Dr Amelia Bonea
Subject categories: Collections / Research
I have always been fascinated with the materiality of science and technology. In my first monograph, on telegraphy and journalism in colonial India, I wrote at length about underwater cables and steamers that plied between Britain and India, carrying newspapers among their cargo. [1] At the time, most of my work revolved around paper-based archives. Several years later, when I decided to turn a solitary footnote from that first book into a larger project about the global history of palaeontology in South Asia, I discovered fossil collections in museums. Not the polished specimens displayed for the public in glass cabinets, but the less prepared fossils hiding in storage and, sometimes, encasing rock. Most of them were body fossils, especially fragments of bone and teeth. A fragmentary record of the deep past that palaeontologists, geologists and other Earth scientists have been studying for years to reconstruct the history of life on our planet. To document the history of palaeoscience, I came to realize, one had to examine these archives of the Earth alongside the no-less-fragmentary paper archives created around them.
In fact, rock and paper, usually in the form of field tickets and museum labels, co-exist in fossil collections. Sometimes, such ephemera are precariously glued to specimens (Figure 2). The label attached to the tooth of this elephant-like animal I rediscovered in the Manchester Museum contains information that helps identify it: its scientific name (Elephas insignis), bestowed upon it by Hugh Falconer and Proby Cautley (abbreviated here as ‘Falc & Caut’). The geological epoch to which the fossil was believed to belong is also mentioned: ‘Upper Miocene,’ likely crossed out because the tooth was later dated to the Pliocene period. This makes it about 3 million years old. Finally, the label tells us that the tooth was collected in the Siwalik Hills in the Outer Himalayas. Since most museums do not store fossil specimens in the same cabinet as the scientific papers that describe them,[2] field tickets and labels such as these offer the first important glimpse into a fossil’s ‘life’ before it became a museum object.
Reconstructing the journey of fossils from the original sites of discovery to the cabinets of museums can be a challenging task. As Efram Sera-Shriar points out, cultural and natural heritage deposited in these institutions undergoes a process of ‘museumization,’ which severs the link with their original environments and meanings. [3] Museums tell stories, Gond artist Rajendar Kumar Shyam also reminds us, but the way they do so is highly selective:
I have imagined the gate of a museum, which is guarded by a lion through day and night. It is held in place by elephants and decorated by deer. I thought of it as a symbol of what the museum holds within and what it keeps out. I’ve shown the gate of the museum in the form of elephants, and within these elephants are day and night, moon and sun. There is an old Gond story about why the moon is surrounded by starts, and the sun is always alone. … I just wanted to show how the museum holds stories. [4]
The collection of South Asian fossils in the Manchester Museum tells stories about life on Earth and about the development of the museum as an imperial and trans-imperial institution. It comprises fourteen specimens from the Siwalik Hills, half of which are the remains of proboscideans, the broader mammal group that includes living elephants and their extinct relatives, such as mastodons and mammoths. Six of the proboscidean fossils are teeth. This teaches us something about the contingencies that create archives: teeth are more likely to be preserved in the fossil record than other body parts, but they would not have ended up in the museum had elephants not been considered valuable enough to be collected.
The fascination with these animals was scientifically, aesthetically, and commercially motivated. Proboscideans had been attracting growing attention in scientific circles at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when French naturalist Georges Cuvier compared fossilized remains found in different parts of the world with those of living elephants from India and Africa to establish the ‘reality of extinction.’ [5] Elephant teeth, in particular, are large and unique. This made them ideal candidates for incorporation into the increasingly global trade in natural history specimens, which tapped into expanding British, French and German imperial networks.
The Manchester Museum Archive, held at the University of Manchester Special Collections, testifies to this nineteenth-century fascination with elephants. At a meeting of the Natural History Club in September 1863, the Secretary showed some ‘magnificent Indian butterflies’ and a ‘tooth of the Indian Elephant with the grinding surface polished.’ [6] It is unclear where the tooth came from, but the butterflies had been presented by James Aspinall Turner, a cotton merchant and entomologist, whose son was an India resident at the time and had amassed a large collection of specimens. Perhaps the best example of Victorians’ fascination with proboscideans is Maharajah the elephant, whose skeleton now greets visitors at the entrance of the Museum.
Maharajah’s arrival in Manchester is well documented, in contrast to that of the fossil elephants. According to the Museum register, most of the fossils from the Indian subcontinent were acquired from the British Museum in the 1880s. [7] Between 1839 and 1842, that institution received a large collection of Siwalik fossils, excavated, with the help of many unnamed locals, by two ‘heterotopic men of science’ who helped advance the British imperial project in South Asia: irrigation engineer Proby Cautley and his friend, the surgeon-botanist Hugh Falconer. As Savithri Preetha Nair shows, it was this collection and its subsequent investigation that played a central role in popularizing the Siwalik Hills’ rich mammalian fossil record in Britain and beyond. [8] Indeed, the fossils travelled, as duplicates or casts, to university museums in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Berlin, Bonn and even Sendai in Japan. They also reached the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St Petersburg, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Danish Government. [9]
Some of these fossils also ended up in Manchester. Research conducted as part of the John Rylands Research Institute’s pilot project Fossil Histories revealed that in 1848, the Secretary of the British Museum invited Captain Thomas Brown, Curator of the Manchester Society for Natural History’s Museum, to London to ‘make a selection from the duplicates of the valuable collection of fossil bones of animals brought home by Major Cautley and Dr. Falconer from the Himalaya Mountains, India.’ The same article, published in the Manchester Guardian on 4 March 1848, reported that Brown had selected fossils ‘to the extent of two tons two hundred weight, which are now in the museum, Peter-street. They consist of portions of extinct mammalia (sic) and reptiles, of gigantic size, such as the sivatherium (sic), a four-horned quadruped; the mastodon, elephants, crocodiles, hogs, and tortoises.’ [10] This would suggest that the Manchester Museum’s collection of Siwalik fossil fauna was considerably more extensive than it currently is, although the fate of the missing specimens remains a mystery.
Manchester Museum was thus part of an imperial and trans-imperial network of institutions that collected natural heritage from the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fossil elephants from the Siwalik Hills were especially valuable, but other specimens, like the butterflies ‘presented’ by Turner, also testify to the attempt to collect the natural world of the Empire within the walls of the Museum. As objects of scientific investigation, fossils provided epistemic access to the deep past, but they also helped to weave that past into the politics of the present and the making of the Museum’s future.
Indeed, a fossil tooth from the Siwalik Hills is currently on display in the Fossils and Dinosaurs Galleries, as part of an exhibition on the evolution of the elephant. The accompanying label establishes the tooth’s scientific identity, but reveals nothing of the context of discovery and its subsequent journey from the Indian subcontinent to the Museum. Incorporated into institutional imaginaries elsewhere, the tooth now tells different stories. As Shyam put it, the fossil elephants themselves have become ‘symbol[s] of what the museum holds within and what it keeps out.’
[1] Amelia Bonea, The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c.1830-1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[2] One exception is The University of Tokyo Museum in Hongō.
[3] Efram Sera-Shriar, ‘From Museumization to Decolonisation: Fostering Critical Dialogues in the History of Science with a Haida Eagle Mask,’ BJHS, 56, 3 (2023): 309-28.
[4] Arun Wolf and Gita Wolf (eds.), Between Memory and Museum: A Dialogue with Folk and Tribal Artists (Chennai: Tara Books, 2017), pp. 18-19.
[5] Martin J. S. Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
[6] University of Manchester Special Collections, Manchester Museum Natural History Club Minutes, MMA/1/4/1: Second Meeting, 28 September 1863.
[7] David Gelsthorpe, electronic communication, 2 March 2023.
[8] Savithri Preetha Nair, ‘“Eyes and No Eyes”: Siwalik Fossil Collecting and the Crafting of Indian Palaeontology (1830-1847),’ Science in Context, 18, 3 (2005): 359-92.
[9] British Library, India Office Records, L/F/2/101, letter dated 30 August 1847.
[10] I wish to thank the RA on the Fossil Stories project, Dr Kath Reed, for identifying this source.