A HUMAN skull can be a scientific specimen, but never only that. It always comes with a story attached of how the person it belonged to lived and died, and how their skull came under the scientist鈥檚 gaze.
Ann Fabian鈥檚 painstakingly researched book begins with Philadelphian naturalist George Morton, who collected nearly 1000 skulls before his death in 1851. His measurements were the raw data for a new racial 鈥渟cience鈥�. As Fabian says, the human races were invented, not discovered, each created for their region of the globe, with whites claimed to be a bit smarter than the rest.
She describes Morton鈥檚 collection, with the poor, executed criminals and the newly colonised the often unwitting donors. It becomes clear how cultural bias did not just contribute to the new science, but constituted it.
Advertisement
The chapters then take a meandering path through a raid on Fiji, the fate of the unburied dead of the American civil war, and efforts to accurately measure brain size. This dissipates the impact of often fascinating material.
The Skull Collectors: Race, science, and America鈥檚 unburied dead
University of Chicago Press