Birds and Stones: Excavating and Burying the Sciences of Time

Mirjam Brusius

Princeton University

Wednesday, October 2, 2019 4:30 pm EDT

Princeton University
210 Dickinson Hall
Princeton, NJ 08540

Abstract: How do the sciences of human history work, and how should we study their history today? Historians of science have long studied how the history of the earth and nature was constructed through the earth and life sciences, but little is known about how human history was constructed through the antique sciences. Yet in the nineteenth-century many of the same explorers who collected bird specimens also observed the stars, or collected antiquities on their way.
 
This paper will argue that integrating the history of archaeology into scholarship on earth, life and human sciences will expand the history of science both geographically and thematically. It will do so under the premise that stones, species, stars, and the soil cannot be detached from one another. The paper will focus on the labour used for turning antiquarian finds into scientific objects; and trace what happens when objects or people do not acquiésce to this process. Studying three distinct spaces – the field, the museum, and a famous tourist site of a temple – it suggests a non-linear analyses of the sciences of time, moving beyond a teleology that assumes that every excavated object leads to institutionalised knowledge, disciplines, and ‘sciences’ classically conceived. The paper hereby challenges longstanding assumptions about the seemingly self-evident relationship between archaeology with scientific methods, progress and modernity. It argues that it is beyond the museum, in a historical anthropology of scientific practices in global and intercultural contexts, where historians could recognise cultural difference in the collections they study, hereby also illuminating crucial debates on colonial legacies in museums and field-work. Such an approach is crucial for our understanding of how the history of science until now has related to time, other cultures, and material culture itself.