Warden was "among the active core" of the "Société de géographie". With Edmé-François Jomard (an engineer-geographer in Napoleon's scientific expedition to Egypt in 1798), he was behind the society's patronage of studies of Mesoamerica. Their terms for a competition for the best new work on "American antiquities", including maps "constructed according to exact methods" and "observations on the mores and customs of the indigenous peoples, and vocabularies of the ancient languages." extended decades-old scientific practices to a new field of anthropological inquiry.