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.

Philip L. Kohl is a professor of anthropology at Wellesley College, where he is also the Kathryn W. Davis Professor of Slavic Studies. He has published more than 150 articles and reviews, and delivered the 2007 Distinguished Lecture, Archaeological Division, at the American Anthropological Association Meeting.

Irina Podgorny, a principal investigator at CONICET, has been a research scholar at Museo de La Plata in Argentina since 1995 and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in the years 2009 and 2010. She has published extensively on the history of comparative anatomy, paleontology, and archaeology.

Stefanie Gänger is an assistant professor at the Institute for Iberian and Latin American History at Cologne University. She is the author of Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Study of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911.

“Nature and Antiquities offers readers an episodic history of the pre-Columbian Americas as it emerged in the writings of a wide range of actors over centuries. Guiding readers through the fluid intellectual space in which antiquities and nature were assigned meanings that mattered for contemporaries, this collection is a welcome addition to the global history of the sciences.”—H. Glenn Penny, Professor of History, University of Iowa

“A fascinating collection of fine-grained studies that examine the relationship of archaeology in the Americas to the biographical, historical, political, and epistemological conditions that shaped its development over two centuries. Anyone wishing to understand the subtleties of archaeology in the contexts of colonialism, nation-building, and natural science would do well to start with this book.”—Curtis M. Hinsley, co-author of Frank Hamilton Cushing and the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition

“A fascinating collection of fine-grained studies that examine the relationship of archaeology in the Americas to the biographical, historical, political and epistemological conditions that shaped its development over two centuries. Anyone wishing to understand the subtleties of archaeology in the contexts of colonialism, nation-building and natural science would do well to start with this book.”—Curtis M. Hinsley, co-author of Frank Hamilton Cushing and the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition