Abstracts Archive

This session brings together papers that show how interactions with Latin American environments shaped scientific practices over three centuries, spanning the colonial and independent period. They discuss how a variety of scientific practices intersected with understandings of landscapes and environ...

In the 1890s, the British sought to open the Colony of Zululand to European settlement. The country, characterised by abundant green pastures, was a paradise for cattle, but had been plagued by a livestock disease that the Zulu called uNakane (Anglicised as nagana). Its cause, Zulu farmers insisted,...

This paper investigates the ambivalent character of Saturn in the context of sixteenth and early seventeenth literature on mining and metalworking in relation to desires, vices and virtues. The mythical figure Saturn, the son of Father Sky (Uranus) and Mother Earth (Gaia), was in medieval and renais...

In Japanese traditions there is continuity between nature and culture in so far as the sense of a place speaks directly to the intricate interplay between human and natural forces. This continuity is most clear in the historical practice of naming utamakura—storied places shared through literature...

Sailing in unknown territory is a dangerous matter. To make sailing safer, sailors all over the world created maps and rutters, sharing their experience and knowledge. Early modern Chinese seafarers are no exception and we know of several Chinese maps that include warnings of dangerous places along ...

This paper explores how different interpretations of the landscape and environment around two archaeological sites of 20th-century Central America (Quiriguá in Guatemala and Copán in Honduras) made these sites contested spaces. It follows thematic trends across the records of several North America...

The idealized representation of geological strata is one of the most striking aspects of late fifteenth-century Italian pictorial landscapes. Yet medieval learned “meteorology”, which also included today’s geology and mineralogy, largely ignored this highly visible feature of the Earth’s sur...

The 1959 Antarctic Treaty declared Antarctica a zone of peace and a ‘continent for science’. A number of scholars, however, have pointed to the geopolitical factors which inevitably underlie international scientific collaboration. Whilst accepting this view, the aim of this paper is to suggest t...

In Ten Months in the Fiji Islands (1864) Sarah Maria Smythe narrated her military husband’s recent evaluation of the strategic and economic feasibility of British plans to annex the Fiji archipelago. Her published letters described her own contributions to concurrent Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew-spo...

In recent decades mean sea level has become the almost unavoidable reference point of an impending environmental cataclysm. Before that it had been naturalized as the most common, almost intuitive vertical datum. The idea to neatly conceptualize the vertical boundary between land and sea as an avera...