Reading, Writing, and Collecting Nature’s Traces

For centuries, people have accumulated natural things and arranged them into collections of examinable, comparable, and combinable specimens to deepen their knowledge of nature. In the last two decades, tracking the pathways of natural things through time, space, and taxonomies has become a popular approach in the historiography of natural history in order to understand this collecting phenomenon. Yet, natural things are also elusive things and the quest to follow them often is one of following their traces—the marks, imprints, indices, fragments, and textual and visual inscriptions—incidentally left behind, preserved, or intentionally created in their wake. Attending to the diverse traces historians rely upon to tell stories about natural things, this panel sheds light on the different forms of traces, their epistemic roles, and the conditions under which they emerge. Specifically, in case studies spanning the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the panel interrogates the various material manifestations traces can assume; the practices, procedures, and sometimes intentions by which traces are generated; and finally, the complex interrelations among traces, natural things, and the knowledge of nature derived from both.