António Mesquita de Figueiredo (1880-1954): archaeological collecting and knowledge circulation networks, 1894-1910

Abstract

This article discusses the intellectual path of the Portuguese collector and researcher António Mesquita de Figueiredo. Being a practically unknown personality, we sought to understand the causes of this historiographical forgetting based on the occurrence of public disagreements in the early twentieth century with the director of the Portuguese Ethnological Museum, José Leite de Vasconcelos. The identification of more than a dozen letters sent to Salomon Reinach between 1897 and 1918, as well as the correspondence exchanged with other impotant Portuguese and foreign archaelogists and intellectuals, justifies the analysis of his internacional networks, the nature of his scientific production as well as its contribution to the enrichment of Portuguese museum collections and its consequente involvement in the processes of construction of historical knowledge.