.