ABSTRACT
Modern prehistoric archaeology was born in Scandinavia with the work of Oscar Montelius, who developed the first culture-historical framework for prehistoric Europe in the 1880s and 1890s. He used both artifact forms and stratigraphic observations to place ancient cultures in chronological order. In the Americas, many scholars denied that there was any evidence of cultural change in ancient American societies. But stratigraphic excavations in Peru and California by Max Uhle and others showed that they were wrong. Meanwhile, archaeologist Alfred Kidder excavated Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico, where he developed a long sequence of Southwestern cultures using potsherds. Hiram Bingham’s expedition to Machu Picchu in the Andes in 1911 marked the end of the pioneer period of archaeology in the Americas, as Max Uhle conducted stratigraphic excavations on the coast.
