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In the 19th century, French ethnology relied on a network of public institutions, scholarly societies, and individuals, and was promoted by the musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878-1937). In this era, the southernmost part of the Americas was perceived as a region that called into question the conceptual and scientific frameworks of Western culture, due to its, its landscape of extremes, and the biological and cultural specificities of its inhabitants. The formation of a national French collection from this region was the result of individual and collective efforts. These collecting endeavors were tied to the dominant scientific paradigms, the personality of collectors and scholars for whom the collections were intended, and the political and social contexts of Argentina and Chile, as well as that of Native communities impacted by the loss of their economic independency and territorial autonomy. The “object” collected in the field arrived at the museum bearing values and views that influenced the ways the latter were perceived. This thesis analyses the practices of collecting and the construction of knowledge of these populations; in so doing, it writes a history of collections that deconstructs the old museum categorizations in order to recover their human and scientific consistency.

The Franco-Bolivian Mission “Palaeoenvironment and Archaeology of the Guaquira –Tiwanaku River” tries to restore the evolution of the landscape in contact with one of the most emblematic cultures of the Andes. The Tiwanakota culture developed on the shores of Lake Titicaca at the end of the second millennium BC and disappears between 1100 and 1200 AD following a drought that would have affected the entire Altiplano. In this essay we present the methodology and the work in progress. It is designed to allow scholars to better understand the interactions between the Tiwanakota culture and the immediate environment surrounding the monumental archaeological site.

The Inca metalwork collection held at the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac (Paris) developed in the 19th century through the activities of varied travelers and collectors. The formal, stylistic and material variety of the miniature figurines in gold, silver and copper raises questions about their cultural attribution and in some cases their authenticity. Their contextual study, as well as the analysis of their typological, technological variety and material composition, provide us with information on the production of these figurines during the Inca period, and during the periods following the Spanish conquest, from the 16th to the 19th century.

The following articles have been presented at the meeting on Amerindian Textiles organized in 2013 at the musée du quai Branly, on November 28th-30th. The intention was to create the conditions for a dialogue between scholars doing research in various regions of the Americas on past and present textiles conceived with means and thought patterns related to pre-Columbian roots. This international colloquium gathered participants from Europe and America belonging to the various scientific and professional spheres involved in research on Amerindian textiles. It was the sixth of a series initiated in Barcelona in 1999 by Victoria Solanilla D. (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) and more generally focused on pre-Columbian textiles. Textiles are an important source to understand the societies that have created and/or used them, and to reconstruct their history. Amerindian textiles are especially interesting as specific climatic conditions, or other favorable conditions, have resulted in the conservation of corpus of archaeological textiles fostering the study of such objects in the “longue durée”. In some cases, one can talk about very “longue durée” as tools, knowledge and artifacts have been transmitted from generation to generation and their developments can be followed during several centuries, and even several millennia until today. Some textiles are considered as national heritage – as those from Coroma in Bolivia -, and others are inscribed on the Intangible Cultural World Heritage List – as weaving in the Taquile Island in Peru. This long history of Amerindian textile regards a continent where many regions from South to North have known and still know the same type of weaving loom and where cotton played a key role while integrating as soon as possible animal materials as camelid fibers and feathers with stronger and more diversified hues. Textiles are an important source to look at Amerindian societies in their diversity and in the multifold inter-regional relations that they can help to show thanks to their capacity for artistic and identity expressions. Our concern was to make clearer the richness of local characters as well as eventual connections revealing common cultural matrix or possible exchanges between societies considered as more or less far away in time and/or space.The quai Branly museum has generously supported the organization of the colloquium, as did the French embassy in Lima, the Institute of the Americas and the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the EHESS in Paris. Thanks to them, it has been possible to invite several American colleagues from Bolivia, Peru and the United States, and to enrich the range of topics to take into account. The lively debate following each session demonstrated that textiles constitute a strong area of research in the Americas. Our thanks go to each – institutions and participants. Additional thanks go to the Centre de Recherches Historiques for its help in the publication of the conference proceedings, and to the Campus Condorcet for its support in the organization of workshops on dying practice and fibers analysis that occurred before the colloquium.

In the footsteps of the Patagonian Giant. The History of Henry de La Vaulx’s collection in the musée du quai Branly (1896-1897). The article summarises the results of a research project held by the authors since 2006. The project aimed to restore the historic coherence of a specific anthropological experience: that of the Henry de La Vaulx’s mission to Patagonia (1896-1897), that took place fifteen years after the Argentinean expansion to the Southern territories, controlled until then by the Mapuche and Tehuelche, or « Patagonians ». The material and documental records resulting from this mission were dispersed between several Parisian institutions after their arrival in France, and the project centers mainly on reconstructing its wholeness, through the observation and combined analysis of the artefacts that were allocated to the musée du quai Branly in 2004, the reading of the travel narrative, and the interpretation of the photographs and documentary corpus produced by the French explorer. After a discussion of the historiography which makes explicit the methodology, the article, at the crossing of ethnology, history and museum studies, presents the « colonial », « anthropological » and « ethnographic » dimensions of the collections, and raises the problem of the historicity of both narratives and objects in a context of crisis for the Patagonian populations.