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\"Nature and Antiquities examines the relation between the natural sciences, anthropology, and archaeology in the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the reader across the Americas from the Southern Cone to Canada, across the Andes, the Brazilian Amazon, Mesoamerica, and the United States, the book explores the early history of archaeology from a Pan-American perspective. The volume breaks new ground by entreating archaeologists to acknowledge the importance of ways of knowing that resulted from the study of nature in the history of archaeology. Some of the contributions to this volume trace the part conventions, practices, and concepts from natural history and the natural sciences played in the history and making of the discipline. Others set out to uncover, reassemble, or adjust our vision of collections that research historians of archaeology have disregarded or misrepresented--because their nineteenth-century makers would refuse to comply with today's disciplinary borders and study natural specimens and antiquities in conjunction, under the rubric of the territorial, the curious or the universal. Other contributions trace the sociopolitical implications of studying nature in conjunction with 'indigenous peoples' in the Americas--inquiring into what it meant and entailed to comprehend the inhabitants of the American continent in and through a state of nature\"-- Provided by publisher.

‘Circulation’ is not only among the most widely used words in the language of global history; it is also among the most erratically employed. Amorphous in its usages and protean in its semantics, ‘circulation’ has come to describe any sort of movement: from circular movement and passage along the vessels of closed systems to, paradoxically, open-ended, unidirectional dissemination. This article asks how ‘circulation’ became prominent metaphorically in global history; it seeks to understand the word’s appeal and the consequences of its ascendancy. It argues that the popularity of ‘circulation’ is attributable to a merger of two of its qualities: its seeming ‘untainted-ness’ and openness, on the one hand, and on the other, how its older, medical and economic, meanings resonate in its usages, allowing it to convey a sense of entity (independent existence) for the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, and a sense of directedness, self-reliance, and ‘liquidity’ for the movements it describes.

Historians have long argued that science was fashioned as a bourgeois, Western cultural practice by the late nineteenth century, in ways that allowed its practitioners to exclude or distance themselves – through a rhetoric of endeavour, utilitarianism, and progress – from the more useless, ‘frivolous’ learning of aristocrats, women, or, indeed, native ‘informants’ in the colonies. This article examines the case of scholars from outside northern Europe and North America – Japanese literati, creole intellectuals, and Lebanese scholars – who managed to participate in the period’s Western scientific networks as peers. It holds that these men were able to establish epistemic credibility not because their lower rung in a political and racial hierarchy was ever irrelevant, but because their status as upper-middle-class professionals and their bourgeois habitus – their ‘civility’, and ‘manners’ – in some measure made up for it. The article reveals, rather than forthright ‘exclusion’ and ‘silencing’ of non-Europeans, complex epistemic hierarchies and geographies of knowledge. It exposes the mechanisms of epistemic inclusion and its limits in the period: the functioning of an academic community that was – in many, rather significant ways – also a social world.

In 1899, Chilean workers discovered the mummified body of a woman in a copper mine in Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert. Chile's most prominent archaeologists were called to examine the body and they estimated it had been in the mine for more than four centuries. What most astonished both the public and the scholarly community was that the body had been preserved virtually intact, apparently by nothing but the environmental conditions surrounding it. José Toribio Medina, a central figure in Chilean archaeology at the time, discussed this finding in 1901: Natural causes account for the mummy of Chuquicamata. The body is that of a female. The depth of the soil where the corpse was found was no more than six to eight feet, and the miner was probably searching the mountain when a sudden collapse buried her. The miner, feeling that the mountain was breaking down, lifted her arms up to protect her head, the position in which her body is preserved. … In some parts of the body, especially the arms, the difference between the injured and the intact parts of the skin can even be distinguished, to the point where it seems almost that blood is flowing from the wounds. In her face, hidden between her arms, her contracted mouth is visible… .1

This article outlines the history of the commerce in medicinal plants and plant-based remedies from the Spanish American territories in the eighteenth century. It maps the routes used to transport the plants from Spanish America to Europe and, along the arteries of European commerce, colonialism and proselytism, into societies across the Americas, Asia and Africa. Inquiring into the causes of the global ‘spread’ of American remedies, it argues that medicinal plants like ipecacuanha, guaiacum, sarsaparilla, jalap root and cinchona moved with relative ease into Parisian medicine chests, Moroccan court pharmacies and Manila dispensaries alike, because of their ‘exotic’ charisma, the force of centuries-old medical habits, and the increasingly measurable effectiveness of many of these plants by the late eighteenth century. Ultimately and primarily, however, it was because the disease environments of these widely separated places, their medical systems and materia medica had long become entangled by the eighteenth century.

Les antiquités précolombiennes sont devenues une catégorie esthétique, scientifique, commerciale et juridique reconnaissable au cours du xix e  siècle. Cet article présente les acteurs, les sites et les configurations matérielles et idéologiques qui jouèrent un rôle dans sa construction et son développement. La première section examine la tradition antiquaire ibérique qui, vers le milieu du xvii e  siècle, a mis en circulation les artefacts d’avant la conquête en tant qu’objets épistémiques, dans le contexte de la pertinence croissante des vestiges matériels comme objets d’investigation. L’article se penche ensuite sur les scènes de collecte dans les pays d’Amérique hispanique nouvellement indépendants, où les élites créoles, les musées locaux et les étrangers, mus par leurs propres intérêts, se sont disputé les antiquités. La troisième section explore la manière dont, au milieu du xix e  siècle, les « technologies du papier » ont fonctionné comme des outils heuristiques pour connaître, organiser et interpréter les antiquités, conférant une densité ontologique à des objets et groupes d’objets spécifiques et conduisant à la construction de régimes de savoirs et d’expertises dédiés. Enfin, la quatrième section reconstruit les processus nationaux et internationaux d’institutionnalisation du passé d’avant la conquête à la fin des années 1800 et au début des années 1900 – à travers la consolidation des musées nationaux et la constitution de l’archéologie et de l’ethnographie comme disciplines scientifiques – afin d’examiner comment ceux-ci ont renforcé l’importance et la signification des antiquités. Prehispanic antiquities from the Americas became a recognizable aesthetic, scientific, commercial, and legal category over the nineteenth century. This article maps out the actors, sites, and material and ideological configurations involved in its creation and development. The first section examines the Iberian antiquarian tradition that placed preconquest artefacts into circulation as epistemic objects by the mid-1700s, against the backdrop of the increasing relevance of material vestiges as objects of investigation. The article then turns to the collecting scenes in the newly independent Spanish American countries, where creole elites, local museums, and foreigners competed for antiquities, driven by their own diverse interests. The third section explores the ways in which, by the mid-1800s, “paper technologies” functioned as heuristic tools for knowing, organizing, and interpreting antiquities, affording ontological density to specific objects and groups of objects and leading to the construction of regimes of knowledge and expertise devoted specifically to them. Finally, the fourth section reconstructs the national and international processes of institutionalization of the preconquest past in the late 1800s and early 1900s—through the consolidation of national museums and the establishment of archaeology and ethnography as scientific disciplines—to consider how these processes entrenched these antiquities’ significance and meaning.

This essay explores the journeys of Andean pre-Columbian antiquities across the Americas and the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century along the veins of intellectual networks, between Andean communities and European, North American and Creole collectors and museums. Centred on the studies and collection of José Lucas Caparó Muñíz, the essay focuses on the Creole and European practice of lifting pre-Columbian objects preserved or “still” in use in Andean communities out of their context and taking them to European and Creole private and public collections. Intellectual history has long paid scant attention to the many voices that its authors silenced, disfigured and suppressed. By looking at the journeys of Andean artefacts—at their owners, their brokers and their losers—this erssay traces the systemic hierarchies and the chasms of an expanding modern intellectual culture.