93-9 Audit and Archival Research of Mount Holyoke College Paleontology Collection

Session: Crossing Borders in the History and Philosophy of the Geosciences

Presenting Author:

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Abstract:

Student research is reinlivening Mount Holyoke College’s paleontology collection, which was built in the decades following a 1917 fire which destroyed the college’s original natural history building. During the four decades following the fire, two prominent female paleontologists, Mignon Talbot and Christina Lochman-Balk, acquired or accessioned most of the fossils in the collection. A catalogue contains information on the collection sites for most of these specimens, and donor information for about half of the specimens. The two most prolific donors had loose connections to the college: John M. Clarke, was an Amherst College alum, and a State Geologist and Paleontologist of New York; Alvin H. Dewey was married to an alum, and was a president of the New York State Archaeological Association. Objects donated by both of these individuals to other institutions have since been repatriated as sacred Indigenous artifacts and human remains. The 19th and 20th century collecting practices that these men followed, raise ethical concerns about our collection and about the natural history collections in institutions within the United States and globally. The Geology department is currently completing an audit of our nearly nine thousand fossil specimen collection. The first author of this abstract is a student researcher who is conducting archival research to situate the fossil collection and our collection of human remains in the context of the ethics of natural history collection practices. This work has drawn together multiple departments across the college, including Archives, the Science Center, and the Departments of Anthropology, Biology, and Geology and Geography. Natural science collections, like ours, are products of imperial nation building and the western expansion of the United States. Confronting the colonial history of collecting is a timely opportunity for student scholarship and engagement. Archival work on these collections, the development of ethical protocols for exploring their origins, and possibilities for restoration or repatriation may be more important than research on the specimens themselves.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-10304

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