Nature and Antiquities examines the relation between the natural sciences, anthropology, and archaeology in the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the reader across the Americas from the Southern Cone to Canada, across the Andes, the Brazilian Amazon, Mesoamerica, and the United States, the book explores the early history of archaeology from a Pan-American perspective. The volume breaks new ground by entreating archaeologists to acknowledge the importance of ways of knowing that resulted from the study of nature in the history of archaeology. Some of the contributions to this volume trace the part conventions, practices, and concepts from natural history and the natural sciences played in the history and making of the discipline. Others set out to uncover, reassemble, or adjust our vision of collections that research historians of archaeology have disregarded or misrepresented—because their nineteenth-century makers would refuse to comply with today’s disciplinary borders and study natural specimens and antiquities in conjunction, under the rubric of the territorial, the curious or the universal. Other contributions trace the sociopolitical implications of studying nature in conjunction with “indigenous peoples” in the Americas—inquiring into what it meant and entailed to comprehend the inhabitants of the American continent in and through a state of nature.

Learn how the deep history of nature became a dominant paradigm of historical thinking, through a study of landscapes of India. Winner of the BSHS Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History of Science, Shortlisted for the Pfizer Award for an Outstanding Book in the History of Science by the History of Science Society In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future. In Inscriptions of Nature, Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality. Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.

The origins of the Antiquities Act / Ronald F. Lee -- Edgar Lee Hewett and the politics of archaeology / Raymond Harris Thompson -- John F. Lacey : conservation's public servant / Rebecca Conard -- Landmark decision : the Antiquities Act, big-stick conservation, and the modern state / Char Miller -- Showdown at Jackson Hole : a monumental backlash against the Antiquities Act / Hal Rothman -- President Carter's coup : an insider's view of the 1978 Alaska monument designations / Cecil D. Andrus and John C. Freemuth -- The Antiquities Act and the exercise of presidential power : the Clinton monuments / Mark Squillace -- Antiquities Act monuments : the Elgin marbles of our public lands? / James R Rasband -- The foundation for American public archaeology : section 3 of the Antiquities Act of 1906 / Francis P. McManamon -- The Antiquities Act and historic preservation / Jerry L. Rogers -- The Antiquities Act at one hundred years : a Native American perspective / Joe E. Watkins -- The Antiquities Act and nature conservation / David Harmon -- The Antiquities Act meets the Federal Land Policy and Management Act / Elena Daly and Geoffrey B. Middaugh -- Co-managed monuments : a field report on the first years of Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument / Darla Sidles and Dennis Curtis -- Application of the Antiquities Act to the oceans : something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue / Brad Barr and Katrina Van Dine -- The Antiquities Act : a cornerstone of archaeology, historic preservation, and conservation / David Harmon, Francis P. McManamon, and Dwight T. Pitcaithley -- Appendix: essential facts and figures on the national monuments.

The origins of the Antiquities Act / Ronald F. Lee -- Edgar Lee Hewett and the politics of archaeology / Raymond Harris Thompson -- John F. Lacey : conservation's public servant / Rebecca Conard -- Landmark decision : the Antiquities Act, big-stick conservation, and the modern state / Char Miller -- Showdown at Jackson Hole : a monumental backlash against the Antiquities Act / Hal Rothman -- President Carter's coup : an insider's view of the 1978 Alaska monument designations / Cecil D. Andrus and John C. Freemuth -- The Antiquities Act and the exercise of presidential power : the Clinton monuments / Mark Squillace -- Antiquities Act monuments : the Elgin marbles of our public lands? / James R Rasband -- The foundation for American public archaeology : section 3 of the Antiquities Act of 1906 / Francis P. McManamon -- The Antiquities Act and historic preservation / Jerry L. Rogers -- The Antiquities Act at one hundred years : a Native American perspective / Joe E. Watkins -- The Antiquities Act and nature conservation / David Harmon -- The Antiquities Act meets the Federal Land Policy and Management Act / Elena Daly and Geoffrey B. Middaugh -- Co-managed monuments : a field report on the first years of Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument / Darla Sidles and Dennis Curtis -- Application of the Antiquities Act to the oceans : something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue / Brad Barr and Katrina Van Dine -- The Antiquities Act : a cornerstone of archaeology, historic preservation, and conservation / David Harmon, Francis P. McManamon, and Dwight T. Pitcaithley -- Appendix: essential facts and figures on the national monuments.