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This article focuses on two places that acted as spaces of training or "scientific" sociability for archaeology and palaeontology in the nineteenth century: two hotels in Brittany and a small house in Montevideo, which were meeting points and places for the exchange of ideas among the fieldworkers of these disciplines in the making. The spaces discussed here have in common their being located in regions far from the main scholarly institutions: this is a phenomenon that occurs in the private sphere, at the crossroads of a literate and commercial culture that characterizes the scientific practices of Europe and Latin America, in spaces that are not necessarily linked to state or metropolitan infrastructures. The study of places that are removed from the metropolis reveals the great similarity between European and non-European provincial localities, which explains why Montevideo and Carnac are brought together in the same article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Centaurus brings together historians from Latin America and Europe to trace the history of some scientific collections and museums, in order to reassess their significance and to draw a more nuanced international geography of the sciences. Our dossier focuses on "provincial" natural history and archaeology museums and collections. For the sake of simplicity, we use the term "provincial" to qualify these "peripheral" spaces that encompassed colonial and post-colonial territories as well as the European provincial regions, but the label is only a convention as some of these collections were sometimes displayed in national capitals. Focusing on objects, people, or institutions, with case studies from Mexico, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, Northern Italy, Catalonia, and Switzerland, the articles gathered here reveal the scholarly practices and sociability of the many collectors, brokers, and go-betweens acting in the "provinces," especially those of the amateurs. These essays show the relevance of the history of provincial collections to the wider history of scientific museums. Indeed, the shift of focus from the major institutions of the metropolitan capitals to the many collections and museums created in less central cities and regions sheds light on many issues that have remained in the background within the more centrally focused historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, an animal from the Americas known as the armadillo offered an extraordinary subject for zoologists engaged in the study of the outer covering of four-limbed vertebrates and its components, The armadillo, a cuirassed living mammal, had excited the curiosity of European naturalists since the early sixteenth century, and their shells had thus become a common sight in collections. The armadillo's carapace provided a structure that could be scrutinized in order to understand animal materials, one that afforded the use of microscopes and chemistry in the emerging life sciences that tried to understand the relationship between form and function and the chemical composition of animated matter. The carapace of the armadillo moved from the culture of curiosity in which it was first collected into the new field of animal chemistry, a key move that is crucial for historians to understand the emergence of the study of animal materials. Armadillos accompanied the expansion of chemistry, microscopy, and physics as they were used to study the materials that constituted the mammals' dermal coverings. This paper mines nineteenth-century publications for episodes connected to the long story of the study of this shell's anatomical and chemical contrivances, and the crucial role it played both in the emergence of new scientific knowledge and in the discovery of new bio-inspired materials still derived from this animal today. This paper is part of a special issue entitled "Making Animal Materials in Time," edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being a charlatan, or the question of trustworthy knowledge If charlatans are the "infamous characters" of a knowledge society, what historical strategies have been used to identify them as charlatans, and, on the other hand, which are the historical strategies that the charlatans used to define and transmit their expertise, and which scientific practices and cultural techniques were adopted and circulated in the sphere that can be called "charlatan knowledge"? Far from being "ignorant" - an argument used by licensed medical doctors to ban charlatans from the practice of medicine - charlatans from the second half of the nineteenth century were well aware of the legal requirements and news of the profession. With this question, Bennati unveiled that he was not the only one that navigated in the realm of the unknown, where physicians and charlatans alike accepted producing the illusion of a cure. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the history of instructions as a form of remote government, mechanism to educate and direct gestures. It is, argues that the instructions confront public with a story of a time scale that transcends administrative reforms, the revolutions and the ruptures of political order. It is opined that the history of the instructions illuminates how the interests and expectations of individuals are linked with the practices of administration and trade in which they are immersed as well as configure other institutions and subjectivities.

The picture of a ‘pony in pajamas’ is used to construct the backstory of a deadly animal disease in three parts. First, by focusing on the figure of the ‘author’ of the cloth depicted in the picture, Scottish veterinarian Robert John Stordy, one can examine the repercussions of transhumant biographical itineraries. Second, a focus on regional epizootics helps alter scales defining the local versus the global. Third, the global circulation of mules and the medicines used to cure them illustrate displacement of objects and knowledge that shaped the understanding of sickness and its remedies. Thus, the remedies and horse-clothes used in Uganda not only speak of things and beings that linked distant geographies and contexts, they also mark the multiple hubs where these connections did occur, propelled in part by commercial interests, biographical itineraries and, of course, randomness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the impact of diverse aspects of Darwin's works on the practices of mammal paleontology in different moments of nineteenth-century Argentina. Starting with Darwin through the publications of Florentino Ameghino, it shows the extraordinary complexity of systematic paleontology that characterized the second half of the nineteenth century. Neither “natural selection” nor “struggle for life” seemed to have shaped the practices of vertebrate paleontology in Argentina. Darwin's earlier work as a voyageur and geologist together with later concerns about intermediate forms and variation allow for an assessment of the impact of Darwin's work on the practice of paleontology in Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the emerging career of school preceptor Florentino Ameghino (1854?-1911), a fossil collector from the Argentine countryside who became an international authority in the 1880s and 1890s in the field of prehistory and the paleontology of vertebrates. Reflecting on investigations in the 1870s about the antiquity of humanity in the Argentine Pampas, Ameghino's story allows us to examine how the press circulated news in a context where political and intellectual matters were closely interconnected. This work is based on a collection of newspaper clippings gathered by Ameghino between 1874 and 1897 and found in the Jorge Furt Library, a private collection of books located near Luján, the city where it is said that Ameghino was born. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the itineraries of the depictions of Steller’s sea-cow, an aquatic mammal from the Bering Insel that went extinct in 1768, leaving behind almost no evidence of its former existence. This story of images travelling around can be read as a case study of how “proxy images” worked, but also as a good example of how images work to creatr new realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the late nineteenth century' an international controversy arose referred to the probable existence of certain diseases such as leprosy, syphilis and lupus in pre-Columbian America. Led by the American physician Albert Sidney Ashmead (1850-1911), it brought together scholars from Europe and the Americas. In this context, certain types of Peruvian archaeological pottery and "mummies", along with series of photographs illustrating the effects of these diseases in contemporary patients, met a prominent role as comparative evidence. In this article we analyze how this type of collections were used as evidence in the debates about pathologies of the past, an issue that from a historical standpoint have received considerably little attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the Aztec children, two children with microcephaly who were allegedly kidnapped from a city located in Central America in the 19th century. Topics include elements of racism in science and ethnology in the period, perceptions of dwarfism and human abnormalities, and interest in Mexican civilizations during the 19th century. Other topics include works on Aztec ruins and civilization and antiquarian Adrien de Longpérier's arguments again the Aztec children.

This paper traces the trade routes of South American fossil mammal bones in the 1830s, thus elaborating both local and intercontinental networks that ascribed new meanings to objects with little intrinsic value. It analyses the role of British consuls, natural-history dealers, administrative instructions and naturalists, who took the bones from the garbage pits of ranches outside Buenos Aires and delivered them into the hands of anatomists. For several years, the European debates on the anatomy of Megatherium were shaped by the arrival in London of a small living mammal and the ideas and evidence received from Montevideo on the existence of huge fossil bony armours. These debates culminated late in 1838 in the creation of the extinct genus Glyptodon by Richard Owen as a result of the exchange of letters, objects and depictions, and a series of contingent events. Based on primary sources and South American scholarship, this paper aims to contribute to the current debates among historians of science about the mobility of knowledge, as well as presenting the condition that made Charles Darwin's work possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes various intellectual practices tied to the use of public and private documents in the practice of history in Argentina over the second half of the nineteenth century. Starting from the "question of limits," this essay analyzes the work of bibliophiles Manuel Ricardo Trelles and Juan Martín Leguizamón, both of whom tried to historically reconstruct the territorial unity of Argentina. it shows how this work lies at the crossroads of antiquarian studies, History, and Natural History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the reliability of evidence to the reported ruins found at different sites across the Spanish empire. It is inferred that the drawings, plans and comments by the military engineers in the discovered ruins in Naples remained unpublished. Details regarding the competition between different individuals and networks for the possession of antiquity and objects of the ruins is presented.

Focuses on the natural history and the ordering nature of museums in Latin America. Rupture of colonial order; Growth of specialization of natural sciences; Descriptions of genera and species from fossils.