Hans Feriz

Hans (Paulus) Feriz (born Hans Feischl) (1895 – 1970) was an Austrian-Dutch physician and amateur archaeologist specialised in American archaeology. He spent most of his professional life in the Netherlands. Since the late 1940s he carried out excavations in South and Central America and donated numerous objects he had found to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam (today part of the National Museum of World Cultures). Most of the museum's pre-Columbian collection can be traced back to him.

Birth and family background Hans Feriz was born as Hans Feischl on 23 August 1895 in Vienna, Austria. Feriz married on 17 May 1926 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the four years younger Leonie Catharina Hermine Wilde who was born in Haarlem, The Netherlands, to parents of Dutch and Prussian descent . In the marriage register, Feriz' parents appear under their new last name "Feriz". Studies and professional career as a surgeon He studied medicine in Vienna, Göttingen, Cologne, Munich, and Amsterdam, graduating as a medical doctor at Munich in 1921 on a topic of pathological anatomy. After World War I, he emigrated to the Netherlands, where he worked as an assistant to Prof. Willem Marius de Vries at the University of Amsterdam from 1921 to 1923. In 1923 he became a resident assistant at the surgical clinic of the famous surgeon Prof. Otto Lanz, who was also a well-known art collector. In 1930, he was admitted as privat-docent of surgical pathology. During his time as a research assistant, Feriz published various articles in pathological anatomy and occasionally continued to publish in medical journals until the 1940s. In 1926, he was the first one to publish about macrodystrophia lipomatosa, a rare congenital non-hereditary disorder.

Activity as an amateur archaeologist (from 1947 onwards) On a voyage to New York in 1931, Feriz visited the Museum of Natural History and became interested in objects from Central and South America. In 1947, he first visited Peru and was fascinated by pre-Columbian culture. On land owned by an acquaintance, he started his activities as an amateur archaeologist, excavating Moche culture pottery. Further trips to Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles followed. In the 1950s, he lectured and published on topics related to his archaeological finds and started to exchange with the staff at Amsterdam's Royal Tropical Institute. His knowledge and experience led to his appointment in 1955 as an honorary curator of Latin American Archaeology at the institute's department of Cultural and Physical Anthropology. Throughout his lifetime, he donated numerous objects he had found to the Tropenmuseum, then still part of the institute. Feriz assembled a collection of his papers and notes on archaeological topics from his voyages between 1949 and 1958. Unlike other scholars of the time, Feriz defended the hypothesis of a south–north influence of Peruvian cultures on Mesoamerican high cultures. From his archaeologist colleagues, Feriz obtained mixed reviews for his publications: some of them welcomed his new perspective and his talent as a keen observer, at the same time criticising his lack of rigour in systematically developing his hypothesis and pointing to shortcomings in handling his bibliographic references. Another exhibition of objects collected by Feriz in Latin America, entitled "With Shovel and Brush", was held posthumously at the Tropenmuseum in 1971. fell in a period characterised by increased US corporate and geopolitical interests in the region (United Fruit Company; Panama Canal), which facilitated amateurs and professional archaeologists' fieldwork. At the same time, strict professional standards for registering archaeological sites had not yet been established, as archaeological excavations in the region had begun relatively late, compared to the neighbouring regions in Mesoamerica or South America. Furthermore, since the mid-20th century, a global market for "pre-Columbian Art" had developed, as a result of which archaeological objects from the region became both collectable and marketable and therefore increasingly found their way to private collectors and museums in North America and Europe. Feriz was a member of the Archaeological Society of Panama, which was composed of professional and amateur archaeologists, alongside commercially oriented actors and members of American military intelligence, such as Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, who appears to have used his activity as a professional archaeologist as a cover for his spy missions. The members of the association were predominantly North-American, Feriz being one of only three Europeans.