Finders,Keepers: Collecting Sciences and Collecting Practice

On the field sciences see Kuklick Henrika Kohler Robert E. (eds), “Science in the field”, Osiris, n.s., xi (1996); and Jardine Nicholas Secord James A. Spary Emma C. (eds), Cultures of natural history (Cambridge, 1996). Also Kohler Robert E. , Landscapes and labscapes: Exploring the lab-field border in biology (Chicago, 2002).

Johns Adrian , “Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society”, in Reading, society, and politics in early modern England, ed. by Sharpe Kevin Zwicker Steven N. (New York, 2003), 244–71; and Secord James A. , “Knowledge in transit”, Isis, xcv (2004), 2004–72.

Martin Rudwick, review of Knell Simon J. , The culture of English geology, 1815–1851 (Aldershot, 2000), in The Times Literary Supplement, 4 May 2001, 27.

te Heesen Anke Spary Emma C. , (eds), Sammeln als Wissen: Das Sammeln und seine wissen-schaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung (Göttingen, 2001).

We may also undervalue collecting because, unlike experimenting, it is not socially exclusive and can be recreational. We thus associate collecting with unskilled labour or vacationing.

Heesen Te Spary , Sammeln als Wissen (ref. 4); and Findlen Paula , Possessing Nature: Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy (Berkeley, CA, 1994). Also Crane Susan A. , Collecting and historical consciousness in early nineteenth-century Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2000); and Beretta Marco (ed.), From private to public: Natural collections and museums (Sagamore Beach, MA, 2005).

Useful points of entry are Impey Oliver MacGregor Arthur (eds), The origins of museums: The cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (New York, 1985); Duncker Ludwig , “Die Kultur des Sammelns und ihre pädagogische Bedeutung”, Neue Sammlung, xxx (1990), 1990–65; and (despite its lack of a bibliography!) Ingo Herklotz, “Neue Literatur zur Sammlungsgeschichte”, Kunstchronik, xlvii (1994), 1994–35. Recent works include Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 (London, 1990; translated from the original French edn, Paris, 1987); Becker Christoph , Vom Raritäten-Kabinett zur Sammlung als Institution: Sammeln und Ordnen in Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Engelsbach, 1996); and Grote Andreas (ed.), Macrocosmos in Microcosmo — Die Welt in der Stube: Zur Geschichte des Sammelns 1450 bis 1800 (Opladen, 1994).

For example: Appadurai Arjun (ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (New York, 1986); Miller Daniel (ed.), Material cultures: Why some things matter (Chicago, 1998); Tilly Christopher (ed.), Reading material culture (Oxford, 1990); Mukerji Chandra , From graven images: Patterns of modern materialism (New York, 1983); and Brewer John Porter Roy (eds), Consumption and the world of goods (London, 1993).

For example: Yanni Carla , Nature's museums: Victorian science and the architecture of display (Baltimore, MD, 2000); Forgan Sophie , “The architecture of display: Museums, universities, and objects in nineteenth-century Britain”, History of science, xxxii (1994), 1994–62; Karp Ivan Lavine Steven D. Kreamer Christine M. (eds), Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display (Washington, DC, 1991); Pearce Susan M. , Museums, objects, and collections: A cultural study (Washington, DC, 1992); and MacDonald Sharon (ed.), The politics of display: Museums, science, culture (London, 1998).

Good bibliographical guides to this growing literature are the essays by Alberti Samuel Bennett Jim Forgan Sophie Kohlstedt Sally G. in “Focus: Museums and the history of science”, Isis, xcvi (2006), 559–608. The most celebrated analysis of the politics of display is Harraway Donna , “Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–30”, in Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science (New York, 1989), 26–58; but see also Schudson Michael , “Paper tigers: A sociologist follows cultural studies into the wilderness”, Lingua Franca, vii/6 (Aug. 1997), 49–56.

Wonders Karen , Habitat dioramas: Illusions of wilderness in museums of natural history (Stockholm, 1993); and McOuat Gordon , “Kinds, patronage and commodities: How the British Museum went from collecting (and exchanging) patronage to collecting (and exchanging) commodities and what that might say about natural objects” (unpublished essay, 2005). Museums' strategies of building collections varied, and a comparative history is much needed: Lynn K. Nyhart and Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr, personal communications (on the Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg museums).

Kohler Robert E. , All creatures: Naturalists, collectors, and biodiversity, 1850–1950 (Princeton, 2006).

Pickstone John V. , Ways of knowing: A new history of science, technology and medicine (Chicago, 2000); and idem, “Museological science? The place of the analytical / comparative in nineteenth-century science, technology and medicine”, History of science, xxxii (1994), 1994–38.

Zeller Suzanne , Inventing Canada: Early Victorian science and the idea of a transcontinental nation (Toronto, 1987), esp. pp. 4–6, 8–9, 269–74.

McLeary Erin , “Science in a bottle: The medical museum in North America, 1850–1940”, Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001, esp. chaps. 2–3.

Klein Ursula , “Shifting ontologies, changing classifications: Plant materials from 1700 to 1830”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xxxvi (2005), 261–329; and eadem, Experiments, models, paper tools: Cultures of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century (Stanford, 2003), chap. 5.

Bulmer Martin Bales Kevin Sklar Kathyrn K. , (eds), The social survey in historical perspective (New York, 1991); and Matless David , “Regional surveys and local knowledges: The geographical imagination in Britain, 1918–239”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, xvii (1992), 1992–80.

Mineralogical samples also now serve mainly as material for structural and chemical experiment.

For example: Pearce Susan M. , On collecting: An investigation into collecting in the European tradition (London, 1995); eadem, Collecting in contemporary perspective (London, 1998); Elsner John Cardinal Roger , The culture of collecting (Cambridge, MA, 1994); Muensterberger Werner , Collecting, an unruly passion: Psychological perspectives (Princeton, 1994); and Stewart Susan , On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Baltimore, MD, 1984).

Knell , Culture of English geology (ref. 3); idem, “Collecting and excavation in palaeontology”, and “Palaeontological excavation: Historical perspectives”, Geological curator, vi/2 (1994), 49–56, 57–69. Also Knell , “The roller-coaster of museum geology”, in Pearce Susan M. (ed.), Exploring science in museums: New research in museum studies (London, 1996), 29–56.

Porter Roy S. , “Science, provincial culture and public opinion in Enlightenment England”, The British journal for eighteenth-century studies, iii (1980), 20–46.

Thackray Arnold , “Natural knowledge in cultural context: The Manchester model”, American historical review, lxxix (1974), 672–709.

For example: Lanham Uri , The bone hunters: The heroic age of paleontology in the American West (New York, 1973); Colbert Edwin H. , Men and dinosaurs: The search in field and laboratory (New York, 1968); and Rea Tom , Bone wars: The excavation and celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's dinosaur (Pittsburgh, 2001).

Lanham , Bone hunters (ref. 23) (on field sites); Rainger Ronald , “Collectors and entrepreneurs: Hatcher, Wortman, and the structure of American vertebrate paleontology circa 1900”, Earth sciences history, ix (1990), 14–21; and Whybrow P. J. , “A history of fossil collecting and preparation techniques”, Curator, xxviii (1985), 1985–26.

Vetter Jeremy , “Cowboys, scientists, and fossils: Field work and local collaboration in the American West”, unpublished paper, 2006; and idem, “The regional development of science: Knowledge, environment, and field work in the Central Plains and Rocky Mountains, 1860–1920”, Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

Kohler , All creatures (ref. 12).

The idea of residential and cosmopolitan knowledge is developed ibid., esp. pp. 156–62.

The following is drawn from Kohler , All creatures (ref. 12), chap. 2; Wonders , Habitat dioramas (ref. 11); and Aron Cindy , Working at play: A history of vacations in the United States (New York, 1999).

Kohler , All creatures (ref. 12), 4–7.

Koerner Lisbet , Linnaeus: Nature and nation (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Müller-Wille Staffan , Botanik und weltweiter Handel: Zur Begründung eines Natürlichen Systems der Pflanzen durch Carl von Linné (1707–1778) (Berlin, 1999); Osborne Michael A. , Nature, the exotic, and the science of French colonialism (Bloomington, IN, 1994); and idem, “Acclimatizing the world: A history of the paradigmatic colonial ‘science’”, Osiris, n.s., xv (2001), 2001–51.

Jasanoff Maya , Edge of empire: Lives, culture, and conquest in the East, 1650–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

Allen David E. , The naturalist in Britain: A social history (London, 1976; repr. Princeton, 1994). There is no comparable survey of recreational naturalizing in other countries; but see Phillips Denise , “Friends of nature: Urban sociability and regional natural history in Dresden, 1800–1850”, Osiris, n.s., xviii (2003), 2003–59.

Larsen Anne L. , “Not since Noah: The English scientific zoologists and the craft of collecting, 1800–1840”, Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1993. On collector networks see also Goldstein Daniel , “‘Yours for science’: The Smithsonian Institution's correspondents and the shape of scientific community in nineteenth-century America”, Isis, lxxxv (1994), 1994–99.

Alberti Samuel J. M. M. , “Amateurs and professionals in one country: Biology and natural history in late Victorian Yorkshire”, Journal of the history of biology, xxxiv (2001), 115–47.

Secord Anne , “Science in the pub: Artisan botanists in early nineteenth-century Lancashire”, History of science, xxxii (1994), 269–315.

Cole Douglas , Captured heritage: The scramble for Northwest Coast artifacts (Seattle, 1985).

On frontier mediators in general see White Richard , The middle ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991); and Merrell James H. , Into the American woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania frontier (New York, 1999).

Cole , Captured heritage (ref. 36), 106–9.

Kohler , All creatures (ref. 12), chap. 7.

For example: Sturtevant William C. , “Does anthropology need museums?”, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, lxxxii (1969), 619–49; Lurie Nancy O. , “Museumland revisited”, Human organization, xl (1981), 1981–7; and Stocking W. George Jr (ed.), Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture (Madison, WI, 1985).

Gosden Chris Knowles Chantal , Collecting colonialism: Material culture and colonial change (Oxford, 2001) (on New Guinea); Schildkrout Enid Keim Curtis A. (eds), The scramble for art in Central Africa (New York, 1998); Jasanoff, Edge of empire (ref. 31) (on collecting in India and Egypt); and Griffiths Tom , Hunters and collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia (New York, 1996).

The best general history is still Daniel Glyn E. , A hundred years of archaeology (London, 1950); a second edition, A hundred and fifty years of archaeology (London, 1975) brings the story to 1970. Other useful points of entry include Stiebing William H. Jr , Uncovering the past: A history of archaeology (Buffalo, NY, 1993); Hudson Kenneth , A social history of archaeology: The British experience (London, 1981); Willey Gordon R. Sabloff Jeremy A. , A history of American archaeology (London, 1974); and Levine Philippa , The amateur and the professional: Antiquarians, historians, and archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (New York, 1986).

Daniel Glyn E. , The three ages: An essay on archaeological method (Cambridge, 1943); Gräslund Bo , “Relative chronology: Dating methods in Scandinavian archaeology”, Norwegian archaeological review, ix (1976), 1976–126; and idem, The birth of prehistoric chronology: Dating methods and dating systems in nineteenth-century Scandinavian archaeology (Cambridge, 1987). See also Klindt-Jensen Ole , A history of Scandinavian archaeology (London, 1975).

Bowden Mark , Pitt Rivers: The life and archaeological work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, DCL, FRS, FSA (Cambridge, 1991).

For example: Wheeler Morton , Alms for oblivion: An antiquary's scrapbook (London, 1966), chap. 5; and Hudson , Social history of archaeology (ref. 42), 96–97. Hudson emphasizes what was lost in the transition from antiquarianism to scientific archaeology.

Daniel , A hundred years (ref. 42), chaps. 6–9; and Daniel Glyn Refrew Colin , The idea of prehistory (Edinburgh, 1988).

For example: Petrie William M. Flinders , Methods and aims in archaeology (London, 1904; repr. New York, 1972); idem, Seventy years in archaeology (New York, 1932); Wheeler Mortimer , Archaeology from the earth (Oxford, 1954); idem, Alms for oblivion (ref. 45); Piggott Stuart , Approach to archaeology (Cambridge, MA, 1959); and De Laet Sigfried J. , Archaeology and its problems (London, 1957). Few of the many popular accounts of celebrated digs pay much heed to field practice.

On natural and man-made substances in chemistry, see Klein Ursula , Experiments, models, paper tools: Cultures of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century (Stanford, 2003).

Kohler Robert E. , “Place and practice in field biology”, History of science, xl (2002), 189–210; and idem, Landscapes and labscapes (ref. 1), esp. chaps. 7, 8. On place generally see Ophir Adi Shapin Steven , “The place of knowledge: A methodological survey”, Science in context, iv (1991), 1991–21; and Gieryn Thomas F. , “A space for place in sociology”, Annual review of sociology, xxvi (2000), 2000–96.

On “practices of place” see Kohler , Landscapes and labscapes (ref. 1).

Studies that deal with scientific collecting on the imperial fringe include Brockway Lucille H. , Science and colonial expansion: The role of the British royal botanic gardens (New York, 1979; repr. New Haven, 2002); Fan Fa-Ti , “Victorian naturalists in China: Science and informal empire”, The British journal of the history of science, xxxvi (2003), 2003–26; idem, British naturalists in Qing China: Science, empire, and cultural encounter (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Miller David P. , “Joseph Banks, empire, and ‘centers of calculation’ in late Hanoverian London”, in Visions of empire: Voyages, botany, and representations of Nature, ed. by Miller and Riell Peter Hanns (Cambridge, 1996), 21–37; MacKay David , “Agents of empire: The Banksian collectors and evaluation of new lands”, ibid., 38–57; and Camerini Jane , “Wallace in the field”, Osiris, n.s., xi (1996), 1996–65.

Shapin Steven , “The invisible technician”, American scientist, lxxvii (1989), 554–63.

Kohler , All creatures (ref. 12), chap. 5.

Gräslund , Birth of prehistoric chronology (ref. 43), chap. 4.

Ibid., chaps. 12–14.

For example, Oscar Montelius later insisted that his Bronze-Age classification derived from Darwinian theory, though his publications reveal that it must have originated in sorting burial objects, ibid., 116. Theory was of course more prestigious.

von Goethe Johann Wolfgang , “Über Naturwissenschaft im allgemeinen einzelne Betrachtungen und Aphorismen”, paragraph 110, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe Sämtliche Werke, xxv (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 113.

Gellner Ernest , Nations and nationalism (Ithaca, NY, 1983), 139. “Perhaps”, he added, “we can only describe things well when we have already understood them”.

For a similar moral economy see Shapin Steven , “The house of experiment”, Isis, lxxix (1988), 373–404; also Kohler Robert E. , Lords of the fly: Drosophila genetics and the experimental life (Chicago, 1994), chaps. 4–5.

There is a large literature on common-property regimens, but exemplary historical case studies are Netting Robert M. , Balancing on an alp: Ecological change and continuity in a Swiss mountain community (New York, 1981); and McKean Margaret A. , “Management of traditional common lands (Iriachi) in Japan”, in Proceedings of the Conference on Common Property Resource Management (Washington, DC, 1986), 533–89.

For example: De Laet , Archaeology and its problems (ref. 47). De Laet writes of the communal imperative to publish prompt and full descriptions of sites and objects.

On the “naturalization” of lab practices, see Gooday Graeme , “‘Nature’ in the laboratory: Domestication and discipline with the microscope in Victorian life science”, The British journal for the history of science, xxiv (1991), 307–41; and Kohler Robert E. , “Labscapes: Naturalizing the laboratory”, History of science, xl (2002), 2002–501.