Rare Books in the Jungle: Searching for the Sources of the Biologia-Centrali Americana
with John W. Hessler
During the nineteenth century, some of the first explorers to the ruins of the ancient Maya cities of Central America and the surrounding landscapes began to collect and document the huge number of insect, animal, and plant species that inhabit the various micro-environments that make them up. One project in particular stands as a monument to this pursuit; the 51 volume Biologia Centrali-Americana, edited by Osbert Salvin and Frederick Ducane Godman. The work, which besides the volumes devoted to zoology, also contained 7 volumes dedicated to archaeology and the photographs of the explorer Alfred Maudslay.
Maudslay would spend years traveling through the jungle, clearing the newly found archaeological sites, with a camera and notebook in hand. For epigraphers and linguists, his photographs, and the drawings made from them by the artist Annie Hunter, would be the tools used to start the long process of the decipherment of the forgotten and, at the time, unreadable Maya script.
For Godman and Salvin, inclusion of archaeology into the Biologia fit well into the environmental history of the region as they conceived it, placing man and his modification of the landscape together with natural processes, as a unit. Overall, the work was monumental and took hundreds of collectors, illustrators and printers, more than 37 years to complete. This talk will trace some of the unknown collectors and scholars who worked to assemble the specimens that make up the Biologia and talk about the role that archaeology played in this huge publishing project. It will also discuss other photographers, illustrators and artists, like Annie Hunter, Aldela Breton, Alice Le Plongeon, Desire Charnay, and many others who documented both the archaeological and natural history of the region from his recent book Exposing the Maya.
Information used in and related to the presentation:
Digital version of the Biologia Centrali-Americana provided by the Smithsonian.
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/730
Rare books of the Jungle
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John W. Hessler
Applied Mathematician, Computer Scientist, and Professor in Baltimore, MD.
https://jhessler.net
When not climbing in the Alps, looking for rare plants in the desert, or searching for endangered butterflies in some remote valley, John Hessler is a lecturer in the Odyssey Program and at the Osher Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the director of the λ-LAB (Lambda-Lab), where they apply high-performance computing, bioinformatics, and geospatial analysis to difficult questions concerning the bioarchaeology, biogeography & spillover of zoonotic diseases.
Formerly the Curator of the Kislak Collection of the Archaeology of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress, Hessler is interested in the links between the bioarchaeology, biogeaography and ethnobiology of Native cultures in the Americas. Presently, his research centers on a study of the biogeography and ethnobotany of the Cahuilla in the deserts of Joshua Tree National Park.
Interested in the historical foundations of biogeography and the influence of climate change on biodivsersity, he is also tracing the current locations of the specimens and the biographies of the collectors involved in the publication of the monumental Biologia Centrali-Americana.
The author of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times bestseller, MAP: Exploring the World, his recent books include, Collecting for a New World, which traces the provenance of the archaeological collections of the Library of Congress, and (with Katia Sainson), Exposing the Maya: Early Archaeological Photography in the Americas.