Fossil Histories: South Asian Natural Heritage in Manchester Museum and Beyond

Amelia Bonea, Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM, University of Manchester), is Principal Investigator. JRRI Pilot grant 2023-24.

How and why did museums collect fossils from the Indian subcontinent? What happened to these relics of past geological ages once they were removed from their original abodes and incorporated into institutional and political imaginaries elsewhere?

The project addresses these questions by documenting the history of the small collection of fossils from the Indian subcontinent in the Manchester Museum. It focuses particularly on the acquisition, in the 1880s, of several vertebrate fossils from the Siwalik Hills and their subsequent afterlives as museum specimens. Studying the materiality of the fossil collection alongside more ‘traditional’ archives of science, it seeks to locate this assemblage within a broader landscape of natural history collecting in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

The project builds on Amelia Bonea’s previous work on the institutionalization of palaeontology in the Indian subcontinent. This revealed that histories of South Asian fossil collections are poorly documented and that such collections, as well as natural heritage more generally, rarely feature in debates about the decolonisation of museums and science. The study is therefore part of a broader agenda to draw attention to these neglected histories of science and the work of Earth scientists in South Asia and beyond. It contributes a focus on natural heritage to ongoing debates about the decolonisation of museums, raising awareness about the Indian subcontinent’s rich biodiversity and its scientific relevance to the study of the deep past.

This pilot project is funded by the John Rylands Research Institute and runs between January and March 2024. It benefits from the expertise of two scientific collaborators, palaeontologists Em Prof Ashok Sahni (Panjab) and Dr David Gelsthorpe (Manchester Museum). Dr Kath Reed also joined the project in February 2024 as Research Assistant.

• https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/amelia-bonea
• https://ameliabonea.com/about-me/