Abstract Summary
The sciences and the humanities have not only been sharing practices, concepts or epistemic virtues with one another, they also cooperated in a concrete, practical and material way. Around 1880, scientific archaeology emerged. In several instances, “historians of material culture”, meaning archaeologists, orientalists, (art-)historians and paleographers, and scientists shared a research interest in archaeological objects and the material analysis thereof. Objects excavated during nineteenth-century colonial expeditions shifted the research focus of historical disciplines towards material sources. The materiality of artefacts held information about the object’s date, origin and manufacturing. However, material analysis required scientific methods. What is still largely unknown, is that historians therefore cooperated with chemists or botanists, who e.g. microscopically analyzed plant fibres in ancient manuscripts or Babylonian enameled tiles, and thus were able to answer historico-cultural questions about ancient civilizations lacking textual sources. My project investigates cooperations between the aforementioned disciplines in terms of their formation and development in German speaking countries from 1880-1930. Using two examples of cooperations, between paleography and botany and assyriology and chemistry, I will uncover cooperative networks and transfer of knowledge among cooperators. In addition, through the analysis of the actor’s research objects (such as paper samples) and the construction of the scientific methods applied to them, I explore the cooperations’ underlying shared practices of knowledge organization, knowledge production, and innovation processes. Generally, my case studies provide insights into the dynamics of cooperative research across disciplinary boundaries between the sciences and the humanities around 1900.
