HIDE AND SEEK: Pelts of jaguar (Panthera onca), giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), neotropical otter (Lontra longicaudis), and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) at a tannery in Manaus (Amazonas State, Brazil) during the 1950sVIRTUAL LIBRARY OF THE BRAZILLIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS
Wildlife ecologist Andre Antunes is the first to admit that he’s not ideally suited to archival research. “My home is in the forest,” he says wistfully. “It’s very difficult for me to work in libraries.” But in the late 2000s, while investigating the impact of commerce on Amazonian ecology over the 20th century, the Brazilian researcher had little choice but to dive into library and museum archives in search of data.
As part of a conservation management project in the lower Purús River, a tributary of the Amazon that rises in Peru and empties into the Amazon upstream of Manaus, Brazil, Antunes was reviewing the history of natural resource use in the region. The work entailed countless hours hunting down old documents—port registries, export records, ...
