ARTICLE Lost Objects, Hidden Stories: On the Ethnographic Collections Burned in the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro Thiago Lopes da Costa Oliveira In this article, I take a close look at the objects collected over the last 200 years from the indigenous people of the Upper Rio Negro, northwest of the Brazilian Amazon,that were part of the ethnographic collection of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro. Examination of these objects allows us to explore the main characteristics of the ethnographic archive of the museum, as the Upper Rio Negro collections were connected to different topics associated with indigenous societies and histories in Brazil, including enslavement, forced displacement, religious conversion, and indigenous territorial, artifactual, and cultural knowledge. This article also highlightsthe professional commitment of Brazilian anthropology to amplifying indigenous voices over the course of the history of the discipline, and by doing so, it pays homage to the women and men whose work built the National Museum collections. Keywords: National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, fire, Amazonian ethnographic collections 1818–2018, history of ethnographic collecting, Amazonian indigenous history, collaborative research, morphological analysis of ethnographic objects Este trabajo discute las principales características de las colecciones etnográficas del Museo Nacional de Río de Janeiro a través de los objetos recuperados durante los últimos 200 años entre los indígenas del Alto Río Negro (URN), quienes habitan en el noroeste de la Amazonia brasileña. Como un ejemplo que permite abordar las principales características del acervo etnográfico del Museo, estas colecciones están vinculadas a diferentes temas que abordan las historias y las sociedades indí- genas de Brasil tales como la esclavitud, el desplazamiento forzado, la conversión religiosa y el conocimiento ecológico nativo. Durante la presentación de estos temas, el texto destaca el compromiso profesional de la Antropología Brasileña con la diseminación de las voces indígenas a lo largo de su historia. Al hacerlo, rindo homenaje a las mujeres y hombres cuyo trabajo ha constituido el Museo Nacional. Palabras clave: Museo Nacional de Río de Janeiro, incendio, colecciones etnográficas amazónicas 1818–2018, historia del coleccionismo etnográfico, historia indígena amazónica, investigación colaborativa, análisis morfológico de objetos etnográficos Reminiscences S till in shock after the fire during the night of September 2, 2018, which destroyed almost 80% of the collections held by the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, I was contacted by a journalist from BBC Brazil. It was then Monday, the morning after the tragedy. Researchers from various departments of the museum were assembled in the gardens of Quinta da Boa Vista, facing the charred skeleton of the building that once housed more than 20 million items, comprising the largest natural his- tory collection in Brazil and one of the five lar- gest in the world. I felt that I was witnessing scenes following a mass extinction. Colleagues who had rushed to the museum during the fire described the deafening noise of successive huge explosions that were heard as flames furiously consumed the building. As I lis- tened to their words, discrete columns of gray Thiago Lopes da Costa Oliveira (thiago.lc.oliveira@gmail.com) ▪ CAPES-Humboldt Postdoctoral Researcher at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. Takustraße 40, 14195 Berlin, Germany Latin American Antiquity, pp. 1–17 Copyright © 2020 by the Society for American Archaeology doi:10.1017/laq.2020.16 1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/laq.2020.16 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 77.11.145.206, on 25 May 2020 at 09:45:08, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at