This article is an approach to the fieldwork carried out by the German philologist and archaeologist Max Uhle (1856-1944) during his stay in Chile (1912-1919). Uhle’s train-ing as a philologist and archaeologist brought together elements that led him to elaborate a unique method of reading the different findings corresponding to the sites explored and excavated in the North Grande, North Chico and Central Zone. A review of his biography reveals the construction of a cultural-historical method applied to the so-called Pan-Andean cultural horizon. We will accompany the record with a selection of sketches found in one of his notebooks which forms part of Uhle’s corpus of 26 notebooks from his Chile period.