Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência

Situated Nature: Field collecting practices and the construction of scientific locality in the long nineteenth-century

Field collecting is a political gesture. Sampling nature is a combined result of specific gestures of the hand, the use of dedicated tools, a reliance on intermediaries, on-site negotiations of natural history knowledge, and the mobilisation of agencies that are not neutral. The context of nation and empire building in the nineteenth century paralleled a soaring accumulation of natural objects supporting naturalist trade and both private and institutional collections. Practices of field collecting resonated with social and political stakes that were intertwined with matters of appropriation of the land and the environment. In the nineteenth century, experience of the field was key in the legitimation of science, and we propose a close-up approach of outdoor practices of collecting in order to better understand the localised, and situated, production of knowledge about nature. Twenty-five years after the publication of a special issue on "Science in the field" (Kuklick and Kohler, 1996) in Osiris, we intend to cast new light on the matter of field collecting of nature. We feel there is ample space for a new interrogation on the implications of the act of gathering a specimen, and we believe that issues of sourcing for intermediaries and prospect localities of collation, processes and logistics of transportation and conservation of specimens, as well as issues of the personal agendas behind collecting can benefit from the comparative approach between diverse case studies that a special issue can provide. Our proposal on the topic of "Situated Nature: Field collecting practices and the construction of scientific locality in the long nineteenth-century," follows the organisation of panels and workshops on the topic of Nineteenth-Century Practices of Collecting Nature, and will result in a submission for the open call of the British Journal for the History of Science-Themes for the 2022 issue. We are looking for researchers who investigate natural history collections in the long nineteenth-century and whose interest may fall within one or more of the following thematic and historiographical parameters: ▪ Manual labour, instructions, and logistics: collecting and collating in the field required informants, boxes and glass containers, insect pins as well as rifles. Specialized tools and recipes for preserving specimens were either transported to the field or improvised on site; ▪ Sociability, hierarchies, and identities: collecting was carried out by professional and non-professional practitioners whose individual lives, agendas and interests provide noteworthy case-studies. Issues of class, gender, race, authority, and identity were frequently a function of natural history exchanges,

The Gruta da Oliveira is a Middle Paleolithic site discovered in 1989 in the framework of the speleo‑archeological exploration of the karstic system associated with the spring of the Almonda River. Removal of the thick brecciated rubble that sealed its collapsed entrance allowed excavation, between 1992 and 2012, of the underlying, ~9 m‑thick archeological stratification. Besides lithic assemblages in flint, quartz and quartzite totaling >25,000 objects, Neandertal skeletal remains, and hearth features, the deposit also yielded abundant microfaunal, faunal and wood charcoal remains. Dated to the ~35‑105 ka interval by Radiocarbon, Uranium‑Thorium and Thermoluminescence, the Gruta da Oliveira is a reference succession for the paleoenvironmental and paleoanthropological study of the Upper Pleistocene of Iberia.