The Archaeology of ?New Fossils? in the decade of 1860. The Great Auk, Game Books, and the Register of Historic Extinctions

PODGORNY IRINA

Berlín

Workshop; ENDANGERMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES; 2012

MPI-WG, Departamento 2

By tackling the paradigmatic case of the Great Auk, this paper analyzes the techniques used by zoologists in the 1860s to account for the on going vanishing of species; namely how to asses the present existence of animals that have recently and apparently ceased to be observed, hunted, or eaten. Ornithologists generally accepted that up to the 1840s, only small circles of North Atlantic naturalists knew the existence of a flying-less bird that in English was called ?Great Auk? or ?Garefowl.? Easy to hunt, up to the nineteenth century, the bird and its eggs had been very used as supply by mariners doing the northern routes. In the 1840s there was still a constant, though very limited, supply of specimens, which kept dribbling into the market of natural history. The present existence of the Great Auk was elusive. British ornithologist would retrospectively say that the unawareness of its extinction was due to the fact that ?the exterminating process is generally one that excites little or no attention until the doom of the victim is sealed.? However, it was not deficit of attention what made historic extinctions invisible. At stake was how to coordinate different scales, the timing of the process of extinction, and the geographical distribution of a species. As we shall see, the elusive evidence of historic-present extinctions emerged by the combination of unexpected archaeological findings, historical and ethnographic research, and the transfer of protocols for the accounting of game to the study of living populations. While the literature on the evidence of evolution of species is abundant, less attention has been paid to the evidence used to prove that extinction was an ongoing process. Some authors have argued that oology or egg collection has shaped the practices of ?wildlife? conservation. This essay, in general, does not disagree with that argument. However, conservation and preservation movements emerged from the awareness of the on going character of extinction, in which humanity was also involved. But once historic extinctions were accepted as a matter of fact, to many Victorians they were equaled to the overkilling of animal species. If humans exterminated whole species, preservationists and conservationists proposed that man could also stop or reverse this process. Thus, the story of the gathering of bones, skins, and eggs of the Great Auk reveals the changing roles given to humans in the process of extinction. At the same time, it shows the shift from evolutionary debates to the possibility to rule over the destiny of animal species and, finally, evolution, one of the cores of what Dias and Vidal call ?the endangerment sensibility.?