Collecting Humanity: Prehistory, Race and Instructions for ‘Scientific’ Travel, 1750-1850

This project seeks to explain why and how the amorphous Enlightenment concept of race hardened into categories of racial hierarchy at the same time as the notion of prehistory also began to take hold in European scientific thought. We investigate how natural historians and early archaeologists linked race with pre-history as the predominant conceptual means to imagine other peoples as static subjects, trapped in the past. We seek to uncover this history by untangling two intimately connected practices integral to the development of modern science and anthropology: the sending out of ‘scientific’ instructions for travelling natural historians, and the collecting of anthropological artefacts and human remains for teaching and display in European museums. Museums were sites of research, teaching and public engagement and were at the forefront of creating and disseminating colonial narratives about racial differences. By focusing on a Swedish-British tradition of instruction, we will show how professors, amateur scientists, creator communities of Indigenous or enslaved people, and museum staff were linked in networks of competing interests that shaped the vivid reimaginings of prehistory and racial difference in museums. The project is generously funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Image: Chartran, Theobald (1849-1907). Paleontologie: 'Le baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) reunit les documents pour son ouvrage sur les ossements fossiles'. Fresque "2022©Photo Scala, Florence" La Sorbonne, Paris, France