By Nathalie Richard, Le Mans Université
In the storerooms of the Carnac Prehistory Museum there is an ordinary-looking pebble, labelled as a “pre-Columbian archaeological polished pebble”. Protected in a plastic bag, it rests in a box alongside other objects also identified as pre-Columbian, authentic or facsimile, several of which are broken.
Nowadays, this pebble has no place in the permanent exhibition of the museum dedicated to the rich local archaeological heritage. However, although it has been put away in the storerooms, it still has a lot to say to the historians of science and collections when they look at it from all sides and analyse the old labels and annotations that are attached to it with the help of the museum archives.
The first story that this pebble recounts is that of the museum and its transformations. Founded in 1882, in a village famous for its Neolithic remains, notably its enigmatic alignments of menhirs, the museum was created thanks to the donation of a private collection and funds for the construction of a dedicated building. As indicated by the number on the pebble and the notation on the sleeve that protects it, this object was part of the collection of the founder, James Miln (1819-1881). This wealthy Scottish aristocrat is a representative of a type of 19th-century science enthusiasts who are sometimes called “grand amateurs”. Given their level of education, leisure time, financial means and social networks they were able to mobilize, these amateurs practiced a science that was little or no different from that of the few professionals. A heir to important estates in Scotland, James Miln practiced the arts and sciences. Before coming to Brittany, he was a member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and is also known as a pioneer photographer. He drew and painted. He came to visit Carnac where he became fascinated with archaeology and carried out excavations. The artefacts he discovered formed the core of the museum’s collection in 1882. But James Miln was a man of his time and the collection he donated also contained ethnographic objects and pieces that were very fashionable at the time and which any archaeological collection worthy of the name had to include. Such was the case of the remains then called “pre-Columbian”, “Mexican” or “Peruvian”, the vestiges of a civilization whose richness was discovered in the 19th century, and that, viewed from Europe, was located in a rather imprecise space and in time. It is not surprising to find such objects in James Miln’s collection.

As this pebble, the first handwritten inventories and printed catalogues indicate, the Carnac Museum was not always as specialized as it is today. Like all museums, it is not a rigid institution and like many of them, it has gradually become specialized, leading to the relegation to its storage rooms, or the outright disappearance, of pieces that belonged to its collections. Alongside the local archaeological pieces and a few ethnographic and “pre-Columbian” objects of the Miln collection, the James Miln Museum displayed collections of natural history and objects related to the local economic activities, notably oyster farming which was developed and modernized in the last decades of the 19th century. The museum’s archives reveal that a lot of energy and funds were devoted to building up a collection of stuffed birds that has now disappeared. These disappearances are not rare, contrary to what one might think. Some collections, such as those of ornithology or entomology, are fragile and when they ceased to be of interest to the museum, they could eventually deteriorate and disappear. The pieces that survived, like this pebble, remind us of this.
The label pasted on the polished pebble tells yet another story, that of the trade in archaeological remains in the 19th century. In the field of archaeology, the worlds of excavators and collectors did not completely overlap. Many collectors did not discover the objects that formed their collections but obtained them through exchanges, gifts or purchases. Auctions of archaeological objects, including prehistoric ones, played an important role in this period. Collectors could also buy from specialized dealers. For “Mexican” antiques, the dealer Eugène Boban (1834-1908) played an important role. After living, collecting and selling archaeological objects in Mexico, Boban opened a Parisian store around 1870 and became one of the leading experts and suppliers of Pre-Columbian objects in the Parisian marketplace. He donated and sold collections to museums and renowned collectors. The objects he sold may be authentic or facsimiles, but some had a provenance that was difficult to establish. Boban’s name is associated with a famous case of forgery, when he sold allegedly Aztec crystal skulls in the 1880s. His name and the address of his store are still visible on the label of the pebble, showing that Miln was one of Boban’s many clients and that he was integrated, as a collector, in the networks dominated by expert dealers.
Thus a simple polished pebble, forgotten in a crate in the basement of a museum, tells us multiple stories of science, collecting and trade. It connects a Breton village of the end of the 19th century to networks of circulation of people and objects on a global scale. In small museums and in their storages, many objects similar to this pebble exist.