Showing and hiding: The flickering visibility of earth workers in the archives of earth science

Queen Oryctology and her well-muscled workmen

In 1755, the French naturalist, collector, and courtier Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville published a lavishly illustrated natural history catalog, Natural History Illuminated by One of its Principal Parts, Oryctology, featuring minerals, metals, precious stones, “and other fossils,” an early modern term that broadly designated (in both English and French as well as other Romance languages) something dug up from underground. Of the many such catalogs published in the eighteenth century, this one deserves special attention for its engraved frontispiece, which made strikingly visible, in high neoclassical style, the difficult physical labor that brought these valuable subterranean specimens to the earth’s surface (Figure 1). In the center of the frontispiece sits a regal woman in classical attire, symbolizing the science of ‘oryctology’: an eighteenth-century designation for the branch of natural history comprising mineralogy and paleontology. She holds up to the reader’s gaze what appears to be a large piece of fossil coral and an elegant ammonite. To her left are two laborers: one in a loose workingman’s shirt, wielding a pickaxe, the other bare-chested, extracting a fossil from the ground. To her right, in the far distance, a third laborer is just visible in shadowy outline, apparently nude and poised to strike into a rocky cliff with an axe. The frontispiece dramatizes the social hierarchies that transferred subterranean specimens from the hands of their discoverers to the hands of collectors. It shows men laboring with their hands and tools on behalf of Queen Oryctology, finding specimens underground and offering her the best ones as a form of tribute, which she then offers to the reading public for collective study and pleasurable admiration. If the classicized queen stood for elite naturalists and collectors like d’Argenville who pursued the science of oryctology, the trio of well-muscled workmen symbolized the non-elite men whose labor made those subterranean specimens available for natural inquiry and public display.

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Figure 1.

The frontispiece to a 1755 catalog of fossils and minerals features three burly men excavating specimens for a regal woman symbolizing the science of ‘oryctology’. Their classed and gendered tools, bodies, and attire (or lack thereof) form a stark contrast with the classicized and femininized figure of Queen Oryctology, who also stands in for the author-collector. Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, L’histore naturelle éclaircie dans une de ses parties principales, l’oryctologie (Paris, 1755). Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum.

The trio of workingmen visualized in Oryctology’s frontispiece are precisely the type of marginalized people whom historians of science have become increasingly interested in recovering from the archives in recent decades: the invisible laborers whose social marginalization by virtue of their race, class, or gender kept them hidden in the shadows for far too long, leading to a skewed perception of premodern science, especially European and Euro-American science, as far more socially homogenous than it actually was. ¹ The shell diggers and fossil finders in d’Argenville’s frontispiece point to the crucial role of a heterogenous class of people I term ‘earth workers’ laborers of very low social rank whose work brought them into regular contact with the earth’s surface or interior, such as miners, quarrymen, ditch-diggers, and fieldworkers. Textual and visual traces of fossil-finding earth workers are scattered across print and manuscript works of natural history from the long eighteenth century in European and colonial Atlantic contexts. Naturalists in this period appear to have been well aware of the relationship between earth work and fossil discovery; according to one midcentury British naturalist, fossil shells were “found in every Place where-ever the earth is broken open, or a Pit is digged.” ² Far from being a secret or a scandal, d’Argenville’s frontispiece openly acknowledged his reliance on lower-ranking people to do the necessary work of paleontological discovery for him.

At the same time, the visibility of d’Argenville’s fossil finders was paired with equally potent forms of elision and invisibility, which furnishes important context for understanding why these key participants in premodern science have yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. ³ The diggers prominently represented in the book’s opening image are nowhere referenced in the text itself. In the catalog’s item descriptions, d’Argenville attributes various specimens to particular mines and quarries but not to the miners or quarrymen who presumably dug them up from the ground. ⁴ Meanwhile, Oryctology contains a long list of individuals who are thanked by name for the subterranean discoveries they passed onto d’Argenville, including several people whose titles – Royal Engineer, Sub-Engineer of Roads and Bridges, Concessioner of Forest Mines – strongly suggest that they were sourcing these discoveries from the people who worked under their supervision on engineering, mining, and construction sites. ⁵ The allegorical style of the frontispiece also works against the attribution of mineralogical and paleontological discoveries to particular people. The three laborers in this image do not and were not intended to represent real, historical individuals any more than the goddess-queen Oryctology was. Instead, the engraved workingmen emblematize a social type. They visualize for eighteenth-century readers the kind of person who typically dug fossils out of the ground rather than the actual individuals who unearthed the particular specimens described in d’Argenville’s catalog. The allegorical workmen represent but also efface actual marginalized lives, gesturing toward their existence but withholding further details. Oryctology’s frontispiece thus furnishes an illuminating example of the ways that earth workers were rendered both visible and invisible – often in the same work and even in the same rhetorical gesture – in the eighteenth-century earth sciences.

This essay contributes to the literature on invisible scientific labor by interrogating the motives of eighteenth-century European naturalists to alternately show and hide their laboring-class fossil suppliers. Focusing on rare moments of heightened visibility, I ask why gentlemen naturalists occasionally, deliberately, and even performatively made visible the marginalized science workers whom they crucially depended on but more typically ignored, denigrated, or effaced. Answering this question has the potential to yield historical and methodological insights of value to the labor history of science more broadly. ⁶

Pursuing the fragmentary traces of laboring-class fossil finders in elite works of natural history serves two interrelated goals. Firstly, gathering such traces allows a preliminary, composite picture to emerge of a dispersed and disparate group of non-literate laborers whose skill and expertise – and yes, sweat and muscle – were essential to natural history collecting in the eighteenth century. ⁷ Given the brief, partial, and scattered nature of the evidence of their existence, I collect here and compare archival fragments from across a considerable stretch of time and space, including Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and French, Spanish, and British colonial America. ⁸ The heterogeneity of this class of science workers is one possible reason for their present obscurity, and I seek to highlight their diversity by bringing in examples from the Ohio River in the North American interior to the Mediterranean island of Malta. The one thing that German silver miners, Italian mountain peasants, Abenaki hunters, Irish construction workers, and an eleven-year-old Spanish shepherdess all had in common was that their daily labor brought them into regular contact with the earth, enabling their discovery of fossils.

Nevertheless, these archival traces ultimately speak more directly to the cultural values, practices, and beliefs of elite naturalists responsible for creating them than they do to the marginalized laborers whose lives they faintly record. While using such traces to glean any information possible about the fossil finders themselves, it is both necessary and generative to acknowledge the limits of what these traces can tell us. ⁹ I therefore begin this essay by using these traces to illuminate the norms of elite masculinity that shaped the emerging earth and field sciences in the Enlightenment, seeking to reconstruct the complex attitudes of gentlemen naturalists toward the lower-ranking people whose labor they both devalued and depended on. All the documentary fragments of fossil finders gathered here come from elite works of natural history such as articles in academic journals, printed treatises and catalogs, and manuscript correspondence, indicating that their existence was well-known by naturalists even if it was more frequently elided than openly acknowledged. Moments of visibility illuminate the proscriptive force of traditional taboos on manual, earthy labor, which prompted gentlemen naturalists to show themselves abstaining from forms of work that might undermine their social standing in their local communities or hamper their admission to the wider Republic of Letters. Images and anecdotes about laboring-class fossil finders, I argue, were created principally to assure eighteenth-century readers that naturalist-collectors had not discovered the fossils they presented to the world. Exploring how cultural norms around labor shaped self-presentation and acknowledgment of others in turn allows us to understand why the most common type of visible trace took the form of anonymous acknowledgment, in which an author briefly referenced an individual or group as discoverers of a fossil specimen without naming them or disclosing any other individuating detail beyond social rank and occupation.

Returning to the engraving of Queen Oryctology and her well-muscled workmen suggests how we might read such traces of marginalized lives to illuminate the values of elite scientific culture. The creators of this image and the author or publisher who selected it as the frontispiece presumably wanted eighteenth-century readers to know that laboring-class men were responsible for discovering the specimens featured in the catalog’s subsequent pages. They wanted readers to know that subterranean discovery was physical, difficult, embodied labor, and therefore suitable for men of low social rank, as is testified by the figures’ clothes, hair, musculature, tools, and bodily postures. Indeed, the visibility of the laborers’ bodies – revealed through an open-necked shirt, a bare torso, even a completely nude body – is a valuable clue as to why they were featured on the book’s first page. Including the earth workers in the image was certainly not intended to thank or acknowledge the historical individuals responsible for discovering the catalog’s specimens or they would have been named in the text. A more plausible way to read this image is that these laboring, burly bodies were offered to readers as tokens guaranteeing d’Argenville’s abstention from the earthy and embodied work of fossil discovery and excavation. Moreover, the substitution of the male naturalist-collector with the figure of a deified, classicized woman symbolizing the subterranean branch of natural history presented a visual argument that d’Argenville alone had done the intellectual labor of describing, classifying, and interpreting the specimens once others had performed the bodily labor of unearthing them from the ground. ¹⁰ The allegorical workmen were there to specify what kinds of work the author-collector had and had not done.

More often than not, eighteenth-century earth workers entered the archives of earth science in similar moments of denigration and disavowal. Assuming such motives behind their archival inscription implies fairly sharp limits to what can be known about them, but it also opens up a space for gaining new insight into scientific masculinities and elite scholarly culture in an age of transition. This essay focuses on the first half of the eighteenth century and also delves back into the late seventeenth, when European naturalists began to consider fossils as a natural kind and to create collections of fossils, instead of adding individual specimens to a heterogenous cabinet of curiosities. ¹¹ For the purposes of the present essay, I set to one side the vibrant knowledge work that naturalists did with fossils after acquiring them, a topic which others have explored at length elsewhere. ¹² Increasing interest in fossils brought naturalists out into the field, but without the norms of rugged masculinity that would later in the nineteenth century allow men of high social rank to visibly engage in the earthiest forms of fieldwork. ¹³ Premodern norms around scholarly masculinity help us to understand why some eighteenth-century naturalists felt they had to publicly disavow a form of labor that would come to be recognized as a crucial and skilled part of scientific fieldwork in the modern era. Elite desire for fossil collectibles therefore also brought gentlemen naturalists into increasing contact, albeit in highly mediated ways, with the kinds of people who were well-positioned to find them by virtue of their daily labor in and on the earth.

In the first part of this essay, I discuss several of the most substantive traces of fossil-finding earth workers I have been able to locate in order to explore the motives behind their creation. By asking why it was important for gentlemen naturalists to reveal and disavow certain kinds of science work, we come to better understand how premodern cultural norms around classed, raced, and gendered labor shaped scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters. In the second half of the essay, I gather a constellation of less substantive traces in order to reveal the wide range of people involved in the premodern field sciences, the surprising array of worksites that doubled as sites of paleontological discovery, and the rich variety of vernacular meanings and uses that laboring cultures assigned to their fossil discoveries. While the elite practice of anonymous acknowledgment makes it nearly impossible to reconstruct the lives of specific individuals, these documentary fragments do yield invaluable information about a class of science workers whose extremely low social status meant they almost certainly did not have access to literacy. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, I conclude by suggesting how reading rare moments of visibility for insight into elite cultures of acknowledgment can help historians recover fainter traces of marginalized scientific lives that might otherwise go undetected.

Not all invisible labor is invisible in the same way. Earth workers in the archives of the earth sciences fell into the category Paola Bertucci has named selective visibility, though for different reasons than did the eighteenth-century learned Italian women who carefully managed their publicity in anticipation of gendered reprisals. ¹⁵ In their lack of control over their public representation, fossil finders shared more in common with other kinds of selectively visible science workers such as Robert Boyle’s “invisible technicians” and the wives and daughters who worked as illustrators, editors, translators, and unnamed authors of published works for which only the male head of household whose name appeared on the title page received formal credit. ¹⁶ The earthy labor of fossil discovery, however, was socially distinct from the artisanal labor of laboratory workers and the domestic labor of elite women. Fossil finders typically did not labor alongside fossil collectors in the home or the laboratory; in many cases the two parties probably never met face to face, precluding the kinds of archival inscription resulting from sustained relationships in more intimate settings. In terms of the social if not also geographic distance separating the two groups, fossil finders were more akin to the (partly overlapping) group of indigenous, African, and African-descended people of the colonial Americas whose natural knowledge was sometimes explicitly though anonymously acknowledged in European and Euro-American works of natural history – except fossil finders were not acknowledged as authoritative knowers of local nature. ¹⁷ The very thing that naturalists chose to render visible about earth workers – their bodily labor – rendered invisible whatever skills – natural knowledge – or expertise enabled them to find fossils in the ground and excavate them successfully. The social meaning of earth work rendered it uniquely visible in some ways and uniquely invisible in others.

Anonymous acknowledgment and self-presentation

The visibility of earth workers in d’Argenville’s frontispiece is an unusually direct trace of the existence of laboring-class fossil finders. More commonly, these traces were recorded textually rather than visually and usually without quite so much fanfare, appearing deep within a printed book, journal article, or manuscript letter rather than splashed across the first page. References to fossil-finding earth workers are brief, no more than a sentence or two, usually just a few offhand words. Most frustrating of all, earth workers who gain momentary visibility in these brief, casual references are almost never identified by name. Even in those rare moments when gentlemen naturalists directly acknowledged their low-ranking fossil suppliers, they did so through an act of anonymous acknowledgment: referencing the individual or group of individuals who discovered a fossil specimen without naming them and shorn of any other individuating detail that would make it possible to correlate these traces with other archival sources in order to more fully reconstruct their lives. The typical anonymous acknowledgment records the approximate location of discovery and the social rank and occupation of the discoverer, or at least the type of labor they were involved in when the discovery was made. Journal articles and letters are more likely to record singular acts of discovery by nameless individuals or groups, while print catalogs and treatises of natural history are more likely to refer to ongoing, regular discoveries, as for example the English naturalist Robert Plot’s offhand reference in his Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677) to “Cap fulls of teeth picked up by such as follow the Plough.” ¹⁸

Beginning with some of the most substantive traces of fossil-finding earth workers offers us a way to begin to discern the motives behind their creation. By substantive traces, I mean ones that relate an anecdote about an anonymous fossil finder in two sentences or more. As for example, when midway through a short work printed in Latin in 1719 announcing the discovery of a fossil walrus skull, the Italian naturalist Giuseppe Monti devoted a few lines to the story of receiving the fossil from a local peasant. I fact checked this and he had not yet attained either of these positions by 1719. Monti had been out on a stroll through the hills beyond the city walls with his (named) colleague Giacomo Biancani, taking measurements of the air with a barometer. As they made their way through the hills, they were approached by “a mountain peasant” (monticola) who “offered us his discovery.” Monti did not record the peasant’s name or any other details about him save the mountain residence implied in calling him a monticola, which aligned the person with a geological formation and also oddly paralleled Monti’s own surname. Nor did Monti include details about the circumstances of discovery. He chose to record that he had asked the peasant to “tell me the place from which it [i.e., the fossil] was taken,” but did not include the peasant’s reply. His decision not to record the mountain peasant’s response regarding the exact place in which he had unearthed the fossil makes sense in the context of the early eighteenth-century earth sciences, prior to widespread recognition of the importance of stratigraphy. Other omissions are harder to understand. The peasant’s identity remained shrouded in as much mystery as how, where, and why he came across the fossil in the first place, much less what motivated him to offer it to Monti. So why include this story of a chance encounter with a fossil-bearing peasant at all? ¹⁹

Monti’s decision to record his questioning of the peasant but not the peasant’s reply begins to make sense if we read his narration of the encounter as an effort to affirm Monti’s gentle status, an assurance directed at the international community of men of letters whose ranks he aspired to join with this short Latin work. Monti’s anecdote omitted details that later scientists and historians of science would have loved to know, but it conveyed important information for eighteenth-century readers about Monti’s social status relative to the other two men, as revealed in the acts of collegial strolling and issuing orders. Walking and taking measurements together with a barometer, a new-fangled and expensive instrument, socially aligned Monti with Biancani, who came from an illustrious Bolognese family. Meanwhile, in Monti’s telling, he immediately followed his command to the peasant to “tell me the place from which it was taken” with an even more forceful one – “I bid him carry it to the city” – establishing Monti as a person whose social status enabled him to command the labor of others. ²⁰ Finally, Monti’s second command established the mountain peasant’s prior work of discovering and excavating the fossil as being somehow on par with the physical labor of carrying the fossil down the mountain and through the city streets to Monti’s home. This display of the power to command the subordinated labor of others in turn furnishes a plausible reason for Monti’s decision to reveal his peasant fossil-supplier to his Latin-reading peers with so little other information: to disavow his own potential engagement with earth work by establishing that someone else discovered and dug the fossil for him.

Just a few years prior, a similar story played out in Northern Europe. This time, the scene was a construction site in Ireland rather than a hillside in Italy, and the story is recorded in manuscript rather than in print. But the narration enacts a similar dynamic of revealing the labor of fossil discovery as a means of demonstrating the recorder’s power to command that labor. In a long letter of 1715 to his patron St. George Ashe, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Clogher, the gentleman Francis Nevil related how a group of nameless workmen digging the foundations for a mill on the lands of the Bishop of Kilmore in Maghery discovered and excavated several large fossil teeth, as well as parts of a jawbone and skull. Nevil got wind of their discovery and visited the construction site, stopped work on the foundations, and ordered the workmen to begin digging for more teeth and bones, which they did indeed find. ²¹

Nevil’s 1715 epistolary relation of the discovery of teeth and bones at the Irish construction site shared much in common with Monti’s 1719 printed narration of his acquisition of the Italian walrus fossil. Both Nevil and Monti were deliberately transparent about the fact that they had neither discovered the fossils themselves nor participated in the physical labor of excavating them from the ground. When informing Bishop Ashe of his intention “to make the nicest search I could” of the site after hearing news of the first discoveries, Nevil clarified that he had not intended to dig at the site himself but rather to “enquire of the workmen the manner of finding the teeth and where and how they lay” and then order them to dig for more. ²² Nevil’s account shared several key features with Monti’s: a concern to establish his presence at the site of discovery, his abstention from the physical labor of discovery, and his diligence in extracting further information, labor, and specimens from the original discoverers. The fact that Nevil’s story was embedded in a letter to his higher-ranking patron may be one of the reasons why he went out of his way to disavow the labor of digging in the earth for subterranean curiosities and to show himself directing that labor instead. Monti’s and Nevil’s open and direct acknowledgments of the priority of discovery of Italian mountain peasants and Irish construction workers indicate several key points about early eighteenth-century fieldwork: firstly how unproblematic it was for elite men to depend on laboring-class men to do the work of paleontological discovery and excavation and secondly, how important it was to convey that social fact to men of equal or higher rank.

Delegating the labor of collecting to others was a common feature of eighteenth-century natural history, which helps to explain why Monti and Nevil might have presented themselves so openly as the beneficiaries of other people’s discoveries. Lisbet Koerner, James Delbourgo, Daniela Bleichmar and others have demonstrated the transatlantic and global spread of collecting networks in the eighteenth century, with collectors like Hans Sloane and Carl Linnaeus deploying field agents to collect naturalia from people and places far distant from Europe’s centers of learning. ²³ A similar dynamic seems to have governed fossil collecting specifically, even when collecting was undertaken on local, regional, or national scales, which would have allowed the naturalist to collect in the field himself without undertaking overseas travel. As a young man, the naturalist John Woodward visited “Mines, Quarries, [and] Colepits” across England in search of fossils – or more likely in search of fossil finders – but after his appointment as a professor at Gresham College in London, he hired two young men, John Groom and Richard Meales, as field agents to continue this work for him. As he explained to readers of his 1728 catalog Fossils of All Kinds, “I concluded to send Persons on Purpose to all Parts where I wanted further Satisfaction and Intelligence; which I did at my own Private Expense.” Woodward’s unusual revelation of his named field agents, whom he referred to as “two learned and ingenious Gentlemen,” established himself as a person of even higher rank who possessed both the social status and the financial means to employ field agents to increase his fossil collection. ²⁴ In his 1737 fossil treatise Dissertation . . . on Petrified Marine Bodies, the Veronese priest Giovanni Giacomo Spada gratefully acknowledged “my faithful servant Martino, noted for his keen eyes and good fortune” in discovering fossils in the “hills, valleys, and plains” around Verona where they lived. ²⁵ (Spada’s priestly status may have played a role in this partially named acknowledgment, a point I return to in the following section.) The Sicilian naturalist Agostino Scilla claimed in 1670 that the best glossopetrae (fossilized shark’s teeth), “handsome, polished, and whole,” were those available from the “mercenary diggers” of Malta, suggesting that Maltese miners or fossil-hunters had begun deliberately collecting and polishing fossils for sale by the mid-seventeenth century. ²⁶ Alternately, wealthy landowners with a taste for natural history were able to cut out agents and middlemen altogether by directing their employees to search for fossils. The owner of a coal mine in northern England, Richard Richardson, “instruct[ed] the miners what to preserve for me, & [gave] them money for incouragement, & I have found them very usefull to me.” ²⁷ These varied economies of fossil discovery and circulation all reflect an elite assumption that fossil collecting – the initial act of discovery as opposed to the later selection, arrangement, and display of the objects discovered – was a form of labor that could be safely delegated to subordinated others. ²⁸

In principle, manual labor was taboo for early modern European men of high social status, though like all social norms it was often violated in practice. The elite taboo on manual labor was especially forceful with regards to work done with one’s hands, in the dirt, out of doors. ²⁹ Fossil-finding in particular was aligned with some of the most difficult, dangerous, labor intensive, and socially undesirable forms of labor in the early modern world, both because the act of fossil discovery and excavation mimicked the labor of earth work and because it was so frequently done in the course of actual earth work, as will be discussed in the following section. Experimentalists like Robert Hooke might try to carve out exceptions to the general prohibition against manual labor by operating on live dogs and manipulating complicated air pumps, but these forms of work involving one’s hands mimicked that of surgeons and artisans: people occupying a much higher social rank than that of earth workers. And Hooke, of course, performed many of his experiments at the behest of gentlemen who outranked him. ³⁰ Collecting objects that were definitionally found in the ground (recalling the Latin root fossus meaning ‘dug up’) may therefore have placed gentlemen naturalists under unique pressure to delegate fossil collecting to subordinated others as well as to impress this act of delegation upon their peers in public fashion.

Further evidence of the force of the digging taboo comes from laboring-class fossil finders themselves, in a singular moment of heightened visibility afforded by their involvement in a legal dispute. In 1726, a pair of fossil-hunting teenage brothers from the German village of Eibelstadt were accused of selling hand-carved fake fossils to local collectors in place of real ones. The brothers, Niklaus and Valentin Hehn, defended themselves in court by claiming that “If they could make such stones, they wouldn’t be mere diggers.” ³¹ This extraordinary protestation to clear their names reflected the Hehn brothers’ accurate assessment, according to the standards of early modern culture, that the ability to handcraft fake fossils would have placed them in a higher social rank – the rank of the artisan class – than did the use of their hands to discover real fossils in the earth, which relegated them to the lowlier status of “mere diggers.” Their recorded responses suggest that Niklaus and Valentin Hehn had internalized the social norms that devalued their vital fieldwork– or at least, they deemed it expedient to appeal to such norms as a way of defending themselves in court. No wonder gentlemen naturalists sometimes felt compelled to demonstrate to one another that they relied on lower-ranking people to do this kind of necessary earth work for them.

Naturalists’ assumptions that fossil discovery and extraction was a form of “mere digging” appear to have inflected actual field practices as well. One striking example comes from manuscript correspondence late in the century regarding a doomed fossil-hunting plot on the Ohio River. In 1784, the physician and naturalist Christian Friedrich Michaelis tried and failed to organize a fossil-hunting expedition from the German town of Kassel to a salt lick near the Ohio, in present-day Kentucky, whose rich deposits of mammoth and mastodon bones led to its later name of Big Bone Lick. Pitching this project to the eminent Dutch naturalist Peter Camper, Michaelis proposed that, with sufficient funds from Camper, he could pay a contact in Philadelphia who owned a saltworks two days’ march from the site to “send some waggons and worckmen from there to the Ohio . . . order them to digg . . . drain the lick if possible, and bring all the bones to Philadelphia” before shipping them to Camper in Amsterdam. ³² Camper refused to front the money and Michaelis’ plot never came to fruition, though it is hard to imagine that it would have succeeded had he found the necessary backing. ³³ The German physician’s confidence that it would be possible to organize a large-scale fossil-finding expedition triply removed from the actual site, with directions issued by letter from Kassel or Amsterdam to Philadelphia to the Ohio River saltworks to Big Bone Lick, reflects the paramount importance of letter-writing as a means of natural history collecting in the eighteenth century. But fossils were not as easy to find as birds, plants, or insects, and Michealis’ conviction that a group of salt-workers sent from their typical worksite to an unfamiliar spot a two days’ march away could unearth multiple, valuable discoveries simply by “order[ing] them to digg” reflects gentlemanly assumptions that fossil discovery was easily delegated to anyone with strong arms and the proper tools.

The gentlemanly proscription against outdoor manual labor brings into sharper relief the significance of the scattered references to hands and handed labor in gentlemen’s reports of fossil discovery. Monti related how, after the mountain peasant delivered the walrus fossil to his home in Bologna, he and his colleague Biancani “liberated it from the excess rock with our own hands, armed with a scalpel.” ³⁴ The phrase “with our own hands (propria manu)” reinforced Monti’s and Biancani’s non-use of their hands in the initial act of discovery and excavation, while their wielding of a “scalpel” enacted a sort of surgical procedure on the rock itself. Monti thereby emphasized the use of his hands in the manner of a surgeon, exploring a specimen in the space of his study, while in the same gesture disavowing the use of his hands like a mountain peasant, digging in the ground out in the open air. In the instances when gentlemen naturalists did actually dig for their own fossils, they sometimes signaled it by noting that they had done so with their own hands. The British naturalist William Arderon, for example, told the Royal Society in 1746 about the fossil shells and horns that were regularly discovered by workmen in the marl pits of Norfolk: “Several I took out with my own Hands and the Workmen, which are employed here, tell me, that they scarce work a Day, but they find less or more of them.” ³⁵ Arderon thereby contrasted his own atypical (for his social rank and for the site) discovery and extraction with the daily discoveries of fossils by the pit-workers. Drawing attention to the kinds of paleontological work they did “with their own hands” paradoxically allowed naturalists to highlight their typical abstention from handed labor.

Why did naturalists feel it was so important to demonstrate their social rank by deliberately revealing the existence of their unnamed fossil suppliers? A key reason is that demonstrating rank was helpful and sometimes even necessary for entry into the eighteenth-century world of academic science, which typically entailed establishing correspondence with important naturalists in the Republic of Letters and joining a scientific society like London’s Royal Society or the Paris Academy of Sciences. ³⁶ While men from commercial and artisanal backgrounds were occasionally able to break into the ranks of the academicians or to join the Republic of Letters as a corresponding member, these men labored under an extra obligation to demonstrate how far they’d come from their non-elite origins, and they were susceptible to differential treatment than the men who had been born into gentle or noble status. Meanwhile, naturalists of unquestionably elite status risked the censure of their peers by engaging in work deemed beneath their station, for example, by purchasing fossils and reselling them at a profit. ³⁷ Further research is needed to determine whether the rare substantive traces of laboring-class fossil finders like the ones described in this section were more likely to come from naturalists who began their lives in the middle ranks of society, like Woodward, or who were trying to make their reputation beyond their hometowns where their social status was already known, like Monti. Social norms of elite masculinity in eighteenth-century Europe coincided with norms of scholarly sociability in the Republic of Letters, creating a strong set of incentives for men of letters to demonstrate their relatively high social rank by underscoring their abstention from earth work, even if done as a leisure (i.e., unpaid and unbonded) pursuit and directed toward purely philosophical ends.

The connection between self-presentation in the Republic of Letters and demonstrating rank by revealing subordinated fossil suppliers is well dramatized in the circulation of news about the discovery of the Bologna walrus fossil. A 1724 article in the Mémoires of the Paris Academy of Sciences by the French naturalist Antoine de Jussieu summarized Monti’s 1719 Latin publication for Francophone readers without mentioning the earth worker who discovered it. Instead, Jussieu recounted Monti’s “surprise at having found in the territory of Bologna, among many other fossils, the jawbone of [this] animal.” ³⁸ In a rhetorical move that was all too common in the eighteenth century, Jussieu’s relation of the discovery elided the peasant entirely and grammatically attributed the discovery to Monti, in spite of the clear attribution to the nameless peasant in Monti’s own account. Similarly, d’Argenville’s Oryctology reproduced an engraved image of the Bologna walrus fossil along with Monti’s name but without reference to its unnamed discoverer. ³⁹ Once Monti’s social and epistemic status had been established to the satisfaction of the international community, it may have no longer appeared necessary to foreign scholars like Jussieu and d’Argenville to repeat the story of the original discoverer along with the discovery. The class and gender norms that shaped scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters appear to have incentivized brief moments of visibility for marginalized science workers but not in sustained or robust ways.

If anxiety about establishing their social rank to peers and patrons drove gentleman naturalists to reveal the existence of their low-status fossil suppliers, doing so may have provoked an alternate anxiety that they would not get credit for the discovery. This would explain why open acknowledgments of laboring-class fossil discovery were frequently paired with derogatory remarks about the ignorance and incompetence of their discoverers. At the end of the century, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier criticized the quarrymen who supplied him with fossil bones for not comprehending the value of their finds. “Hardly a day goes by,” Cuvier declared in Extract of a Larger Work on the Kinds of Quadrupeds whose Bones One Finds in the Interior of the Earth (1800), “in which the laborers who work in the gypsum quarries near Paris do not find some of them.” He immediately followed this statement of remarkably routine discovery with a complaint that elite naturalists suffered from a lack of fossils in their natural history cabinets because “the laborers have rejected them, out of want of understanding of their value.” ⁴⁰ A similar anecdote comes from Arderon, the naturalist who unearthed fossil shells and horns from a Norfolk marl pit with his own hands, who in the same Philosophical Transactions article related a story about a workman who excavated giant human-like bones from a marl pit and then destroyed them through ignorance and neglect. This unnamed worker discovered and excavated the “entire Skeleton of a Man” in the pit where he worked and then “took the Pains to lay it all together upon the Grass, as regularly as he was able.” But afterwards, according to Arderon, “his Curiosity being then satisfied, he left it to be ground to Pieces by the Carts and Waggons that came thither for the Marl; so careless were these poor ignorant People of so valuable a Specimen of the human Race! . . . I own, I cannot but regret the Loss of it.” ⁴¹ Arderon moved rapidly from crediting the pit-worker’s discovery and careful arrangement of the bones to blaming “these poor ignorant People.” But if the Lincolnshire earth worker had truly been ignorant of the value of the bones he came across while mining marl, why bother digging them up and piecing them together into a sense-making pattern – or, for that matter, relating the story of their discovery to a naturalist passing through his village? Arderon’s anecdote of the allegedly ignorant discoverer contains the same kernel of self-contradiction as Cuvier’s description of quarrymen who both found fossils every day and routinely destroyed them through careless neglect. This double move of acknowledgment and denigration makes sense only as a way of insisting that fossil-finding was a purely physical and mindless form of labor.

While these acts of anonymous acknowledgment can tell us quite a bit about the values of the people who created them, they can be frustratingly unforthcoming on the subject of the people whose existence they gesture toward. One final example illustrates how the most visible traces often encode the least information about laboring lives. Another frontispiece from a fossil catalog, this one published in 1716 by the Swiss naturalist and collector Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, presents an idealized fossil-hunting expedition in the Alps (Figure 2). A gentleman naturalist appears at his leisure, facing forward and gesturing with his walking stick to an impressive pile of fossil fish and shells heaped at his feet. Meanwhile, a peasant with his back to the viewer, his face invisible, hacks away into the mountain face. While the gentleman is the one presenting the fossils to the reader, it is clearly the peasant who is doing the actual work of excavating them. We might read this image as one of the conspicuous consumption of other people’s labor: another important way, along with abstention from certain types of labor, that early modern elites demonstrated rank. But even these most conspicuous displays revealed surprisingly little about these marginalized workers beyond the fact of their existence. Like d’Argenville’s allegorical frontispiece of Queen Oryctology and her well-muscled workmen, Scheuchzer’s alpine peasant and gentleman represent generic social types rather than real, historical individuals, as conveyed through the details of masculine self-presentation such as dress (frock coat or peasant tunic), head covering (wig or cap), and accessories (walking stick or pickaxe). The gentleman figure is not a portrait of the author-collector Scheuchzer, which becomes evident when compared to the portrait of Scheuchzer that appeared as the frontispiece to Herbarium of the Flood (1723), featuring fossils in the foreground, the Alps in the background, and no fossil-digging rustic (Figure 3). Comparing Scheuchzer’s two frontispieces makes clear that the alpine peasant, like the bewigged gentleman, represents a social type and not a real person. This faceless, laboring, visible body is more like a prop, akin to the gentleman’s walking stick. Even the most visible traces can withhold more information than they reveal about marginalized scientific lives.

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Figure 2.

A peasant and a gentleman on a fossil-hunting trip in the Swiss Alps. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Museum Diluvianum (Zürich, 1716). ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 5822, https://dx-doi-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/10.3931/e-rara-10495.

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Figure 3.

Portrait of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, in Scheuchzer, Herbarium diluvianum (Leiden, 1723). ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 157q, https://dx-doi-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/10.3931/e-rara-9977.

Worksites as fieldsites

Substantive traces of laboring-class fossil finders appear to have been created primarily as a means of signaling the social status of the author-collector and not as a means of awarding credit to the original discoverer. Appreciating this fact makes it possible, however, to read these traces against the grain for insight into the social composition of these selectively visible participants in the work of early modern science. While the practice of anonymous acknowledgment makes it nearly impossible to know anything about marginalized fossil finders as individuals, the frequent inclusion of details relating to their occupation, the task they were involved in at the time of discovery, or their place of employment – all of which clarified the fossil finders’ social rank for contemporary readers – does tell us quite a bit about what types of people and what types of labor were frequently involved in fossil discovery in the eighteenth century. This section presents a wide range of brief traces, usually just a sentence or a phrase, from across Europe as well as several of Europe’s American colonies. From this collection of brief traces emerges the contours of a heterogenous and widely dispersed class of people linked by their proximity to soil and rock and their propensity to find fossils therein. I also highlight some of the other kinds of information that can be gleaned from these fragmentary traces, including the importance of local and indigenous knowledge and skills in bringing fossils up to the earth’s surface and the role of gift economies in circulating fossils from earth worksites to elite collectors.

When considered collectively, these less substantive traces of fossil labor suggest that any worksite on which laborers were tasked with digging into the earth could become a site of paleontological discovery. As indicated by Nevil’s relation of the workers who discovered fossils while digging the foundation for a mill, the construction site was one such place of outdoors employment where laborers discovered fossils in the course of their daily work. Laboring-class people found fossils while working on engineering projects, such as draining wetlands or digging ditches and wells. A young man draining a swamp on his employer’s farm in New York’s Hudson River Valley in 1780 “digged up the remains of a very surprising animal,” including several elephant-like grinders. ⁴² In 1764, the naturalist Jean-Étienne Guettard recorded the discovery, “many years ago,” of two fine exemplars of the Cornu Ammonis by workmen employed to sink a well in the Jardin des Apothicaires in Paris. ⁴³ In 1703, the English naturalist Samuel Dale described a particular variety of “Fossil Shells” from Harwich on the North Sea that were frequently found in places “where the Earth has been broken by digging of Ditches.” ⁴⁴ In 1728, Woodward instructed his fellow naturalists to make opportunistic inquiries, as Nevil had done, “when there are Wells making: And in short, wherever there is Digging upon any Occasion whatever.” ⁴⁵

Even types of work that incidentally disturbed the earth could become an opportunity to find fossils. French woodcutters in the 1740s discovered a large fossil bone, later identified by an académicien as the “shoulder blade of an elephant,” while felling trees in a forest in Burgundy. An article in the journal of the Paris Academy of Sciences stated that the bone was found “two feet below the surface of the earth”; perhaps the woodcutters found the bone when a felled tree brought up a considerable amount of soil along with its roots, exposing the bone buried below. No other detail about the woodcutters is included in this very brief article beyond the fact that they were woodcutters and were engaged in this labor at the time of discovery. The anonymous author of the article does, however, reveal valuable insight about the social networks by means of which this elephant fossil made its way from fieldsite to academy. The anonymous woodcutters gave or sold their find to an unnamed local priest, “from whence it passed through other hands until finally it came to M. Geoffrey, who then announced the discovery to the Academy.” The reference to hands functions here to distinguish the woodcutters’ act of exhuming the fossil from the gift-exchange of the specimen through provincial and then cosmopolitan networks of higher-ranking people, until finally reaching a person high-ranking enough to enter the archive as a named individual, donating the fossil to the Academy. This fragment reveals not only the engagement of a surprising group of laborers in paleontological discovery but also the importance of gift economies in circulating fossils from outdoor worksites to elite collections. ⁴⁶

Other forms of outdoor work that simply involved careful and sustained attention to a natural landscape could become the occasion for discovery. The first discovery recorded in European sources at Big Bone Lick, the site of Michaelis’ failed fossil-hunting expedition, was made by Native American hunters in 1739. The hunter-warriors, possibly Abenaki, were traversing the North American continent from Quebec to New Orleans on a joint military expedition with French troops led by Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil. ⁴⁷ The fullest known documentary account of this discovery is a 1762 journal article by the French naturalist Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, who reported that the indigenous warriors were out hunting for game with which to provision the war party and returned to camp bearing a giant fossil femur and several tusks. Daubenton’s account contains barely any details of the circumstances of discovery and as per usual refers to the discoverers anonymously, though it does very clearly attribute the finds to “Natives (Sauvages) who were out on the hunt” and records the location of discovery as “the edge of a marsh.” Daubenton also records that the hunter-warriors “presented the tusk and femur to [Longueuil] in his camp on the Ohio.” Here again we see the importance of gift economies in circulating fossils, though Daubenton’s interpretation of the social meaning of the hunter-warriors’ actions must be taken with a grain of salt. ⁴⁸

Daubenton’s account of the 1739 discoveries at Big Bone Lick permits limited speculation about the natural knowledges that may have enabled the indigenous warriors’ find. The fact that they were engaged in hunting when they found the fossils suggests that they had decided to focus on the salt lick because it attracted live animals. Careful attention to this feature of the natural landscape, a magnet for deer and other game in search of salt, would have brought the hunters into close engagement with a site that also harbored the fossilized remains of extinct animals (mammoth and mastodon) who had once inhabited the same landscape. Keen scrutiny of the earth’s porous surface in pursuit of live animals may have enabled the hunters to discover the valuable remains of dead animals as well. As to what motivated them to recover the bones and tusks from the marshy lick, Adrienne Mayor argues that the cultural value of fossil ivory among several of the First Nations furnishes context for understanding the meaning and value that the hunter-warriors might have assigned to their fossil discoveries, as do Abenaki legends regarding a large mythical animal known as Big Elk. ⁴⁹ Certainly their decision to present these objects to the leader of the French war party with whom they were allied, perhaps as a gift to cement ties, indicates the high value the hunters placed on their discovery.

Sustained attention to the features of a natural landscape may also have enabled the discoveries of perhaps the most surprising fossil finder I have yet come across, an eleven-year-old shepherdess from northern Spain. In his Natural History of Spain (1754) the Spanish Franciscan scholar José Torrubia credited a shepherd girl named Gabriela Perez Gil, of the Guadalajaran village of Anchuela, as the discoverer of two excellent petrified specimens of an unknown marine animal. Perez Gil stands out not only because of her gender and age but also because she is the only laboring-class fossil finder I have seen thanked and acknowledged by their full name in a printed work of natural history. Torrubia credited Perez Gil with multiple valuable discoveries, noting that she found “not only these [two] pieces but many of the other ones contained in this Index” of Spanish and Spanish-American fossils. There are several reasons why Torrubia might have acknowledged Perez Gil by name. Perhaps he found it as surprising as we do that an eleven-year-old girl was such an adept fossil finder. The British fossil hunter Mary Anning, who was active at the turn of the nineteenth century, remains famous in part because of the dearth of attested women before her who engaged in this kind of science work. Possibly Torrubia mentioned Perez Gil by name because he ascribed religious significance to the fact that a shepherdess, a “pastor” like himself (he called her a Pastorcilla), discovered the marine fossils that Torrubia considered vestiges of the biblical Flood “while out herding her sheep,” a Christlike activity. It might be significant that of the two publicly named fossil finders I’ve yet identified, Gabriela Perez Gil and Spada’s servant Martino, both were named by naturalist-collectors who were also Catholic priests. Priests occupied a unique social position in early modern society, educated and respected though often poor or from poor families, so perhaps they felt less need to demonstrate their social distance from their fossil suppliers. Possibly Torrubia named Perez Gil but not his other fossil suppliers precisely because her age and her gender as well as her low social rank so completely barred her entry to the world of academic science and the Republic of Letters. Whatever his reasons, Torrubia’s acknowledgment of his shepherdess fossil-supplier offers historians a precious scrap of information as to how she made these discoveries, namely that she did so while in the course of her daily labor herding sheep across the northern Spanish plains, an area rich with trilobites and other marine fossils. The fact that fossil echinoids were colloquially known as “shepherds’ crowns” in southern England and that northern Italian shepherds in the eighteenth-century routinely supplied naturalists with fossils suggests further paths of research regarding knowledge of the earth that sheep herding may have uniquely enabled. ⁵⁰

It was almost certainly the case, however, that the most common worksites to double as sites of fossil discovery were mines and quarries, as the examples of Cuvier’s quarrymen, Scilla’s “mercenary diggers,” and Arderon’s pit-worker suggest. Places where workers’ daily labor brought them into direct contact with the deep interior of the earth were frequently located in fossil-rich sites. ⁵¹ Even as Germany’s mines yielded less and less precious metal across the early modern period, miners in the German lands continued to unearth fossils at a rapid clip. The fossilized remains of an ancient crocodile, as identified by Christian Maximilian Spener in a 1710 journal article, were exhumed from the Kupfersuhl mine in Thuringia, while the headless, tailed skeleton of “some type of sea cat,” as described by the Swedish naturalist-turned-mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, was discovered in the copper mines of Glücksborn in Saxe-Meiningen, Thuringia, in 1733. ⁵² The polymath G. W. Leibniz excitedly relayed the discovery of “plants of the Indies in the mines of Saxony” in a 1710 letter to Spener. ⁵³ Meanwhile, indigenous miners in “the Indies” supplied Europeans with both precious metal and fossils, often under horrific circumstances. Torrubia, for example, reported the discovery of bones “streaked with threads of silver” in the infamous silver mines of Peru. ⁵⁴ According to the Anglo-Dutch-French antiquarian Abraham de la Pryme, villagers in Lincolnshire, England routinely unearthed “innumerable fragments of the Shells of Shell-fish of various sorts” as they quarried for stones and clay in order to “build their Walls and Fences,” illustrating well how different types of earth work – in this instance, quarrying, construction, and vernacular engineering – could converge as drivers of paleontological discovery. ⁵⁵

Gathering and comparing fragments like these allows us to glimpse the laboring lives of eighteenth-century fossil finders and to appreciate the range of the worksites that facilitated their knowledge of the earth and its hidden treasures. Even if naturalists specified fossil finders’ occupation or site of employment in order to signal social status to one another, we can productively read these fragments as evidence for what types of workers, worksites, and emplaced labor were most likely to be involved in paleontological discovery in premodernity. Miners, quarrymen, builders, and ditch- and well-diggers are well-represented, while shepherds, woodcutters, and hunters make rarer appearances. While a wide variety of laboring people and occupations are attested, this constellation is not, I would argue, random. The clearest pattern that emerges from this variegated collection is that people whose daily labor brought them into contact with the earth’s surface and interior were exceptionally well-positioned to discover fossils. Being emplaced in a particular worksite in a specific landscape seems to have been key. With the exception of the Abenaki hunters who were far from home, the earth workers represented above were mostly performing routine tasks on patches of ground familiar to them as a worksite or as a place of residence. Further research is needed to uncover how, when, and where these forms of expertise emerged and circulated, but Chandra Mukerji’s groundbreaking work on vernacular engineering in early modern France, when women peasants developed engineering expertise they would later use to build the Canal du Midi by maintaining the old Roman aqueducts in the course of their daily labor of sourcing water, provides a useful model for thinking about how earth workers might have developed adjacent forms of paleontological expertise as a kind of second shift on top of their waged or bonded labor on the earth. ⁵⁶

Cramp stones, playthings, and fossil fertilizer: Vernacular practices and beliefs

Reading natural histories against the grain offers one way to begin to uncover earth workers’ knowledge of the underground. Even Arderon’s relation of the “ignorant” pit-worker, for example, contains two potential clues regarding the worker’s beliefs about his subterranean discoveries. The first is the detail that the pit-worker “took the Pains to lay [the bones] all together upon the Grass, as regularly as he was able,” which at the very least indicates a sense that his discovery was both interesting and valuable, something that deserved to be excavated, interpreted, arranged, and maybe even publicly displayed. The second clue is Arderon’s description of the find as “the entire skeleton of a Man” of unusually large size. Since Arderon never saw the bones, this description likely came from the pit-worker himself. Belief in ancient giants was common in early modernity, so it is possible that the unnamed pit-worker interpreted the large bones he discovered in the Lincolnshire marl pit as those of a giant and valued them for that reason. ⁵⁷ While Arderon did not explicitly raise this possibility, other naturalists sometimes did record folk nomenclature, uses, and interpretations of the kinds of fossils that were common in a particular area and around which local beliefs and practices had accrued. These vernacular meanings and usages were often relayed with an air of condescension, which makes them difficult to take at face value. Plot, for example, derided local beliefs in Oxfordshire regarding “Bufonites or Toad-stones,” dismissing the notion “that there comes any such thing out of a vexed toads head, as is commonly and no less fabulously reported.” ⁵⁸ In some instances, the point of including this kind of information seems to have been to contrast what the locals believed with what the naturalist believed, once again highlighting the importance of the knowledge work that naturalists did with fossils after they had been discovered by others. We might therefore read these types of fragments as direct evidence of how authors sought to present themselves as authoritative knowers and also as mediated evidence of the meaning and value that laboring-class people assigned to the objects they unearthed from underground.

First of all, it should be noted that the use of fossils in religious, medical, and other cultural practices long predated their status as objects of natural inquiry in early modern Europe. Archaeological evidence from across the Mediterranean basin suggests that people have valued, sought, kept, and used fossils from the Paleolithic era onwards. In the Stone and Iron Ages, fossils and fossil-bearing rock were fashioned into jewelry, amulets, and weapons, used in ritual burial practices, and incorporated into buildings as decorative or symbolic elements. ⁵⁹ This latter use survived well into the Christian era, when small geometric fossils like echinoids and ammonites were incorporated into the facades of medieval and early modern European churches, possibly due to the long-standing association of marine fossils with Noah’s Flood. ⁶⁰ Fossils showed up inside of churches as well, which often functioned as places for the display of God’s and Nature’s wonders in the medieval and early modern periods. ⁶¹ A late sixteenth century dialogue on wonders by the Spanish writer Antonio de Torquemada records several instances of large fossil bones in churches and monasteries across southern Europe that were displayed as a kind of holy relic and that the author apparently regarded as belonging to ancient, possibly biblical, giants. ⁶² Torquemada reported that a church in Astorga, a town along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, kept a fragment of an enormous jawbone “as a precious relic, which many times I myself have seen.” ⁶³ Fossils displayed in the facades and interiors of churches could have provided an intellectual framework, available to Christians of all social ranks regardless of their access to literacy or to private collections, for interpreting any future fossils they might happen to see or discover in the earth.

The religious value of fossils may have been a factor in stimulating their popular use as medical therapies, premised on the widespread idea that sacred objects often possessed curative properties. The Scottish savant Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703), for example, recorded the use of a variety of ammonite fossils in both human and veterinary medicine on the Isle of Skye. Locals employed a type of fossil Martin named Lapis ceranius that “the Natives called Cramp stones” in order to “cure the Cramp in Cows, by washing the part affected with Water in which this Stone has been steep’d for some Hours.” A similar procedure of steeping fossils in liquid for internal ingestion was used to treat humans suffering from diarrhea (“they make them red-hot in the Fire, and then quenche them in Milk . . . which they drink with good success”) and also horses suffering from distemper, who were given water to drink in which had been steeped a stone that Martin called “Velumnites” and the “Natives” called “Bat Stones.” Martin’s Description, published in London, presented local Scottish customs as curiosities to a cosmopolitan English audience in Latin dress. It also presented the author as an ambassador and translator of Scottish culture to a unifying Britain; it is telling that Martin used the word “Natives” to designate the people of the Isle of Skye, which was also his place of origin. These traces reveal the author’s efforts to position himself above and apart from his community of origin and also the islanders’ concern for their own well-being and that of their livestock, which motivated their use of local fossils in curative practices. ⁶⁴

Economic concerns also motivated the use of fossils in peasant-directed agriculture. The French naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur reported to the Paris Academy of Sciences that farming communities in the Touraine region excavated fossil shell fragments called falun from local quarries to use as fertilizer in their fields. In a 1720 article in the Academy’s journal, Réaumur related that falun was mined seasonally by peasant communities in late September or early October. This annual fossil harvest was crushed and plowed back into the earth, imparting a “surprising fecundity” to “lands [that] are naturally sterile.” ⁶⁵ Réaumur praised this practice, if not the peasants’ ingenuity, for increasing crop yields dramatically. Réaumur had his own distinct and philosophical reason for valuing the stratum of falun: to prove that the entire region had once been underwater, a case he forcefully made in his letter to the Academy of Sciences. However opportunistically Réaumur seized on the evidence of this stratum unearthed by peasant farmers, his anecdote provides evidence that low-ranking people did not simply use the fossil specimens they happened across accidentally but sometimes deliberately sought and excavated fossils for their own purposes. The case of the Touraine demonstrates that some peasant communities even instituted regimes of fossil-finding woven into the cycle of the agricultural year in which the entire community participated.

Finally, the economic concerns that seem to have motivated the use of fossils in agriculture and animal medicine were sometimes tempered by more playful meanings and motives. Torrubia, the Franciscan scholar who collected fossils found by the eleven-year-old shepherdess Gabriela Perez Gil, recorded elsewhere in his Natural History that children in the same region of the Spanish highlands employed locally abundant fossils as game pieces. Torrubia related how a trip from Paris to Madrid in August 1750 brought him through the village of Anchuela, where he came upon a girl playing a game he recognized as China Alta with some unusual playing pieces: “curiously figured stones” that upon closer inspection turned out to be “entire shells” that Torrubia identified as fossil bivalves. ⁶⁶ The point of recording this information seems to have been to highlight Torrubia’s own interpretative work, relocating these objects that children regarded as playthings in the ennobling framework of natural philosophy. But here again, we can use this trace to glimpse vernacular meanings and uses of fossils. While Torrubia did not identify this unnamed game-playing girl with Perez Gil or draw any direct connection between them, the story he narrated indicates that children in the region collected small marine fossils for use in their games and suggests that Perez Gil herself may have been looking for fossils to use as playthings while she was out herding sheep: a child planning her play time while at work in the fields and hills.

These fragments indicate the rich complex of vernacular meanings and uses of fossils in early modern Europe, a variety matched only by that of the kinds of people who discovered them, whether by accident or as the fruit of intentional searching. Certainly this robust set of beliefs and practices predated the new financial incentives for fossil-finding that stemmed from the increasing elite interest in fossils from the late seventeenth century onwards. The promise of payment surely added new inducements for earth workers to find fossils, but these monetary incentives probably overlaid rather than replaced older motivations for fossil-finding in laboring-class culture. Whatever specimens could not be sold to a gentleman naturalist or traveling middleman could be kept for the use of the discover’s family and community for the purposes of worship, healing, sustenance, or play.

Acknowledgment and the archive

Given the visible traces of laboring-class fossil finders in elite works of natural history, why are they not better known today? One very obvious answer is that they were not named. By contrast, naturalists frequently thanked their higher-ranking fossil suppliers – gift-giving intermediaries, not the original discoverers – by name in their publications. In an article in the Mémoires, the French physician and naturalist Jean-Étienne Guettard gallantly proclaimed his debt to the Countess of Rochechouart for sending him several marine fossils, specimens that the Countess, on account of her rank and gender, almost certainly did not discover herself. ⁶⁷ Publicly naming and thanking one’s intermediaries could function as a means of gaining or maintaining patronage, as was probably the case in Guettard’s thanks to the Countess, or as a way of giving an aspiring provincial or colonial naturalist a leg up in their bid to climb the ranks of the Republic of Letters, as d’Argenville was likely doing with his long list of named provincial suppliers in Oryctology. Public thanks was a form of social capital and specifically a form of repayment that could also be paid forward; naming and thanking could itself be a means of incurring obligation.

While it made perfect sense in the context of eighteenth-century culture to thank elite fossil-gifters by name while anonymously acknowledging non-elite fossil-diggers, these classed practices of acknowledgment have unfortunate consequences for historians’ ability to reconstruct the full range of people involved in the work of science in early modernity. If a fossil supplier was of high enough status, they entered the archive as a named individual, but if they did not warrant named acknowledgment, their name has been lost. Giuseppe Monti’s failure to record the name of the mountain peasant who discovered the walrus fossil stands in stark contrast to the thanks and praise he heaped on “my dearest Signor Biancani . . . my companion, guide, and host”: “host” because one of the hills through which they walked was named Monte Biancano after his friend’s illustrious and ancient Bolognese family. ⁶⁸ This is an especially stark example of how social status influenced who would be thanked by name in a work of natural history. The person who discovered the fossil remains anonymous while the person who witnessed the transfer from discoverer to collector is named and therefore legible in historical documents as the same Giacomo Biancani who was a member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences, for example, and who wrote a 1766 Latin work on the natural history of the hills of the Bologna region. ⁶⁹

That being said, understanding how acknowledgment practices shaped the archival inscription of participants in the work of science can help us recognize elisions and erasures as the very faint traces of marginalized labor we might not otherwise notice. For every instance of open acknowledgment of a fossil-finding earth worker, there are dozens of rhetorical elisions that can only be appreciated as such when placed alongside the direct if anonymous acknowledgments. References to fossil-bearing mines and quarries in natural history catalogs typically employed the passive voice of “are found.” For example, the Anglo-Portuguese naturalist Emanuel Mendes da Costa’s 1757 Natural History of Fossils contains an entry for a type of flagstone quarried in Oxfordshire, which notes that “curious figured fossils” such as “the teeth and palates of fish” were “found also lodged between the plates of this stone.” ⁷⁰ Other grammatical constructions avoided mentioning discoverers through use of the anonymizing pronoun “one,” as in the French naturalist Jean Astruc’s assertion regarding fossil shells: “One finds them in very large quantities in the rock of Boutonnet: one finds them as well in great number in all the neighboring quarries.” ⁷¹ These circumlocutions were typical of eighteenth-century paleontology, hinting at the labor of earth workers without directly acknowledging it. Given the widespread acknowledgment of the role of earth workers in the field as suggested by the direct traces enumerated above, these rhetorical elisions likely registered to eighteenth-century readers as indirect acknowledgments of the discoveries of laboring-class people. Once we begin to read these texts as eighteenth-century readers did, we can better search the archives of the earth sciences for the flickering presence of earth workers.

The practice of acknowledging earth workers indirectly and anonymously has kept them well hidden since the eighteenth century. Forced to contend with opaque descriptions of fossil discovery by early modern naturalists – Jussieu, for example, referenced “discoveries that are made in the quarries of Languedoc” and “bones that one finds in the earth” ⁷² – nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians of paleontology and geology tended to recapitulate this effacing passive voice, following the linguistic conventions of the primary sources not only out of sensitivity to actors’ categories but also because the sources themselves often do not provide, or do not appear to provide, the kind of information that would allow a modern scholar to identify the active subject of the discovery. However, attending to culturally specific acknowledgment practices can help historians use the most visible traces of marginalized lives to discover much fainter ones, revealing in this case a group of science workers who were never really invisible in the first place. Finally, further research into material culture and oral culture may yet yield more direct evidence of how and why earth workers found fossils and what they made of their discoveries. Pursuing these questions leads us toward greater appreciation of the rich vernacular knowledges of the earth that existed beyond the gentlemanly worlds of eighteenth-century natural history.