15.00-16.00h: Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel & Vossius Fellow

On Tissues and Salts: Understanding the Micro-World in Progressing Early Modern Horticultural Expertise

Gardens were important places for plant studies and the production of botanical books in early modern Europe. For example, the living rare plant collections in private princely or liefhebber gardens and/or semi-public university or city gardens offered naturalists a means to study and write many descriptions of plants from the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Early modern gardens were also grounds for experimenting with different planting methods and breeding new cultivars of flowers and fruit, leading to a greater variety of productive and ornamental plants for research and usage. The flourishing botanical interests required the expertise and knowledge of (head) gardeners and horticulturalists. Many learned gardeners/horticulturalists who wrote and published treatises on the art of gardening also studied other subjects, such as chemistry and plant anatomy, a new field of research that started around the 1670s. This paper examines the discussions on plant tissues and salts in several eighteenth-century gardening treatises. It looks into how the authors implemented microscopic studies in practical planting to better understand and explain the inner workings of plants. By situating these microscopic studies in the larger development of different scientific interests of the period, this paper explores how gardeners/horticulturalists worked with theory and practice to find more effective methods for cultivating plants.

16.00-17.00h: Anabel Harisch, LMU Munich & Vossius Fellow

Caves, Lakes, and Early Archaeologists: The Emergence of Prehistoric
Research in 19th Century Germany

In the 1820s, discoveries of human bones and artifacts alongside extinct animal remains became increasingly common across Europe. Scholars and enthusiasts alike began to seek answers about the first appearance of humans and the development of human culture. However, traditional historical disciplines like history and philology, dependent on text-based sources, could not address questions about these prehistoric times. This gap led to the emergence of anthropology in the 1860s as a new field dedicated to the comprehensive study of humans. Anthropology consisted of three main subfields: physical anthropology, ethnology, and prehistory (Urgeschichte), each contributing insights into human physicality, cultural diversity, and ancient history.

Research in these fields was often organized through societies, most notably the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory and its local branches. In my talk, I will explore the central questions, methods, and institutional developments that shaped prehistoric research (Urgeschichtsforschung) in the 19th century, with particular attention to two defining research areas: cave exploration and pile dwelling studies. These topics illustrate how prehistoric archaeology evolved into a distinct field in the second half of the 19th century.