"Papered Leps" & Incidental Archives at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Deirdre Smith
204 Frick Fine Arts

Curators and other staff at natural history museums often describe their collections as archives or libraries of life, in reference to the ways that their often-massive holdings of birds, bugs, amphibians, reptiles, and other biological specimens can allow scientists to track evolutionary and ecological change over time. This presentation will focus on an ongoing research project that indicates an "incidental" archive of human life available for multidisciplinary research within these same collections. "Papered leps" is the term for Lepidoptera specimens folded in the field in scraps of paper. Although a moth or butterfly was the intended target, examining the papers can lead to insights about the broader context of specimen collecting. For the past year, students in my "Inside the Museum" course and I have been examining the papered leps sent to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History by Albert Irwin Good (1882-1963), a Presbyterian Reverend who spent long portions of his career stationed in Cameroon doing missionary work, when Cameroon was under first German and later French rule. Good sent thousands of insects wrapped in paper to CMNH, including in scraps of international publications, letters, and drafts of sermons. This presentation will share the avenues of research that have extended from the starting point of those fragmentary papers, including research conducted in other sections of the museum's collection, and at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia.