2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
that such knowledge must—for it truly to remain human knowledge—be contained
within human, and humanistic, structures.
Grace␣ Y. Shen Harvard University
Mining the Cave:
Global visions and local traditions in the story of Peking Man
This paper will discuss the role of place in mediating the investigation and
understanding of the 1926 Peking Man discoveries at Chou-k’ou-tien
(Zhoukoudian), China. It is centrally concerned with different aspects of transit
between the local and global, particularly how these movements were tethered
by both the physical and material circumstances of the cave and the cave’s
figurative implications. Four conceptions of “place” will be examined to show
the suppleness of this concept in action and the versatility of its analytic
possibilities. The first example charts the ways in which theoretical concerns,
especially the idea of centers of primate dispersal, focused attention on China/
Central Asia in the search for early hominids. The second contrasts the
“success” of the Peking Man discovery with the “failure” of Eugene Dubois’
Java Man find on the basis of consciously developed local institutional
structures, such as the Peking Union Medical College Cenozoic Research
Laboratory, the Peking University Geology department, and the Geological
Survey of China. Third and fourth are two aspects of Chinese national identity
which hinged on invocations of place to first embrace the Peking Man find
and then to use it as currency in widening international arenas (political and
scientific). In one case, Peking Man’s habitat is the basis for its enrollment
into narratives of Chinese cultural history, and in the other, the possession of
the literal remains of Peking Man (actually over 45 specimens) plays into
constructions of China as a modern nation-state. Though the meanings of
“place,” “local,” and “global” lay on shifting sand in these varied contexts,
the cave functions as a solid space within which interrelations can be negotiated.
H
S
S
Brian␣ C. Shipley Dalhousie University
“My fact, therefore, I now consider established beyond controversy”:
William E. Logan, the Origin of Coal Debate,
and the Writing of the History of Geology
The question of the origin of coal deposits, contemporary commentators agreed,
was one of the most provocative geological issues of the mid-nineteenth century.
Although it had already been established that coal was of vegetable rather than
mineral derivation, widespread uncertainty persisted as to how this vegetative
material had been accumulated into the deposits that eventually became coal.
157