ABSTRACT
During the 1980s, courses of archaeology and prehistory in French universities were attended regularly by Latin American students. Some of these students were following the example of their Latin American teachers who had attended, in their turn, postgraduate studies in France two decades earlier. Others had worked in America with French teams, which as a consequence led to their subsequent visits to the Old World. The presence of Peruvian, Argentinian, Brazilian and Uruguayan students at the University of Paris I, at Nanterre, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in the Collège de France and in the Museé de l’Homme, showed the interest that French archaeology awoke among some Latin American archaeologists. Such interest was the most noticeable aspect of a long history of relations between French researchers and the American continent and its native populations. Furthermore, the drift of Latin American bourgeois intellectuality made Paris an inevitable stop in any academic journey, often for nonarchaeological reasons. Although French influence is important, even basic to some topics, it is not the only influence, nor the one of greatest relative weight.
