Commercial fossil collection has a history as long as paleontology itself. Foundational figures Mary Anning and Charles H. Sternberg offered their finds to avocational collectors and scholars alike. The celebrated rivalry between American paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and O.C. Marsh amidst the backdrop of the Gilded Age was only possible through the labor of commercial fossil collectors who formed the backbone of the great American paleontological institutions. This integration between commercial extraction and scientific research strikes as unimaginable to Western paleontologists today: commercial fossil sales were recently charged as the ‘greatest challenge to twenty-first century paleontology’ by a group of American academic paleontologists.

I show that these economic relationships were foundational to the development of the discipline, and continue to profoundly influence the directions of paleontological research today. The modern global fossil industry emerged in the postwar United States, centered on nascent avocational gem and mineral societies. As amateur organizations grew, so did the collecting and sale infrastructure: nowhere did this occur more than in Tucson, Arizona. The Tucson Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show was established in 1955 as a modest local venue, but over the ensuing decades the event swelled to hundreds of vendors and tens of thousands of visitors vying to purchase fossils and minerals. The expansion of the Tucson Show during the 1950s and 1960s evinces the postwar growth of amateur fossil collection and the increased public interest in fossils.

This presentation builds on the words of the French historian Marc Bloch who defined geology as a “historical discipline” in his 1949 work “Apologie pour l'histoire.”

Besides Bloch, other historians from the French school of the "Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale" (Braudel, Le Goff, Febvre, Le Roy Ladurie and others) in their works have questioned and referred to the nature of geology and its component branches in different ways.

The aim of this paper is to highlight some historiographical interpretations related to geology and other opportunities for methodological and definitional comparisons between the two subjects, considering geology in its status as a discipline often considered as a “border” between natural sciences and history itself.

The most famous ancient monuments in the Balkans are located in Greece. However, also the countries of former Yugoslavia and Albania house various Roman, Greek, and prehistoric sites, which have attracted the attention of archaeologists (in the modern sense) since the mid-19th century. Many of the first researchers came from Austria, France, Britain, Russia, and Italy. Austria(-Hungary) ruled present-day Slovenia, Croatia, and later also Bosnia-Herzegovina in a colonial fashion, while Ottoman rule in the eastern Balkans was declining. As a consequence, the European powers each pursued geopolitical and other interests in the Balkans, and their archaeologies were embedded in that context. On the other hand, archaeology has always depended on the knowledge and cooperation of local residents. Moreover, in the late 19th century, Balkan natives emerged as archaeologists in their own right, who worked more or less independently from the foreigners until the Balkan countries became independent as Yugoslavia and Albania after World War I. This war, in turn, was triggered in part by the nationalisms of Balkan peoples, which may have influenced native archaeologies. Before this background of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism, my paper explores the relationship between foreign archaeologists, including those in the Austrian administration, and native actors in Balkan archaeology in the long 19th century. How did local knowledge and practices inform the foreigners? How did foreign and native archaeologists cooperate and/or compete with each other? And how similar was Balkan archaeology in this regard to Western archaeology in non-European, “Oriental” settings such as Egypt and Mesopotamia?