ABSTRACT
The collaboration between naturalist voyagers’ expeditions, on the one hand, and antiquaries and geologists concerned with human antiquity, on the other, turned the New Guinea present in the 19th century into European prehistory. Early prehistoric archeology, European expeditions and their travel narratives, natural history's goal of classifying and ordering not only animals, plants, or islands but also human cultures and peoples in time and space, evolutionary thought and the richness of imagination all worked together to conceptualize New Guinea as a place where, thanks to the epistemic tool of the ethnographic analogy, a “living” Stone Age could be visited. This chapter will revisit this poietic conjunction of European prehistory and the “exotic” present. It will show how this fruitful interdisciplinary “fabrication” of knowledge about the deep human past, the scientific invention of the Stone Age, lent new significance to expeditions to New Guinea (and other islands in the Pacific) well into the 20th century. The chapter will elaborate how the ethnological analogy as a chronopolitical practice informed persisting imaginations of prehistoric humanity and at the same time turned the culturally diverse inhabitants of New Guinea into eternal de-temporalized “Stone Age dwellers” living “where time stood still.”
