Aufbruch und Rückkehr. Die Berliner Zeit im Leben Max Uhles

Abstract

This biographical contribution is focused on two periods in the long and restless life of Max Uhle: the early years (1881 - 1895) when he started his career as an assistant in the ethnographic museums of Dresden and of Berlin, when his specialization and preparation for fieldwork culminated in his first expedition to South America (1892 - 1895) under the auspices of the Berlin Museum, financed by a Berlin private committee supporting the acquisition of ethnographic and archaeological materials, and his last years (1933 - 1944) after he returned from Ecuador to Berlin, with another stay in Peru (1939 - 1942) and his final days in Silesia. The part Berlin's personalities and institutions played during these formative and post-classic years of the great archaeologist will be discussed on the basis of documents from local archives. Many objects collected by Uhle in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador are now in the Berlin Museum of Ethnography while his library, notes and manuscripts are preserved in the Ibero-American Institute, also located in Berlin.