Abstract
The geoscientific knowledge of the territories of the Americas was at the core of colonizing projects and international disputes over these territories. The historical studies of various aspects of Earth sciences bring countless references. They have been present since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the writings of the Portuguese Jesuits or chroniclers. Latin America continues to participate in the historiographical production of Earth sciences at the international level, in tune with mainstream trends, but with varying intensity depending on each country’s specific contexts and intellectual traditions. New perspectives suggest counterpoints to the unidirectional views of the old diffusionist proposals in the History of Sciences. They emphasize that governments’ individual, professional, institutional, political, economic, scientific, and theoretical interests are not dissociated and are linked to rocks, fossils, soils, mineral and energy resources, and landscapes. There is much to be explored along with the perspective of circulation of ideas, practices, and objects, and scientific cooperation in the continental context, without losing the dimension that the phenomena associated with Earth sciences, due to their spatial and temporal dimensions, are not subordinated to geopolitical frontiers that, in Latin America and various regions of the world, as a result of colonizing processes, wars, and territorial disputes, have changed over time.
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1 Introduction
The geological and geographic characteristics and specific mineral and energy resources contributed to outlining the profile of the historiographical production of each country in Latin America. Gold, silver, mineral resources in general, and expectations of inexhaustible wealth attracted the interests not only of the Portuguese and Spanish empires since the early years of conquests in the late fifteenth century but also of explorers, naturalists, traders, adventurers, exploration companies, and several European countries. Moreover, the geoscientific knowledge of the territories of the Americas was at the core of colonizing projects and international disputes over these territories. For this reason, the historical studies of various aspects of Earth sciences bring countless references. That is because they have been present since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the writings of the Portuguese Jesuits or of the chroniclers of the Indies – as America was called. It includes information on minerals used by the inhabitants of these regions, occurrences of earthquakes and volcanism, and also information on bones attributed to giants, extending from Argentina and Chile, further south of the continent and to the more northern territories, then Spanish, incorporated by force or by purchasing by the United States.
These are themes that continue to be emphasized in current studies, such as mining, in which Argentina is highlighted in classical studies due to its very name closely related to mineral exploration (Alonso 2010), to dreams of incalculable riches, as also critically affirmed in the works on the Brazilian ‘El dorados’ and the ‘visions of paradise’ (Figueirôa 1997).
At the international level, the history of Earth sciences has been consolidated for some decades. The International Geological Congresses (IGCs) increasingly include the theme in specific sessions and symposia, since the meeting in India, in 1964. In 1967, the INHIGEO – International Commission on the History of Geological SciencesFootnote 1 – was created, linked to two important international organizations: the IUGS (International Union of Geological Sciences) and IUPHST (International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology). The INHIGEO brings together researchers interested in a wide range of topics in the history of geological sciences, which currently has approximately 300 members from 57 countries.
Since its early years, the INHIGEO has had the participation of Latin American researchers dedicated to the history of geology in their countries, such as Othon Henry Leonardos (1889–1977), professor at Geosciences Institute, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, since 1968, and Telasco Garcia Castellanos (1912–2008), professor of economic geology at the National University of Cordoba, since 1970, in addition to Horácio Homero Camacho (1922–2015) and Juan Carlos Manuel Turner (1918–1979), professors of paleontology and geology both from the University of Buenos Aires.
However, Latin American participation became more present at INHIGEO from the 1980s onward. A new generation of young researchers started to mobilize and participate, since 1985, with colleagues from Brazil and Venezuela and, in the following years, with colleagues from other Latin American countries (Costa Rica, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile). As a result, initiatives around the history of geological sciences in this region gained momentum. An expressive set of international events that took place in Latin America since the end of the 1980s, relying not only on local researchers but also on several European countries, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan, constituted landmarks in this process.Footnote 2 The interest of these events also resides, in addition to the strengthening of internal exchanges within the Latin American and international region, in the productions that have been published, where one can find a vibrant and varied production, either from the point of view of themes or approaches, revealing the dynamism of the area and the quality of local historiographic production on the Earth sciences.Footnote 3
The institutions and events mentioned marked essential inflection points in research and, consequently, in the historiographical production on Earth sciences at the international level. Latin America continues to follow and participate in these movements, in tune with mainstream trends, but with varying intensity depending on the specific contexts and intellectual traditions of each country. An indisputable and comprehensive milestone, however, was the creation of the Sociedad Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y la Tecnología (SLHCT) in 1982. Its strong impact lies less in its foundation itself and in its international design, which brought together researchers from Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Cuba, Costa Rica, Argentina, Ecuador, and Spain, but mainly in the new intellectual frameworks launched to think about the sciences in this region, escaping the trap of conceiving it as eternally peripheral and, above all, not allowing to subordinate intellectual and scientific contexts to economic and political ones (Saldaña González 1986). Alongside the historiography on various scientific fields, Earth sciences were present in the SLHCT, especially in its official journal QuipuFootnote 4 (started in 1984), including various approaches to different themes. It is from then on that the concept of ‘empire’ becomes part of academic production, either as a reference framework for analysis or in its concreteness, as manifested in the scientific practices themselves and in the lives of those who made them happen. Before that, the expressions “colonial” or “imperial,” when present, referred to a period of historical time, without a more strictly political connotation. Furthermore, the concern with constructing a “national” science, in dialogue with but not subordinate to the North Atlantic centers and full of native and/or local knowledge, permeates many of the works.
Consequently, the historiographic production of Earth sciences in Latin America can be roughly aggregated into two large groups. Considering the themes, in general, there is more continuity than rupture. The history of mining, cartography, biographies, educational and research institutions, disciplinary fields, and foreign researchers comprise the main focus of the works produced in one or another set. However, in addition to some innovative themes, as will be mentioned later, it is the new approaches that constitute the most distinctive aspect among these sets of articles, produced either by geologists and/or historians of science and other professionals. We will present below a non-exhaustive synthesis of some characteristics of each of these sets in order to situate the readers, offering them a textual compass to navigate the historiography of Earth sciences in Latin America.
2 Episodic-narrative perspectives
The first set, likely produced before the 1980s, is characterized by the primacy of works with a strong episodic-narrative characteristic, not very analytical and interpretive, and with lists of facts and famous names, almost always male. The biographies, quite frequently, have a flattering and hagiographic tone. The preferred theme brings broad views of specific disciplinary fields in specific countries. In the texts, people and institutions are almost always mentioned in chronological sequence but not always interconnected with each other or with contexts (local, national, or international). There is also an intense appreciation of foreigners, to the detriment of the national ones, who are generally presented in secondary positions.
Along these lines, in 1895, geologist Orville A. Derby (1851–1915), whose professional career was entirely built in Brazil, published what appears to be the first article specifically on the history of the Earth sciences in a Latin American country (Derby 1895). Derby stated that the science practiced in Brazil was not characterized by including research and, furthermore, that some reputations had been built without original and worthy work. At the same time, it devalued local production and exalted the contributions of foreigners, like him, a perspective that would be kept in works by the nationals, continued until the 1980s, as previously mentioned. In the year following Derby’s article, José G. Aguilera published, in the Boletín del Instituto Geológico de México, a bibliography of the engineer Antonio del Castillo, founder and director of the Instituto Geológico de México, accompanied by a short summary of the Instituto Geológico’s initiatives, organized in 1886 to introduce the country’s geology and maps (Aguilera 1896).
The exaltation of foreigners as founders is seen in several works, whether in Colombia, with emphasis on the Germans (Ramírez 1955), or in Brazil, addressing the British and German contributions to geology (Leonardos 1970, 1973). In fact, various historical works of the engineer and geologist Othon H. Leonardos (1899–1977), editor of the only Brazilian publication specifically dedicated to “Mining and Metallurgy,” which he created in 1936, deserve mention, as well as his co-authorship with Avelino Ignácio de Oliveira (1891–1970), from the book “Geologia do Brasil.” This book began with a first chapter on the history of Earth sciences in Brazil since the beginning of colonization, highlighting the production of the first geological map prepared by nationals and the scientific cooperation of geologists from neighboring countries (de Oliveira and Leonardos 1940). On the other hand, the work of Alvarez Conde (1957), despite highlighting foreigners, already incorporated local contributions to emphasize, in broad panoramas, the importance of knowledge on soil, hydrology, cartography, paleontology, mining, and geophysics, including archaeological studies in Cuba.
Among these works – with a strong episodic-narrative nature and full of information – the work of Aguilera (1904) brings the origins of the geology of Mexico, in addition to initial derogatory references to the original peoples, mentions to Spanish historians, to von Humboldt, the Real Seminario de Minería of 1783 and the work of Andrés Manuel del Rio, “Elementos de Orictognosia”, published from 1795 to 1805, considered to be one of the first books on mineralogy to appear in New Spain. These mentions are repeated up to the moment of what is considered to be one of the first outlines of Mexican geology history carried out by the men of science themselves, such as Zoltan de Cserna (1968, 1990), and already in a critical way, a work that appreciated their own practices (Azuela-Bernal 2016).
Earth sciences were included in the general works about the History of Sciences in several Latin American countries. The Argentine tradition dates back to the initiatives of Aldo Mieli (1879–1950) – a collaborator of George Sarton (1884–1956) – and of Argentine historians (Papp et al. 1961) and, more recently, to the works of Garcia Castellanos (Riccardi 2020) and Camacho (2001), among others. In Mexico, Gortari’s book (De Gortari 1963) covers the art of metals from the cultures of ancient Mexico, mentions indigenous science, and makes brief references to local geological institutions, societies, and publications, up to the 20th International Geological Congress (IGC) in 1956, a landmark in the geological sciences in Mexico, as was the tenth International Geology Congress, held in Mexico in 1906. Also, within the framework of perspectives considered externalist and Eurocentric, but already evaluated as more innovative and more critical, Elias Trabulse’s voluminous work (1985) refers to the period ‘of the arrival of European science’ in Mexico until the nineteenth century. This work drew attention to the lack of historians with scientific preparation to deal with themes from several scientific areas, which was then the reality. Classical texts by authors of the enlightened period regarding geography, geodesy, cartography, by José Antonio Alzate (1737–1799), or Andrés Manuel del Rio’s classification of minerals (1764–1849), and the benefits of exploring silver minerals by Faust de Elhuyar (1755–1833) and others, have been reproduced, as well as by nineteenth-century authors on mineralogy, paleontology, geography, hydrography, tidal studies, or Eduardo Noriega’s ‘progress in the geography of Mexico.’ In Brazil, the extensive work organized by sociologist and educator Fernando de Azevedo (1894–1974) included wide-ranging chapters, prepared by professors of respective disciplines at the universities of São Paulo, on geology and paleontology (Leinz 1955), mineralogy, and petrography (Leonardos 1955), and geography (da Costa Pereira 1955). A review and expansion of this work was undertaken by botanist Mário Guimarães Ferri (1918–1985) and science historian Shozo Motoyama (1940–2021) between 1979 and 1981, addressing mineralogy and petrography (Franco et al. 1981) and paleontological research (Mendes 1981), where this time the field of Earth sciences deserved the title of “Geosciences” and focused on climatology, meteorology, oceanography, and geomorphology (Ab’Saber and Christofoletti 1980).
In Colombia, the “Apuntes para la Historia de las Geologicas Investigaciones en Colombia” (Botero 1978) and “Reseña Histórico de la Geologia en Colombia” (Durán 1973) stand out among the wide-ranging contributions. In Bolivia, the Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia and the Academia Nacional de Ciencias were concerned about redeeming the history of science in that country. In the book “Contributions to the History of Science in Bolivia”, Ismael Montes de Oca presents “Historia de la ciencia geologica” and a brief historical review of seismology (Montes de Oca 2001), José Luis Tellería-Geiger addresses geophysics in Bolivia (Tellería-Geiger & Pabón 2001), Waldo Ávila Salinas writes about mineralogical and petrological investigations (Ávila Salinas 2001a, b), and Estela Minaya has a biography on “vidas dedicadas a la ciencia de la Tierra” (Minaya 2001).
The emphasis in studies on the lives of geoscientists deserves to be mentioned, also due to its constant presence in the literature. Both foreigners, such as Charles Darwin (1809–1882) (Sagredo Baeza & Allamand 2011), and native characters were the object of attention. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is without a doubt a frequent presence in works from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, or Venezuela (Aceñolaza 2008; Aguilera 1904; De Terra 1956), as he traveled widely and extensively through the territories now occupied by these countries. Others, such as Orville Derby, mentioned above, also deserved texts and tributes honoring their birth centenaries (Lamego 1951). But local characters, creoles, or figures from imperial metropolises are also on the list of those entitled to have their lives counted since colonial times. The brothers Fausto and José d’Elhuyar, Tulio Ospina, José Maria Cabal, Enrique Hubash, Manuel Ferreira da Câmara, José Bonifácio d’Andrada e Silva, to mention just a few, clearly illustrate what we have just said.
In short, a large part of the production prior to the 1980s (but not exclusively), whether its authors were aware or not, strongly share – if not completely – the positivist historiographic perspectives, that is, the coming of science (in the singular, because it assumes a unity in this endeavor) is continuous and progressive; science is a collection of results and a set of methods; what counts, in fact, are the contents and concepts, and the people who developed them, leaving aside the broader relations in which the sciences are inserted and established with the other spheres of society. In addition, of course, to the strong Eurocentrism that permeates and pervades it.
3 Contemporary perspectives
The production of the second set, frequent from the 1980s onward, is meant to map geoscientific activities in their different times and spaces. Although the perspectives of the first phase can still be found occasionally and are still valuable due to the amount of compiled information, the works of the second set track identify and situate practices, processes, and actors, strongly supported by primary documentation, international bibliography, and contemporary theoretical references that, in many cases, we could also say decolonial. Scientific exchanges, knowledge circulation, collections, and people acquire thematic relevance and new explanatory perspectives, articulating contexts at different scales. Less generalist panoramas and more specific thematic ones, deepening local and regional histories, appear in approaches to mining, paleontology, oil, scientific institutions (mainly scientific associations, museums, and geological/geographical surveys), impactful geological phenomena, such as volcanism, earthquakes, and meteorites, just to mention some themes.
A relevant theme that crosses the entire historiography is that of mining. In this second set of works, the intertwining of economic, political, cultural, and technical-scientific issues is highlighted in the interpretation and acquires explanatory substance (Uribe-Salas et al. 2016). Changes are followed on a smaller scale, even at the level of practices, which occur within the Earth sciences in their articulation with the mining activity and their repercussions in other disciplines. Some texts exemplifying this theme, published in the same book, reflect a new phase in which new perspectives circulate more widely. The work of military engineers in California in the eighteenth century is analyzed related to the dynamics of the survey of natural resources (including minerals) in this territory, with the interests of several States coming together, such as France, England, Russia, and, later, the United States, in addition to Spain (Moncada Maya 1995). The quick scientific exchanges of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, which brought technical-scientific innovations applied to socially relevant sectors such as the mining industry, commerce, and public works, are analyzed simultaneously with the specialization and institutionalization of various areas of knowledge (Molina Martínez 1995; Aceves Pastrana 1995). Another good example is Azuela’s (2005) article that connected the introduction of experimental laboratory practices to mining activity in the construction of geology in an educational space in Mexico since the colonial period. Similarly, Figueirôa (1997) examined in detail the investments of the Portuguese metropolis in Earth sciences and Natural History since the Pombaline reforms, whose consequences, especially in mining, infrastructure works, and the training of technical staff, resulted in the institutionalization of geological sciences in Brazil. In Mexico, the institutionalization process of the Earth sciences in the sixteenth century was investigated in depth by Omar Moncada (2003). Márcia Alvim (2010) made a relevant contribution by associating sources traditionally used by history, but not really present in the history of sciences, such as the missionary chronicles and codices from the period of occupation, to rescue Mesoamerican knowledge about the natural world. As for the Mexican nineteenth century, it is important to highlight the works of Luz Azuela (1996), Mendoza Vargas (1999), and Morelos Rodríguez (2012).
At the same time, this production takes the concepts of “science” in each period, which means abandoning the present and ahistorical frameworks, common in previous works that continuously (and artificially) organized information about the Earth as if they had always been part of the same corpus of knowledge. Accordingly, for example, we find texts that connect geography, natural history, and physics to marine expeditions, bringing the richness and dynamics of the imbrications of these fields in their respective historical time (Capel 1995). In addition to valuing native knowledge, its circulation is considered a two-way street, breaking one-way and reductionist perspectives that only considered circulation from Europe to America or from Metropolis to Colonies. It is understood that “foreign” knowledge – especially European – goes through local “acclimatization” processes, almost always “amalgamating” with original knowledge and generating new knowledge that, in due course, returns to Europe to continue being used (Serrano Bravo 1995).
Production is abundant. Citing a few more themes, since the 1980s and 1990s, pre-Hispanic mining in Mexico (Langescheidt 1985; Sánchez-Flores 1988), neogranadine metallurgy (Espinosa Baquero 1987) or Peruvian pre-Hispanic (Grinberg and Palacios 1992), metallic mining in Central America (Soto 2011), or colonial mining in northwestern Argentina (Aceñolaza and Alonso 2018) have been treated in detail in specific localities, regions, or countries, addressing technology transfers, exchanges, and comparisons between America and Europe (Sánchez Gómez and Mira 1993; Contreras and Mira 1993), or mining representations in the scientific and technical press (Azuela and Morelos 2011).
Not intending to rebuild all mining-metallurgical activity in the region and opening new research perspectives for innovative approaches, Serrano Bravo (2004) relates mining in current Bolivia to agriculture, to climate processes and their effects on the environment, and implications regarding the health of populations. The mining of gold, silver, copper, and tin in Bolivia also invited the interest of foreigners, at various times, attracted by the dream of riches. As cited by the author, it also favored the exchange of knowledge between inhabitants of different regions of the territory and colonizers, in contexts where the performance of mineral policies in interculturality cannot be abstracted, in terms of practices in exploitation, and processing, and smelting of minerals. Such publications addressed aspects of the life of miners and entrepreneurs, the magnitude, intensity, and duration of certain companies (Fernández 2005), and opened perspectives for more critical analysis of those who did not find wealth. These aspects were only part of the producing mechanism and went unnoticed. Along these lines, historical reflections strongly resonate today, including issues of the environmental effects of mining or the exploitation of sea mineral resources (Coll-Hurtado et al. 2002; Uribe-Salas 2010; Machado and Figueirôa 2020).
To extract minerals, it is necessary first to carry out exploratory surveys and map the territory. Thus, another significant portion of historiographic production was dedicated to the history of Cartography and its multiple spatial approaches. An excellent example is the work “Historias de la Cartografía de Iberoamérica. Nuevos caminos, viejos problemas”, organized by Héctor Mendoza Vargas and Carla Lois (2009). This book discusses cartographic representations and their technical aspects, the relations between the State, national maps, and the professionals involved in their creation, passing through case studies that expand the theme in its various connections. As a rule, the institutions responsible for surveying territories were Geographical and Geological Commissions and Services, mostly inspired by the international model of “geological surveys.” Present practically all over the world, they constituted the institutional mark of developing the Earth sciences from the nineteenth century onward and Latin America did not overlook these actions. In Brazil, there were three initiatives in the independent and republican periods, two of them lasting until the present and inspired by the North American model. In each country, these institutions also focused on specific issues, from droughts in the Northeast of Brazil to the search for oil (Figueirôa 2007), also a common attribution to the Colombian Geological Service, the beneficiary of several institutions since the Chorographic Commission of New Granada (Restrepo Forero 1984). Organized in the twentieth century, in addition to prospecting for mineral resources, it also dealt with environmental disasters related to volcanism, earthquakes, landslides, and avalanches (Espinosa Baquero 2016). In the Mexican case, it was not until the last third of the nineteenth century that an official attempt was made to put together a geological survey, which had to overcome a series of local obstacles to become a reality (Azuela 2017).
The theme of Geological Surveys allows us to consider other types of institutions that were also studied, such as Academies, Museums, Research Institutes, Universities, among others, but outside the laudatory and encomiastic perspectives that are typically used during celebrations of festive dates such as anniversaries, silver or gold jubilees, or centenaries. Such studies generally used analytical categories involving aspects like “successes” or “failures,” “number of publications,” and “scientist’s administrative capacity,” for example, which concealed more than revealed the scientific activities that, concretely and daily, were carried out in this part of the world (Figueirôa 2019). Furthermore, Hebe Vessuri (1987) pointed out that the history of scientific institutions allows us to enter the strategic loci of science construction. Currently, there are very rich studies on scientific societies and museums that reveal their complex relationships as mediating institutions between science and society. From the perspective of the geography of institutional spaces, trying to put science in its place, historiographical studies show that geological, cartographic, geographic, mineralogical, and paleontological practices were enabled in different institutional spaces (Figueirôa 1992).
Among these institutions, we highlight only the museums, which, for example, were some of these seminal loci. In the changing perspectives of the 1980s and 1990s, mineral resources, particularly in Colombia (Rodríguez-Prada 2013), and the geographic and geological exploration of the territory in Chile (Sanhueza 2014) were addressed in studies on the museums that were created as legacies of illustrated colonialism in the first decades of the nineteenth century (Lopes and Podgorny 2000; Azuela et al. 2009; Lopes 2020). Such studies have shown a much more complex panorama about the earth sciences, until recently mainly focused on metropolitan collections only. They brought new analytical perspectives in works that concentrated on the difficulties of fieldwork in the nineteenth century, the circulation and commerce of objects and collections, correspondence, and ideas (Farro 2009). These exchanges were not only with researchers from institutions in Paris, Berlin, Padua, and Washington, but within the Latin American context between researchers from museums in Buenos Aires, La Plata, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Valparaiso, and Santiago de Chile, Bogotá, and México City. They showed how the fossils, bones, minerals, and rocks connected people, crossing national, local, disciplinary, or epistemological borders. Many of these analyses highlighted and demystified the recurrent ideas of natural history museums as symbols of invented nationalities and nationalized natures, highlighting the richness of their daily practices that are far removed from national political projects, whether implemented or not.
In the spaces of the countless museums organized since the end of the eighteenth century in Latin America, areas of knowledge such as paleontology have become institutionalized. Latin American historiography has devoted considerable attention to paleontology and stratigraphy, portraying the roused interest since the colonial period regarding the first findings of Latin American megafaunas; studies on fossils, fundamental for establishing geochronology and geological mapping of territories, or for coal surveys in the nineteenth century; or micropaleontological studies fundamental to oil research (Peyerl 2019). Comprehensive panoramas about Mexico or Costa Rica (Gío-Arsgáez et al. 2003; Alvarado Induni 1989) coexist with strategies of following the collections to identify the articulation of international communication networks among specialists (Waligora 2020) or to resume an unconventional biography by Florentino Ameghino (1853–1911), an unavoidable character in Latin American paleontology (Podgorny 2021), to reconstruct fieldwork, disputes over classification priorities, competition for publications, or the trajectories of the fossil trade.
In addition to paleontology, much of this historiography paid attention to and continues to address the consolidation processes of the various disciplinary fields and sub-fields of earth sciences throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as mineralogy and geography (García and Morelos 2011; Azuela 2011), but one of the recent trends is a shift to the more current themes of the twentieth century (La Podgorny 2005). Some examples are the aforementioned environmental approaches to mining, oil investigations, the inseparability of catastrophic geological processes, and their social implications, which have deserved the attention of various science historians and professionals who incorporated them into their specific themes.
Historical studies on oil show that explorations in different Latin American countries have gained prominence since the end of the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth century, improving expertise in stratigraphy, sedimentology, and geophysical research (Peyerl and Figueirôa 2020). In Venezuela, where the oil hunt started in 1912, location-specific approaches turn their attention to the violent confrontations of oil initiatives with communities that defended their ancestral lands, as well as projects considered significant economic failures (Urbani Patat 2020), and in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, or Brazil (Lopes 2019). In the context of the Argentinean agro-export society, for example, it was the Dirección de Minas, Geología y Hidrología, created in 1904 and heir to previous agencies and currently the Servicio Geológico Minero Argentino, that led oil research in the country since the beginning of the twentieth century (Riccardi 2016), as well as the most recent petrochemical investigations (Matharan and Feld 2016). These studies evidence not only the scientific and technological aspects, the industrial diversification, but also its impacts on political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, and diplomatic issues of history (Figueirôa et al. 2019).
However, geological realities differ from country to country. Unlike countries such as Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia, or Chile, where mining and the search for energy sources have been the fundamental promoters of geological knowledge, in Costa Rica, the seismic and volcanic phenomena have been the underlying foundation of geological investigation, and therefore historical. Contemplating relationships such as art and culture since pre-Columbian times related to volcanoes and various topics on the evolution of philosophical and scientific ideas and technology related to volcanology, a recent publication focusses on volcanological research throughout history in Costa Rica, addressing themes on geothermal energy development, volcano observatories, and the historical study of volcanic hazards (Alvarado Induni et al. 1991; Alvarado Induni 2021).
Throughout Latin America, as was done in Europe, previously unknown documents were compiled in the archives, since colonial times, on the occurrence of earthquakes, directly related to volcanism to understand the past. Incorporating anthropological perspectives, the authors of the ‘History of Seismological Assessment in Venezuela’ highlight the centrality of documentary research, including the churches, to unravel the characteristics of each earthquake in different times and the understanding of the social context for a broad understanding of earthquakes, as did other authors (Podestá and Olson 1987; Altez 2006; Altez et al. 2004; Poirier 2018; Alonso 2016).
In the perspectives that have understood earthquakes as hybrid entities, in the interface between nature and society, even in Brazil, a country known for the absence of intense earthquakes and active volcanism, Brazilian authors have also called attention to the fact that Brazil has been living under the impact of severe environmental, cultural, and political disasters for centuries. Retrieving centuries-old earthquake records, they highlight the urgency of taking innovative environmental, legal, and political steps to safeguard and preserve archives and material collections. Similarly, in Venezuela, debates about current risks and natural disasters are discussed while incorporating the historical perspective. These studies have shown that the key to understanding and solving today’s most pressing environmental challenges lies in the fabric that interconnects the Earth sciences and their historical record (Urbani Patat 2018; Lopes and Figueirôa 2020).
Biographies continue to be present in the historiography of Latin American Earth sciences, but without the hagiographic characteristic that has usually marked them. Instead, they seek to bring aspects of the life trajectories of local builders not prioritized by the previous historiography, such as José Vieira Couto (1752–1827) (da Silva 2002) and Guilherme Schüch de Capanema (1824–1908) (Figueirôa 2005), pivotal to the institutionalization process of Earth sciences in Brazil, as well as Germán Avé-Lallemant (1835–1910), a polymath whose work ranged from mineralogy to education in Argentina (Ferrari 2000). Or propose new ways to understand celebrated characters, such as Spanish-Mexican Andrés Manuel del Río (1764–1849), who was revisited within the context of the circulation of ideas between Saxony and New Spain (Escamilla-González and Morelos-Rodríguez 2020), José Bonifácio d’Andrada e Silva (1763–1838), revised in the inseparable dimension between a man of politics and science (Varela 2006), or Ignacio Domeyko (1802–1889), analyzed within the institutional consolidation of geological sciences in Chile (Hervé and Charrier 2016). These works have demonstrated how dialectically interconnected and interdependent scientists, institutions, and contexts are, also highlighting the role of individuals in history. Without, however, ignoring the fact that they relate to the collective and to their peers, who are part of a community, producing science and technology in the conflict between the individual and collective praxis.
Furthermore, particularly in the context of biographies, an emerging trend of work focused on gender relations in science is identified. These approaches, although present in an extensive historiographical production in several Latin American countries (Lopes et al. 2014), only recently have they started to receive greater attention from the historiography of Earth sciences, whether in presentations at symposiums (Morelos Rodríguez 2019), specific publications, or references to women’s life stories and work processes, discussing the inclusion and impact measures of women in the mining industry, in the search for more significant gender equity in ChileFootnote 5 (Narváez 2018) and Brazil (Carrilho 2021). Another focus has been the career of women in scientific disciplines, both in academia and in their profession, marked by gender prejudices and stereotypes, in Chilean (Mora-Stock et al. 2018), Mexican (Morelos Rodríguez 2019), Costa Rican, Cuban (Figueredo et al. 2017), or Argentinian productions (Herbst and Anzótegui 2016; Guereschi et al. 2021).
Studies on the histories of twentieth-century space and ocean explorations have also begun to gain greater expression in cross-fertilization with other areas of knowledge. Some investigations conceive marine scientific cultures as strategic areas for geological sciences by mining marine mineral resources (Lopes 2021). Others addressed the negotiations on the International Geophysical Year in 1957 as a model in the Cold War years on how to conceive international relations through science, aggregating different branches of geology, and geophysics, including oceanography or Antarctic treaties in the 1960s, that proposed preservation status of this region as an international reserve for science (García 2016).
4 Conclusion
In the historiography of Earth sciences in Latin America, the priority of analysis continues to be given to each country. However, new perspectives suggest counterpoints to the unidirectional standpoints of the old diffusionist proposals in the history of sciences. They emphasize that the individual, professional, institutional, political, economic, scientific, and theoretical interests of governments are not dissociated and are imbricated to rocks, fossils, soils, mineral and energy resources, and landscapes. They point to approaches about the spatiotemporal locations of countries, institutions, individuals, histories, and complex descriptions of specific details of contingent situations, favoring ideas that the production of knowledge in circulation can transgress scales, settings, and territories. The emphasis on places can help to better understand the processes of circulation and transfer of knowledge, technologies, and expertise in the context of international networks, even if they are marked by asymmetric relationships, dependent on economic trades, exchanges of favors, patronage, friendship, and obligation. For a comprehensive and global historiography of the Earth sciences based on such ideas, it is important to know what happened in each country and, especially, what happened in specific institutions or places, and in the activities of particular agents within international contexts, also contingent. Several local and regional distinctive aspects of disciplinary areas, which the present article would not be able to carry out, suggest new perspectives in which other unknown and ignored agents may emerge.
A large body of works continues to prioritize, given their historical relevance, the contributions, and collaborations between researchers and European countries and the United States in the development of Earth sciences in Latin America. Some studies open innovative perspectives for historical reflection regarding the exchanges within the continent itself, focusing on the practices of nineteenth-century museums, geological surveys, and oil exploration in the twentieth century or environmental perspectives of the twenty-first century.
There is still much to be explored under the framework of the circulation of ideas, practices, objects, and scientific cooperation in the continental context. One must be aware, however, that the phenomena associated with Earth sciences, due to their spatial and temporal dimensions, are not subordinated to geopolitical frontiers that, in Latin America and various regions of the world, as a result of the colonizing processes, wars, and territorial disputes, have changed over time. At the same time, our Earth is only one, and therefore, a new path also arises: the need to widen the historical dialogue with the other fields of earth sciences, such as the history of soil sciences, meteorology, or oceanography, among others.
Notes
- 1.
For more details, access: http://www.inhigeo.com/, https://www.iugs.org/, http://iuhpst.org/
- 2.
As an example, we mention the first Brazilian Colloquium on the History and Theory of Geological Knowledge (University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, July 1988); the 18th International INHIGEO Symposium (Campinas, SP and Ouro Preto, MG, Brazil, July 1993) (Lopes and Figueirôa 1990; Figueirôa and Lopes 1994). The Boletín de Historia de las Geociencias de Venezuela since 1984; the organization of the Sociedad Venezolana de Historia de las Geociencias 1988; the first Venezuelan Meeting on the History of geological sciences, 1991; the establishment of the Committee on the History and Philosophy of the Geosciences and Geotechnologies – COHIFIGEO, founded in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1989. Since 2007, Congresses on the History of Argentinean Geology (CAHGEO) have been held (Aceñolaza 2008); see Revista de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, vol. 7, Supl. 1, 2020 (https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/FCEFyN/issue/view/2083). The First Chilean Symposia on History of Geology was held in Chile in 2010 and the INHIGEO 43rd Meeting was held in Mexico DF, in 2018. http://www.inhigeo.com/record/51.pdf
- 3.
Also, within the framework of scientific associations, the History of Earth Sciences Society (HESS) founded in 1982 deserves emphasis. Since then, this society has published the journal Earth Sciences History (ESH) is one of the few, recognized international journals focused on this field of knowledge, which has had the participation of Latin American authors and publishers. For more details, access: http://www.historyearthscience.org/
- 4.
The journal owes its name to an ancient mathematical computing system used by the Incas in the Andes. This fact represented a symbol of the guiding ideas that were intended to be presented and implied the recognition of the scientific and technological past of Latin America.
- 5.
Presentation of the book ‘100 mujeres y sus historias en la minería chilena’ by Claudia Monreal, president of Women In Mining Chile https://www.reporteminero.cl/noticia/mujer-minera/2017/08/video-women-in-mining-chile-presenta-el-libro-que-regala-reporte-minero
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Figueirôa, S.F.d.M., Lopes, M.M. (2024). Historiography of Earth Sciences in Latin America. In: Aronova, E., Sepkoski, D., Tamborini, M. (eds) Handbook of the Historiography of the Earth and Environmental Sciences. Historiographies of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92679-3_27-1
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