e visited Morton and his collection in 1846, writing that “Morton’s skulls had made an impression. But Morton’s ideas about race were also appealing to Agassiz because they were entirely consistent with his own theory of natural history.”
Ricardo Roque, “Authorised Histories: Human Remains and the Economies of Credibility in the Science of Race,” Kronos 44 (November 2018): 69–85.
Collections of human remains and skulls, like those amassed by Morton and others now housed in museums, were meant to be contextualized with biographical data as part of their support of scientific racism. The information that was included or specifically left out was controlled by the collectors to support these beliefs. As Ricardo Roque argues, it is “time to rewrite histories for these collections, to give them a present and a future beyond the tropes of the colonial and racialised ‘little histories’ usually associated with them,” especially when this data is continuing to be used by current scholars and for repatriation.
Friedrich Pöhl, “Assessing Franz Boas’ Ethics in His Arctic and Later Anthropological Fieldwork,” Études Inuit Studies 32, no. 2 (2008): 35–52.
In examining influential anthropologist Franz Boas’s collecting for museums, which included the exploitation of people in the Arctic and desecration of Northwest Coast graves, Friedrich Pöhl situates his practices during a time of high demand for human remains for museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “People violated ethical and religious boundaries without a second thought,” Pöhl writes, “ignoring completely the meaning the dead of a supposedly primitive culture might hold for the living.” Boas’s research trips included work for the American Museum of Natural History, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Bureau of American Ethnology, the United States National Museum, and others, with Pöhl quoting Boas himself as stating, “Besides having scientific value these skeletons are worth money.”
Steven Lee Rubenstein, “Circulation, Accumulation, and the Power of Shuar Shrunken Heads,” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 3 (August 2007): 357–399.
While some human remains were collected by museums as anatomical or anthropological specimens, others were turned into commodities when amassed as objects of spectacle. How museum collecting changed the popular perception of tsantas, known commonly as shrunken heads, is analyzed by Steven Lee Rubenstein in this article that emphasizes how Europeans trading with the Shuar people in South America led to a loss of their ritual meaning. “Trophies of colonial expansion acquired by Euro-Ecuadorians in the upper Amazon, they are instead presented as trophies of Shuar warfare,” he writes, “so that museums can present themselves not as collectors of shrunken human heads but as collectors of tokens of ‘Shuar culture.’”
James Riding In, “Repatriation: A Pawnee’s Perspective,” American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 238–250.
From his perspective as a repatriation advocate with the Pawnee Nation, James Riding In chronicles the evolving challenges of working with museums to return and rebury remains looted from graves. His article was published six years after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, recognizing its limitations as some institutions “continued business as usual” while displaying Indigenous remains. His analysis includes an overview of how past legislation enabled the theft and display of remains and burial objects, such as the Antiquities Act of 1906. “With such laws stipulating the placement of remains, burial offerings, and other unearthed objects in public institutions forever, universities, state historical societies, museums, and federal agencies became mausoleums,” he writes.
Andrew Gulliford, “Bones of Contention: The Repatriation of Native American Human Remains,” The Public Historian 18, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 119–143.
“It is no accident that vast collections of skeletal remains, grave goods, and Indian artifacts came to repose in the Smithsonian In