The Finest in Any Museum in the World

Centered on the collection of pre-conquest antiquities formed by Miguel Garc & eacute;s, a Puno landowner and antiquary, this article studies the creole antiquarian landscape of the Southern Andes over the late 1800s and early 1900s. Historians have commonly taken the fact that many of the area's private collections were later sold to museums abroad as a testament to this antiquarian landscape's fragility and precariousness. This article argues that the collections' very volatility, dissolution, and mobility also, somewhat paradoxically, contributed to their centrality. Indeed, many of these collections from "provincial" Peruvian and Bolivian localities would leave a decisive mark on the period's most visible museums of Americana in metropolitan centers-by their sheer scale and number, but also through their composition, prestige, and aesthetic appeal. The article thus contributes to an ongoing rethinking of the histories of anthropology and archaeology more broadly-by making visible Hispanic American contributions and the ways in which they were subsumed by, and constitutive of, the very "core" of these fields. The Southern Andes, the article holds, ought to be seen in many ways as a center, not a periphery, of Americanist learning, collecting, and display.