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SUMMARY:Skulls and idols: anthropometrics\, antiquity collections\, and th
 e origin of American man - Miruna Achim (Universidad Autonoma Metropolitan
 a\, Mexico City)
DTSTART:20120206T130000Z
DTEND:20120206T141500Z
UID:TALK35072@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Sophie Waring
DESCRIPTION:During the first half of the nineteenth century\, as Europeans
  and North Americans began to travel to newly-independent Spanish American
  countries and came in contact with the fabulous vestiges of ancient Ameri
 can civilizations\, a set  of problems motivated those among them who soug
 ht to explore the  ruins: who built them?  And did they give evidence of t
 he\norigin of American man? The answer they preferred almost always substi
 tuted some other for the  ancestors of the contemporary Indians who still 
 lived\nnear the  sites. But it was harder to say who that hypothetical oth
 er was.\n\nBy the late 1830s\, two sets of objects became central evidenti
 ary tokens for arguments supporting  a variety of hypotheses: human bones 
 (presumably from ancient tombs on ruined complexes) and 'idols' (mostly sc
 ulpted antiquities). This talk examines how these two kinds of objects cam
 e together in the same physical and epistemical space. I will be arguing\,
  in\nthe first place\, that bones and antiquities travelled together\, alo
 ng the same routes\, mobilized by explorers\, diplomats\, commercial agent
 s\, and collectors. However this proximity stimulated association\, it sti
 ll does not guarantee that these kinds of objects would be studied in dial
 ogue with each other. To understand how this happened\, I will be tracing 
 the emergence of artefacts and bones as the objects of study of two separa
 te scholarly traditions: the antiquarian tradition and comparative anatomy
 . As bones and artefacts came together\, their conceptual association drov
 e an increasingly insurmountable distance between contemporary Indians and
  their idols. Reinforcing the hypothesis that there was an anatomical gulf
  between ancient Americans and present-day ones\, the bones collected on s
 ite functioned within the sphere of exchange to delegitimize the Indian ti
 tle to the ruins and the use of these objects – whether to sell\, worshi
 p or\nsafeguard – and legitimated the role of the collector/savant.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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