Archaeology of Zoos: Conference Sessions
WAC 5, Washington D.C. June 2003:
In June 2003, members of the Archaeology of Zoos Network and guests presented a session at the World Archaeological Congress in Washington D.C. Please visit our conference website here: www.logomancer.com/aoz/
ISAZ LONDON CONFERENCE: ANIMAL ARENAS
Session:
The archaeology of zoos
Session
organizers:
Sarah
Cross (English Heritage)
David
Van Reybrouck (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
The archaeology of zoos (I): landscapes and designs of wilderness
David Van Reybrouck (Department of History, Catholic University of Leuven,
Belgium):
Materializing
the human-animal boundary: an archaeology of the cage.
Sofia Åkerberg (Institute for the History of Ideas, Univesity of Umeå,
Sweden):
Nature
tamed -- not with a fist but with a smile: Zoo nature in London and Prague
Tony Axelsson (Department of Archaeology, Göteborg University, Sweden)
Landscapes
of inauthenticity – creation of past places and African savannas
Sarah Cross (English Heritage):
Landscape
with Lions: the place of zoos in 20th century ceremonial practice
The archaeology of zoos (II): between cultural and natural heritage
Cornelius Holtorf (Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge):
The
zoo as archive of memories
Oscar Ortman (Bohusläns Museum, Uddevalla, Sweden):
Replicants
of reality: on authenticity in zoos and museums
Kathryn Denning (Department of Anthropology, McMaster University,
Hamilton, Canada):
To
catch a quiddity
Cornelius Holtorf, University of Cambridge, United
Kingdom (ch264@cam.ac.uk)
David Van Reybrouck, Catholic University of Leuven,
Belgium (david.vanreybrouck@worldonline.be)
In recent years, archaeologists have
increasingly turned their attention to a study of material culture in
postmedieval, modern and contemporary contexts. One of the most intriguing
phenomena of the modern Western world is undoubtedly the zoo, despite the fact
that its rich material culture has been poorly understood.
In fact, the zoo is the site par
excellence where ideas about human uniqueness and human-animal
relationships, about colonialism and exoticism, about identity and otherness are
communicated, consumed and negotiated. Zoo architecture in particular
exemplifies how humans have experienced and represented the natural world
generally and animals in particular. Today’s zoos show a fascinating number of
paradoxes: designed by adults but particularly popular among children, directed
by academic insight but consumed mainly as entertainment, dedicated to respect
and survival but increasingly subjected to ethical objections. Zoos, therefore,
are a rich, if contentious, field of study.
Very recently, a number of
archaeologists have begun to turn their attention to zoos. Their interests
include material culture in the zoo, the ‘zoo experience’ as a landscaped
theme park, specific animal appeals to visitors, and the legitimation and
purpose of the zoos as a (natural) heritage attraction, an educational
institution and a centre of conservationist agendas. Some of these topics find
interesting parallels in the recent ‘heritage’ debates about the history and
current role of the cultural (and archaeological) heritage in our society.
Looking at zoos promises to create new perspectives on issues such as the
authenticity of artifacts, techniques of contextualization, the creation of rich
visitors’ experiences, the engineering of collective human identities, the
management of visitors in general and educational activities in particular, and
the role of material culture in the light of specific requirements and their
changes over time.
Paper
abstracts
Cornelius Holtorf (Department of
Archaeology, University of Cambridge): Introducing
Zoo Archaeology
This paper introduces the archaeology of
zoos, or Zoo Archaeology, as an emerging field of research. Zoo Archaeology is
part of a larger body of research on modern zoos that is now rapidly developing
in the humanities and social sciences. Zoo Archaeology is primarily concerned
with (a) the study of modern zoos of the 19th and 20th
centuries, thus making a contribution to the Archaeology of the modern world,
and (b) the analysis of zoos as outdoor presentations of natural heritage, thus
providing new ideas and ‘metaphorical links’ for the study of outdoor
archaeological heritage sites. Archaeological remains in zoos, especially in as
much as they relate to earlier phases of a zoo’s development, might also be
covered. This paper reviews tentative beginnings in Zoo Archaeology so far, and
introduces an international project “The Archaeology of Zoos” (funded by The
British Academy) that began its work in Dublin this week.
David Van Reybrouck (Department of
History, Catholic University of Leuven): The cage: towards an archaeology of
zoo architecture
In this paper, I want to
outline a history of zoo architecture in the 19th and 20th century in Western
Europe. Much has been written about the shifting human-animal boundary in
scientific, philosophical, and literary discourse. The zoo, however, is the
place par excellence where this
conceptual demarcation is literally materialized. A study of cage design offers
surprising insights into the nature and the development of human-animal
relationships. If the nineteenth-century fence served to protect the Victorian bourgeois
against the wild beasts, the late twentieth-century enclosure attempts to
protect the animals’ peace against any obnoxious visitors. This, then, is a
field where the archaeology of modern material culture, the history of
architecture and the history of ideas can meet.
Sofia Åkerberg (Institute for the History
of Ideas, University of Umeå): Knowledge
behind Bars: Guidebooks and the Public at the London Zoological Gardens during
the Victorian Period
The Zoological Gardens founded by the
Zoological Society of London were constructed in order to spread an interest of
natural history among the public. To facilitate this spread the Society
published guidebooks that would help the visitor to know what he were looking
at, a means of popular science or natural history. But since these guidebooks
are closely related to the travel handbook it is also possible to interpret a
visit to the Gardens as a journey. Not a geographical one, but a journey of
knowledge. This paper explores the relationship between the Gardens’
guidebooks and travel handbooks and the conditions of this genre but also how
such a journey of knowledge was supposed to be executed.
Nils
Müller-Scheeßel (Römisch-Germanische Kommission, Frankfurt/Main): Human
Zoos: Exhibiting the ‘primitive Other’ in the 19th and 20th century
The exhibition of the ‘Other’ has a
long tradition in western history, going back to the freak shows of medieval and
early modern fairs. But only with the upsurge of imperialism was it possible to
get hold of a significant quantitiy of ‘primitives’ from the newly gained
colonies to put them on display for the education and amusement of western
people.
This paper concentrates on the popular
people’s shows of the 19th and early 20th century, which are closely linked to
similar presentations on the world’s fairs of that time in Europe and the
United States. It will be demonstrated how the ideology underpinning these shows
also included the exhibition of past times and archaeological artefacts. Taking
up T. Bennett’s notion of the “exhibitionary complex” and T. Mitchell’s
catchphrase of the “world as exhibition“ it can be argued that ‘human
zoos’, but also world’s fairs and ‚normal’ museums and zoos, are part
and parcel of a wider tendency that started in the 19th century and that led to
the specific western tradition of seeing, perceiving and using the ‘Other’.
Sarah Cross, (Department of Archaeology,
University of Cambridge): Urban Jungles:
Zoos as landscape
All landscapes are inscriptions of
cultural perceptions and requirements into the non-human world. The changing
relationship between people and their environment is one of the main foci for
study in landscape archaeology. Zoos are particularly powerful landscapes in
this respect since they consciously attempt to represent or even recreate 'the
wild' in ways that are approachable and controllable by a largely urban
population.
There are a range of ways in which
perspectives from landscape archaeology can be brought to bear on zoos in order
to consider the culture : nature relationships constructed in these places. The
proximity of different species may indicate perceived relationships between
different elements of the animal 'community'. Modifications of the exiting
terrain - such as the creation of wetlands or cliffs emphasise the human role in
the creation of the zoo microcosm. The experience of these landscapes by zoo
visitors requires movement through prescribed sequences with different senses
accented at different times. Some animals are approached in quiet, open, sterile
landscapes. Others are encountered in enclosed spaces full the noise and smells
of both animals and other humans. These
experiences are an important component in the construction of what it is to be
human in the contemporary world. In this paper I will compare some elements of
London Zoo and Dublin zoo to explore the nature of variation between these two
landscapes.
Kathryn Denning (Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton): Riders
on a Listing Ark
The parallels between zoos and museums are
many and striking, but possibly even more noteworthy are the zones where their
endeavours actually overlap. One might portray the archetypal zoo as concerned
with living animals, and the archetypal cultural museum as concerned with dead
people and their things. However, when one considers instances of living animals
on display in museums, and instances of living people on display in zoos, not to
mention the occasional coexistence of human burial grounds and zoos, it seems
that the domains of zoo and museum are not so separate ? either in their choice
of objects or in their relationship with those objects. A closer examination may
allow us a more nuanced understanding of the traditional role of archaeologists
and curators as captors and keepers of the past.
Moreover, at a broader scale than the
animal and the artifact, the convergence of present-day zoological and
archaeological problems and agendas is worth contemplation. We seek more than
ever to preserve not the isolated specimen, but the context; however, it is as
hard to catch a biome as to cage a landscape, given exigencies of habitat
destruction and land development. So, we rescue or protect the fraction that we
can. But in many cases, the animal life and the heritage in question are reduced
to data: frozen DNA samples, carbon dates, composition analyses, maps and
photos.
Perhaps these data are what some experts
value most; however, current attempts at using those data for resurrection ? by
cloning severely endangered or extinct species, or virtually reconstructing
heritage sites ? suggest that experiencing the ineffability of a rare animal or
precious place is still important to many. This is where we come full circle in
our listing boat: if such replication is a new form of domestication, then
perhaps our traditional role of captor and keeper is harder to escape than we
might have hoped.
Oscar Ortman (Bohusläns Museum, Uddevalla):
Rockcarvings seen as endangered spices of prehistoric monuments.
In recent years focus has been put on the
external threat, i.e. pollution, towards wild animals as well as cultural
heritage remains. This situation has been taken as an argument for
"protecting" the threatened animals or remains in different ways. One
way is to capture them and to put them in a safer place for instance zoos or
museums. In my paper I will give some examples, mainly from the county of Bohuslän
in the southwestern part of Sweden. First the preservation efforts concerning
the weathering rockcarvings, and secondly on the rescue operations conducted by
the Nordic Arc (Nordens Ark) a Zoo situated about 100 km north of Gothenburg. In
my paper I would like to reveal similarities in arguments and language used in
my two separate case studies. I would also like to discuss two urgent questions;
What is it that we save when we put animals in zoos and material remains in
museums, and what does it represent?
Phillip Segadika (Botswana National
Museum, Gaborone): Wildlife
tourism in Botswana. What lessons for archaeology
In line with the Botswana government
policy of diversifying the economy, archaeologists are under pressure to explore
ways and means of presenting the cultural and archaeological heritage to the
tourist. As yet Botswana tourism is essentially a wildlife tourism where the
western and regional tourist is introduced to the ‘big’ five: elephants,
rhinos, leopard, buffalo and the jungle royalty - lions. There are, of course,
others which are popular with tourists: hippos, crocodiles, giraffes and a host
others. The policy of diversification challenges archaeologists to justify their
existence by presenting the cultural and archaeological heritage for a
financially viable tourism consumption project. Presenting a case study of the
‘big seven’ archaeological sites in Botswana, this paper makes a critique of
the lessons and difficulties that archaeologists and cultural heritage
‘custodians’ come across in trying to emulate the more advanced tourism
industry. The sites are: Tsodilo Hills (a world heritage site), the Livingstone
Memorial; Manyana (Late Stone Age Rock paintings), Matsieng (a mythological site
on origins of humans), Toutswe-Mogala, and Domboshaba – a Great Zimbabwe type
site. I will conclude that as much
as Botswana archaeologists need to do a cultural marketing research of western
and regional tastes for the tourist dollar and pound, there is also a need to
carry out moral and epistemological research on implications for archaeological
interpretation.