Heaney - Skull Walls

Christopher
Heaney
Skull Walls
The Peruvian Dead and the Remains of Entanglement
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When the Smithsonian’s first Hall of Physical Anthropology opened in Washing-
ton, DC, in 1965, it greeted visitors with the skulls of 160 “Peruvian Indians.” Using
indiscernible brackets, anthropologists at the National Museum of Natural History
had fixed them to the exhibit’s wall like a lopsided mushroom cloud to visualize how
the “world’s human population has literally ‘exploded’ in historic times.” Every three
crania represented one hundred million people. At the exhibit’s base, nine skulls rep-
resented the three hundred million people believed to compose the world’s human
population in AD 1, the “Beginning of the Christian Era.” The row above was fifteen
skulls long, the five hundred million people supposed alive in 1560, which the exhib-
it’s designers designated “Beginning Settlements in America.” Thirty more crania in
two rows represented the one billion people estimated for 1860, the eve of “the Civil
War.” Finally, a thunderhead of 106 skulls represented the 3.5 billion human beings
alive in 1960, “the Space Age.” According to the Washington Post, the “grinning skulls
of the ancient Peruvians” “eerily demonstrated” the new hall’s overall theme: “man’s
supremacy over all other primates.” Its designers simply called it the “Skull Wall.”1
Who were these “ancient Peruvians,” and why had the Smithsonian made them
stand for humanity’s “supremacy”? The museum’s director and senior physical anthro-
pologist T. Dale Stewart was vague in his explanation: “The death’s heads were found
about 60 years ago after being uncovered by gold miners,” but there was “no particular
significance in their use.”
“We used Peruvian skulls,” Stewart told the Post, “because we had so many of them.”
1 “Exhibit Unit No. 2—World Population Explosion,” box 2, folder “Hall 25: Physical Anthropology Script,”
Record Unit (RU) 363: National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) Office of Exhibits Exhibition
Records, Smithsonian Institution Archives (hereafter cited as SIA); Richard Corrigan, “Visit National
History Museum and Have a Real Skull Session,” Washington Post, July 1, 1965.
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 1071
Stewart’s answer explained little but was not wrong. If the Post’s reporter investigated
further, he could have learned just how long Andean remains had been abundant at
the Smithsonian. The first eleven entries of the institution’s first ethnological catalog
were three Peruvian mummies and eight Peruvian skulls. The early Smithsonian other-
wise avoided the collection of human remains, but it dramatically reversed course after
1903, when Stewart’s predecessor, Aleš Hrdlička, more than doubled the institution’s
collection of human remains, adding more than ten thousand “ancient Peruvian” cra-
nia, bones, and mummified remains. Today, remains from the United States—Indige-
nous, Black, white—outnumber remains from Peruvians when counted together, but

doing so neglects the racializing labels of their collection, by which “Peruvian Indians”
remain the largest original population.2
Nor was this Peruvian surfeit specific to the Smithsonian. If the reporter left DC,
he would have seen how unremarkable it was within American anthropology and its
museums. The largest original population in the Americas’ first dedicated anthropol-
ogy museum, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, was Peru’s
dead: they accounted for almost half of the Peabody’s cranial population when the
institution opened in 1866, rising to nearly two-thirds of the collection by its eighth
year.3 In 1893, some fifty mummy bundles removed from Peru’s “Necropolis” of Ancón
were the largest and most popular display in the anthropology exhibit of Chicago’s
Columbian Exposition, its famed World’s Fair; their excavation was the subject of the
first PhD dissertation in anthropology written by a US citizen (again, at Harvard).
The mummies became a founding collection of Chicago’s Field Museum, but they also
ended up at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, whose own largest cra-
nial population, when tallied in the 1920s, was six hundred from Bolivia and Peru.4
And then there was Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), the Philadelphian skull
scientist whom Hrdlička deemed the “father of American anthropology,” whose
2 Titian Ramsay Peale, “Collection of the United States South Sea Surveying and Exploring Expedition,
1838–1842,” box 1, folder 8 (“Ethnology”), RU 7186: United States Exploring Expedition Collection, SIA;
Aleš Hrdlička, “Division of Physical Anthropology Annual Report 1910–1911” and “Division of Physical
Anthropology Annual Report, 1916–1917,” box 32, RU 158: United States National Museum, Curators’
Annual Reports, SIA; Joseph Feldman, “‘Miserable San Damian—but What Treasures!’: The Life of Aleš
Hrdlička’s Peruvian Collection,” History and Anthropology 27 no. 2 (2016): 230–50. David R. Hunt, former
bioanthropology collection manager of the NMNH, broke down the modern numbers for me. Of the more
than thirty-four thousand catalog records for human remains in the Smithsonian Institution’s physical
anthropology collections in 2014, 4,851 lots of crania, long bones, or other skeletal elements are from Peru,
about 14 percent. This is far less than the 75 percent that are from the geographical United States, whose
single largest internal population (15.2 percent of the larger collection) comprises 4,500 white and Black
Americans in the anatomical skeletal collections of known individuals. “Peruvian” also nationalizes peoples
of different culture groups, separated by thousands years, from across the Andes. But again, using the original,
historical terms of their collection, Peru’s populations remain largest. The next largest from any one country
is Egypt, at about 2.2. percent. Author’s correspondence with David R. Hunt, February 24, April 14, 16, 2014.
3 Jeffries Wyman, First Annual Report of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology
(Cambridge, MA, 1868), 5–9; Jeffries Wyman, “Report of the Curator,” in Sixth Annual Report of the
Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology (Boston, 1873), 6.
4 Warren King Moorehead, “Anthropology at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Archaeologist 2, no.
1 (1894): 15–24, here 20; George A. Dorsey, “An Archaeological Study Based on a Personal Exploration
of Over One Hundred Graves at the Necropolis of Ancon, Peru” (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1894);
Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge,
MA, 2016), 193.
1072 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

methods and white supremacist theorizations of separate human creations shaped
his field. 5 When Morton wrote his first book, Crania Americana (1839), the earliest
section he composed was on Peru.6 The first “American” skull to enter his collection,
as historian Ann Fabian notes, was from Peru.7 In the last catalog Morton published
before dying in 1851, 201 of his 867 human skulls were “ancient Peruvian,” the largest
population in what was then the Atlantic world’s largest and most influential anthropo-
logical collection, which moved to the University of Pennsylvania’s museum of archae-
ology and anthropology in 1966.8
In other words, Stewart answered the Post’s question without explaining much

at all. From a curatorial perspective, because the Smithsonian had so many skulls of
“ancient Peruvian Indians,” Stewart might have thought it appropriate to use them in
such a blockbuster display, given that to do otherwise would deplete proportionally
more skulls from groups less represented in the research collection.9 But to the more
pointed questions invoked by the Skull Wall—who were the 160 individuals subsumed
as “ancient Peruvian Indians,” and why were they so foundational to anthropological
collections that they could be made to represent all humanity, and not their own mil-
lennia of innovation and settlement?—Stewart’s reply was more of a shrug.
Or is “We used Peruvian skulls because we had so many of them” answer enough?
***
This essay argues that Americanist anthropological collectors between 1820 and 1920
acquired more human remains of Andean origin than those of any other single popu-
lation worldwide because Peru’s own history mattered. That this is at all a novel claim
suggests how race science’s archives and museums orient even critical histories toward
the Global North.10 Those archives make clear that white Americans used cemeteries,
5 Aleš Hrdlička, Physical Anthropology: Its Scope and Aims; Its History and Present Status in the United
States (Philadelphia, 1919), 41; Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (New
York, 1982), 16–17; Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, 2001), chap. 5; Alice L. Conklin,
In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY, 2013), 22–24;
James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–1920
(Chicago, 2019).
6 Samuel George Morton to George Combe, March 2, 1840, MSS 7256/48–49, National Library of Scotland
(hereafter cited as NLS). I thank Angela Smith for her help accessing this exchange.
7 Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago, 2010), 38.
8 The next largest population was “ancient Egyptians,” at 84. The rest of the “Americans,” North and South,
numbered 208. “Negro” skulls amounted to 107. Samuel George Morton, Catalogue of Skulls of Man and
the Inferior Animals, in the Collection of Samuel George Morton, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia, 1849), v–vi. When
the collection was next tallied, in 1857, 221 of the 1,035 human crania of the “Morton” collection were
“ancient Peruvians” or replicating casts. J. Aitken Meigs, Catalogue of Human Crania, in the Collection of
the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia: Based upon the Third Edition of Dr. Morton’s “Catalogue
of Skulls,” &c. (Philadelphia, 1857), 3, 76–87.
9 Author’s correspondence with David R. Hunt, February 24, 2014.
10 Warwick Anderson, “Racial Conceptions in the Global South,” Isis 105, no. 4 (2014): 782–92. See Ana
Lucia Araujo, Alice L. Conklin, Steven Conn, Denise Y. Ho, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Samuel
J. Redman, “AHR Conversation: Museums, History, and the Public in a Global Age,” American Historical
Review 124, no. 5 (2019): 1631–72, for an excellent and wide-ranging discussion regarding global museums
and the traumatic power relations and provenances that curations conceal.
S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1073

plantations, hospitals, reservations, and battlefields to accumulate the remains of
enslaved, poor, and Indigenous peoples from around the world. Anthropologists and
surgeons like Morton then studied and depicted skulls and behaviors as specimens of
race history, in which colonization, enslavement, and criminalization predicted future
white dominance. Communities whose identities, sovereignties, and soul values—per
Daina Ramey Berry—survived this violence have long called for their ancestors’ return
and redress.11
When noted, the unexpected preponderance of a group as temporally distant as
ancient Peruvians seems to clarify American race science’s opportunism.12 Historian

of science Stephen Jay Gould, for example, argued that Morton collected a “major
overrepresentation of an extreme group”—“the small-brained Inca Peruvians”—for
the same reason he sought so many skulls worldwide: as extrinsically useful tools in
a project to “plummet” his averaged measurements of nonwhite crania across time.13
This accumulation of human materials is among race science’s legacies, surviving its
field’s turns to culture, migration, species-level population growth, and, more recently,
genetics.14 In the case of the Smithsonian, “Peruvian Indians” remained so numerous
that whatever Stewart knew of their history mattered less than how he could use them
11 An abbreviated review includes the following: William Ragan Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific
Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago, 1966); Vine Deloria Jr., “Anthropologists and Other
Friends,” in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York, 1969), 78–100; Robert E. Bieder,
Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman, OK, 1986),
chap. 3; James Riding In, “Six Pawnee Crania: The Historical and Contemporary Issues Associated with the
Massacre and Decapitation of Pawnee Indians in 1869,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16,
no. 2 (1992): 101–19; Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in
Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ, 2002); Fabian, The Skull Collectors; Nell Irvin Painter, The
History of White People (New York, 2010); Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native
America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012); Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and
Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture (Chicago, 2017); Daina Ramey Berry,
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a
Nation (Boston, 2017), 101–12, chap. 6; Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural
Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850 (Williamsburg, VA, 2018), chap. 7; Michael L. Blakey,
“Archaeology under the Blinding Light of Race,” Current Anthropology 61, no. S22 (2020): S183–97.
12 The Peruvian skulls of Morton and others are noted by Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots, 38; Bieder, Science
Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880, 77–78; Helen Delpar, Looking South: The Evolution of Latin
Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2008), 12; Fabian, The Skull
Collectors, 38–39, 189–90; Miruna Achim, “Skulls and Idols: Anthropometrics, Antiquity Collections, and
the Origin of American Man, 1810–1850,” in Nature and Antiquities: The Making of Archaeology in the
Americas, ed. Philip L. Kohl, Irina Podgorny, and Stefanie Gänger (Tucson, AZ, 2014), 23–46, here 32;
Redman, Bone Rooms, 106–8, 165–68; and Poskett, Materials of the Mind, 102–5.
13 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (1981; repr., New York, 2006), 89, 99. Subsequent
research has shown that Morton weighted Peruvians equally to other American groups to not distort
the shared average, but that his decision to amass and average them, in light of his documented beliefs,
illustrates his project’s racism. For an incisive reconsideration of Gould and Morton’s biases, see Paul Wolff
Mitchell, “The Fault in his Seeds,” PLoS Biology 16, no, 10 (2018): 1-16; Paul Wolff Mitchell and John S.
Michael, “Bias, Brains, and Skulls: Tracing the Legacy of Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth-Century
Works of Samuel George Morton and Friedrich Tiedemann,” in Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in
Public Discourse, ed. Jamie A. Thomas and Christina Jackson (Lanham, MD, 2019), 77–98.
14 For how race continued to shape American anthropology and notions of Indigenous descent despite
the field’s twentieth-century shift to questions and displays of migration and culture, see Tracy Teslow,
Constructing Race: The Science of Bodies and Cultures in American Anthropology (New York, 2014);
Redman, Bone Rooms; and Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of
Genetic Science (Minneapolis, 2013).

to measure and display all humanity, as bricks in a wall mortared by North American
temporality: Christianity, the US Civil War, colonizations past and future.
“Ancient Peruvians” weren’t bricks, of course. But because the Skull Wall came
down in the 1980s, its 160 crania rejoining 4,691 other Andean lots in storerooms
of the National Museum of Natural History, the historian largely encounters them in
an archive that affirms Stewart’s understanding of the mortar that still holds them in
place—“American” race science, now more critically viewed. This mortar lends itself
to an actionable reading of the Skull Wall as a seemingly transparent example of how
settler colonialism, white supremacism, and scientific empire webbed the world, intel-

lectualizing inequities as basic as the denial of a peaceful burial. Yet as explanation of
what was intrinsic to the Andean dead or the “Peruvian” past that first interested their
collectors, the wall may as well still exist.15
In arguing that Peru’s own history mattered, this article therefore scales a problem
whose temporalities go beyond those of the United States. It argues that Peru became
Americanist anthropology’s quarry because it was home to Andean mortuary cul-
tures already targeted by three centuries of disinterment and textualization. After
independence, republican Peruvians promoted these “Inca” ancestors abroad, where
their adoption by Morton broadcast their reputation as the earliest, most “civilized,”
certainly most collectible “Americans.”16 The “ancient Peruvian” diaspora became
American museums’ abundant core, to be compared to other Native peoples who
now were amassed as well. This transnational process “shaped racialization in both
North and South,” contributing to Peru’s own expanding museum project—but the
Andeans’ near ubiquity eventually occluded their specific importance.17 Over time,
15 Among this essay’s concerns is why, save a reference in Joseph Feldman’s excellent “‘Miserable San
Damian—but What Treasures!,’” 242, the original Skull Wall has gone undescribed. One answer is that
storerooms and archives are easy places to forget monuments taken down by the institutions who put
them up. For example, upon encountering a photograph of the wall in the archives, this historian’s first
thought was “I’m glad it’s down.” I had been using the records and collection rooms of the Smithsonian and
the University of Pennsylvania Museum to approach the individual lives that the racialization of “ancient
Peruvians” obscured. But I soon realized that my relief at such a monument’s dismantling, rather than
devastation at its existence, actually assisted the museum in forgetting the nationalist, racist, and temporal
ideologies that subjected those lives to the gaze of millions of visitors through the mid-1980s.
16 For “textualization” and the “anatomization” of racial identities, see Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy
of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, 2011). For this specific
textualization’s circulation, see Mark Thurner, History’s Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial
Historiography (Gainesville, FL, 2011); Stefanie Gänger, Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Study of
Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911 (Oxford, 2014); and Christopher Heaney, “How
to Make an Inca Mummy: Andean Embalming, Peruvian Science, and the Collection of Empire,” Isis 109,
no. 1 (2018): 1–27.
17 Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, “Introduction: Racial
Nations,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson,
and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 13. In this sense, “ancient Peruvians” were as
foundational to anthropology as enslaved and Black women’s bodies were to American gynecology. Deirdre
Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens, GA,
2017). For like examples of Iberian and Indigenous knowledges undergirding “modern” sciences, see James
H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997):
143–66; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian
and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (1999):
33–68; Julia Rodriguez, “South Atlantic Crossings: Fingerprints, Science, and the State in Turn-of-the-
Century Argentina,” American Historical Review 109, no. 2 (2004): 387–416; Gregory T. Cushman, Guano

claims for ancient Peruvian civility and priority came to matter less than the compa-
rability of their accumulated mortality: skulls that constellated America’s way from
Christ to the storeroom and the stars. That the Peruvians and their history were once
also the mortar was lost.
This history is relevant beyond the Skull Wall and race science’s remainders. It also
tells us something of how our own priors in history materialized the “American” past,
and what it means for our recent attempts to understand its entanglements. In anthro-
pology, entanglement has been an important methodology for understanding how Euro-
pean collectors and Native makers gifted, exchanged, and appropriated each other’s

things, complicating the hierarchies claimed by colonialism.18 A similar turn of the last
two decades in history has been an exciting attention to entanglement as revealing sim-
ilarly heterarchical, mutually influencing pasts—for North Americanists, a “vast early
America,” in the words of historian Karin Wulf, in which wider geographies, experiences,
and temporalities of Indigenous, African, and European actors reveal “a fuller North
American story that incorporates an Atlantic and, especially, Caribbean, context.”19
In museum studies, however, entanglement has recently been critiqued for roman-
ticizing the imperial relations that make one group’s sacred things another’s collected
objects.20 The “ancient Peruvian” dead underline history’s role in these vistas, illustrat-
ing that one way the nineteenth-century United States weighed empire’s mantle was by
studying and incorporating Indigenous and Iberian American sovereignties as North
America’s embodied historical context. 21 The Peruvian dead were American antiquity
as entangled by US consuls, collectors, and commercial agents—a move that helped
“last” both Peru and the Indigenous American living, per historian Jean M. O’Brien’s
excellent formulation: as belonging to an “ancient” or “colonial” past, rather than a
shared and still colonizing republican present.22 As Caroline Dodds Pennock mused in
and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge, 2013); Philip L. Kohl, Irina
Podgorny, and Stefanie Gänger, eds., Nature and Antiquities: The Making of Archaeology in the Americas
(Tucson, AZ, 2014); Matthew James Crawford, The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial
Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800 (Pittsburgh, 2016); Marcy Norton, “Subaltern Technologies
and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 18–38; and
Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner, eds., Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas
(New Haven, CT, 2018).
18 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific
(Cambridge, MA, 1991).
19 Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish
Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 764–86; Karin Wulf, “Vast Early America:
Three Simple Words for a Complex Reality,” Humanities 40, no. 1 (2019), www.neh.gov/article/vast-early-
america.
20 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London,
2020), chap. 3.
21 Richard L. Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,”
American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996): 423–46; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT,
1998); Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth
Century (Chicago, 2004); Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds,” 784; Delpar, Looking
South, chap. 1; Ricardo D. Salvatore, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945
(Durham, NC, 2016); Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in
the Northeast (New Haven, CT, 2018); Strang, Frontiers of Science.
22 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010).

this journal, “One wonders whether ‘entangled history’ suggests less a colorful tapestry
than a chain caught around the ankle.”23
In thinking through entanglement’s historiographical power, this essay does not
warn against histories complicating the geographical or national polity.24 For example,
Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup’s important call to attend
to specific Native contexts cannot be fulfilled in this case without also naming the gen-
eralizing transimperial process by which tens of thousands of individuals, from distant
sites and millennia across the Andes, were entangled as “ancient Peruvians.”25 Follow-
ing these chains also takes us to their remains: a “Latin” America treated as context

to a fuller North America. The “ancient Peruvians” instead reveal contingency. They
show how internal colonialism, race science, and violence compounded across borders
and timescales, conjoining Native and captive peoples throughout the hemisphere—a
“Latin America” not walled off from or merely colonized by republican American his-
tory but generative of it.26
The Skull Wall makes the necessity of attending to the literal remains of entangle-
ment obvious. While Indigenous and Black American communities, scholars, and
nations have long resisted the theft and racialization of ancestors, grave goods, and
sacred beings, national legal norms regarding repatriation have mostly left those col-
lected from beyond US borders outside the frame—in the Peruvian case, at some
points the largest population in a number of collections.27 Yet as efforts to decolonize
23 Caroline Dodds Pennock, “Aztecs Abroad? Uncovering the Early Indigenous Atlantic,” American Historical
Review 125, no. 3 (2020): 787–814, here 814.
24 The push-pull between expansive histories and their critique by historians of American republics as
imperial or neglectful of the modern polity is nearly a century old. See Herbert E. Bolton, “The Epic of
Greater America,” American Historical Review 38, no. 3 (1933): 448–74; Edmundo O’Gorman, “Do the
Americas Have a Common History?,” in Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton
Theory, ed. Lewis Hanke (New York, 1964); and Johann N. Neem, “From Polity to Exchange: The Fate of
Democracy in the Changing Fields of Early American Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History 17, no.
3 (2020): 867–88.
25 Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American
and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn,” William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2018): 207–36.
26 To claim US history is impermeable to considerations of empire, transnational forces, migration, and global
currents would be absurd. Yet Latin America’s frequent historiographical position as colonial borderland
of commodities and labor, rather than source of ideas and influential politics, remains an important point
of critique. See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New
Clothes?,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 787–99; Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The
United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York, 2016); Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings:
Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton, NJ, 2017); Karin Alejandra
Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC,
2018); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights
Movement (Chapel Hill, NC, 2019); Christopher Heaney, “Compared to What? William Walker and Radical
Republicanism in the 19th-Century Americas,” Reviews in American History 47, no. 3 (2019): 370–79;
Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (New
York, 2020); and Christy Thornton, Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global
Economy (Berkeley, CA, 2021).
27 Since 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) has compelled US
institutions receiving federal funds to report and facilitate the repatriation of remains and sacred beings to
federally recognized tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. (NAGPRA does not cover the Smithsonian,
which developed similar policies regarding Native remains prior to the law’s adoption.) This means that
the non-US dead can receive even less attention than the supposedly “culturally unaffiliated” Indigenous
and African American remains some museums and archaeologists have resisted returning. James Riding

museums and history expand, it becomes ever more important to attend to the mul-
tiplicity of non-US temporalities: in this case, for example, Andean ancestors whose
assumed descendants don’t always take them as ancestral. Rather than prescribing one
ethic of decolonization, these remains ask us what other spirits of history our skull
walls contain, and what we assume when we anticipate their “return.”
***
A direct answer to how “ancient Peruvians” went from Samuel George Morton’s col-

lection to the Skull Wall begins with recognizing that early republican scholars in the
United States had an understanding of “early America” considerably more vast than
we might presume. This vastness was geographical, temporal, and societal, and it
assumed, as Thomas Jefferson did in 1787, that “the antient [sic] part of American his-
tory is written chiefly in Spanish.”28 That history’s material remains were believed to be
best preserved in the monumental tombs of “ancient Peruvians”—the peoples believed
to have preceded the Incas, whose empire the Spanish called Peru. These ancient
Peruvians’ attributed priority to both Columbus and the Incas promised a lack of racial
or cultural admixture with Europeans, making possible the measure of the “civiliza-
tion” supposedly embodied by their cranial size and shape. Peru’s history of colonial
grave opening also made them easier to collect than the dead of other Native Ameri-
cans with whom they were compared—not to plunge the latter’s reputation, as Gould
assumed, but to establish whether they were all “American”: whether the attributed
civility of the “ancient Peruvians” was the heritage of “barbarous” Native Americans
elsewhere, and, if not, what that difference meant.
Put another way, Peru was America’s Egypt, and the “ancient Peruvian” dead were
America’s first accepted “pre-Columbian” remains. Scholars like Morton hoped that
this Peruvian solution might test Native Americans’ wider antiquity, “civility,” and
unity—which under Morton’s polygenetic understanding of the racial past presumed
Americans’ separate creation from humanity’s supposed other four races. As Morton
noted in lectures and the earliest written section of his influential Crania Americana
(1839), Peru’s ancients had used their dry, coastal climate to preserve their dead so well
that “the lifeless bodies of whole generations of the former inhabitants of Peru may now
be examined, like those from the Theban catacombs, after the lapse of hundreds, per-
haps thousands of years.” He thus came to desire “a series of crania from the Peruvian
sepulchers, in order to ascertain, if possible, whether they present indications of more
than one great family; or, in other words, to inquire whether among them I could trace
In, “Decolonizing NAGPRA,” in For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook, ed. Waziyatawin
Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird (Santa Fe, 2005), 53–66; Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums, 159–
66; Blakey, “Archaeology under the Blinding Light of Race.” The non-US loophole is noted by Kathleen
S. Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln,
2002), 162, and Michael F. Brown and Margaret M. Bruchac, “NAGPRA from the Middle Distance: Legal
Puzzles and Unintended Consequences,” in Imperialism, Art and Restitution, ed. John Henry Merryman
(Cambridge, 2006), 193–217, here 210–11.
28 Delpar, Looking South, 1.

such departures from the well known type of the American race, as would lead to the
supposition that this continent was formerly inhabited by a plurality of races.”29
Morton came to that desire because he and his interlocutors benefited from over
ten millennia of Andean creativity in the embodiment of time, place, and ancestry, as
well as three centuries of that culture’s looting and rehistoricization under Spanish
rule. From 1532, those efforts centered in the Inca empire of Tawantinsuyu, whose
claimed subjects stretched from what is today Peru into Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and
Ecuador. In Tawantinsuyu, conquistadors encountered a universe of cultural and lin-
guistic groups that sometimes shared key characteristics. One was the artificial mum-

mification of prior generations—a practice Andean peoples innovated eight thousand
years ago, two millennia before the Egyptians. While many groups’ ancestors remained
socially alive in open tombs, loved and well fed, some asserted their sacred difference
from those they claimed to rule. The Incas, in particular, made mummification a tech-
nology of empire, using climate and botanicals to solidify an elite dead whose cosmic
command of subjects’ and descendants’ labor and veneration never expired.30
The conquistadors’ looting of these ancestral elites and their huacas—sacred spaces
and mortuary palaces containing silver and gold—was so profitable that it became a
bureaucratized industry (huaqueo) subject to the crown’s royal share. This process
destabilized conquest-era Andean lords, whom the Spanish pressed into revealing the
wealthy tombs of generations past, chipping away at their sacred claims to power. 31
It also yielded surprising outcomes: the next Andean generation sometimes picked
up digging tools, too, making the Hobson’s choice that it would be better if they and
their dependents—rather than the Spanish—profited from ancestral wealth. Historian
Rocío Delibes Mateos suggests this may have been a covert adaptation of affection—a
chance for them to reinter the ancestral dead elsewhere while burying themselves in
Christian churches. When seventeenth-century clerics grasped that some highland
converts maintained these hidden ancestors, they burned them on bonfires, to their
descendants’ despair. But converts exposed them, too, a practice that can be under-
stood, like huaqueo, as a further hedging of bets, an articulation of a new, less elite
“Peruvian” power over an ever-more-distant and less hierarchical dead—respected,
looted, revalued, or even punished as “beautiful grandparents,” “Inca” forefathers,
“gentiles” or potentially toxic beings from a pre-Christian era, whom peoples around
29 Samuel George Morton, lecture, box 5, folder 1, Samuel George Morton Papers, Library Company of
Philadelphia; Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana; or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various
Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia, 1839), 96, 97. For Peru’s section being the
earliest composed, see note 6 and subsequent text.
30 Frank Salomon, “‘The Beautiful Grandparents’: Andean Ancestor Shrines and Mortuary Ritual as Seen
through Colonial Records,” in Tombs for the Living: Andean Mortuary Practices, ed. Tom D. Dillehay (1995;
repr., Washington, DC, 2011), 315–53; Isabel Yaya, “Sovereign Bodies: Ancestor Cult and State Legitimacy
among the Incas,” History and Anthropology 26, no. 5 (2015): 639–60; Peter Kaulicke, “Corporealities of
Death in the Central Andes (ca. 9000–2000 BC),” in Death Rituals, Social Order and the Archaeology of
Immortality in the Ancient World: “Death Shall Have No Dominion”, ed. Colin Renfrew, Michael J. Boyd,
and Iain Morley (New York, 2015), 111–29.
31 Jorge Zevallos Quiñones, Huacas y Huaqueros en Trujillo durante el virreinato, 1535–1835 (Trujillo,
Perú, 1994); Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, The World Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact and Conflict in
Sixteenth-Century Peru (Stanford, CA, 1996), chap. 5.

Cuzco today call suq’a. By the eighteenth century, only some communities maintained
preserved ancestors, while creolized Peruvians of European, African, and Andean
descent, particularly on the coast, dug the “ancient Peruvian” dead to capitalize on
their objects, even ritualizing “Inca” skulls to “cure” the colonial present.32
Scholars like Morton knew of Peru’s tombs because their opening and textualization
undergirded ideas of “American” antiquity. Starting in the mid-sixteenth century, the
Spanish placed the most venerable Inca and Andean ancestors on desecrating display,
even dissecting some to claim their remarkable preservation was a matter of nature
and artifice, not sanctity. They wrote about them as well. The Jesuit José de Acosta

saw these “very embalmed” Incas in Lima; his Historia natural y moral de las Indias
(1590) speculated as to how the Incas harnessed Peruvian nature “to conserve the bod-
ies of their Kings and Lords, which remained whole, with neither foul smell, nor cor-
ruption for more than two hundred years.” For the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega el
Inca, grandnephew of the last pre-Hispanic Inca emperor, his people’s incredible skill
at “embalming” was a civilized knowledge lost to Spanish colonialism.33
The Atlantic circulation and European translation of these tributes led to the
Peruvian dead’s admission in the third volume of France’s Histoire naturelle, in 1749,
as “mummies” like those of the similarly “ancient” Egyptians. This was the same vol-
ume of the Histoire naturelle in which Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, pub-
lished his influential “Varieties of the Human Species.” In this theorization of the
relationship between climate and race, Buffon used Spanish and Andean accounts of
sixteenth-century Mexico and Peru to argue they were the Americas’ “temperate”
and civilized heights, “the most ancient lands of the continent.” They were “the most
anciently peopled, given not only their elevation but also the fact that they were the
only ones in which man was found united in society.” Mexicans and Peruvians had pop-
ulated the rest of the Americas, Buffon believed, but humid climates had degenerated
32 Alberto Flores Galindo, In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes, trans. Carlos Aguirre,
Charles F. Walker, and Willie Hiatt (1986; repr., Cambridge, 2010); Frank Salomon, “Ancestors, Grave
Robbers, and the Possible Antecedents of Cañari ‘Inca-ism,’” in Native and Neighbours in South America,
ed. Harald O. Skar and Frank Salomon (Gothenburg, 1987): 207–32; Frank Salomon, “Ancestor Cults
and Resistance to the State in Arequipa, ca. 1748–1754,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness
in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison, WI, 1987), 148–65;
Thomas A. Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History Among an Andean
People (Madison, WI, 1998), 324–28; Otto Danwerth, “El papel indígena en la huaquería andina (siglos
XVI y XVII),” in Muchas hispanoaméricas: Antropología, historia y enfoques culturales en los estudios
latinoamericanistas, ed. Thomas Krüggeler and Ulrich Mücke (Madrid, 2001), 87–104; Irene Silverblatt,
Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, NC, 2004), 170–80;
Leo J. Garofalo, “Conjuring with Coca and the Inca: The Andeanization of Lima’s Afro-Peruvian Ritual
Specialists, 1580–1690,” Americas 63, no. 1 (2006): 53–80; Peter Gose, Invaders as Ancestors: On the
Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes (Toronto, 2008); Gabriela
Ramos, Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532–1670 (Notre Dame, IN, 2010); Rocío
Delibes Mateos, Desenterrando tesoros en el siglo XVI: Compañías de huaca y participación indígena en
Trujillo del Perú (Sevilla, 2010). For suq’a, see Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice
across Andean Worlds (Durham, NC, 2015), 211–12.
33 José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Sevilla, 1590), 317; Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,
Primera parte de los commentarios reales, que tratan del origen de los Yncas, reyes que fueron del Peru, de
su idolatria, leyes, y gobierno (Lisbon, 1609), 127–28; Christopher Heaney, “A Peru of Their Own: English
Grave-Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2016):
609–46. For the argument that some were dissected, see Heaney, “How to Make an Inca Mummy.”

those other societies. 34 In one influential volume, then, the Peruvians and their remains
became America’s Egyptians, the antiquity that the rest of the New World degraded.
The dispute Buffon’s essay unleashed focused far more on the Peruvians; the Incas’
romanticization made them a clearer target than the oft-vilified Mexicans.35 But it was
also because the well-preserved bodies and objects found in Peru’s monumental tombs
were proffered as material proofs to test Garcilaso’s tribute to precolonial complexity.
The Peruvians thereby became a key reference for debates over whether supposed
Indigenous inferiority was a matter of race, climate, or abuse by Europeans. 36 What is
possibly the earliest recorded example of a European measuring an Indigenous skull

dates to this process. In 1772, the Spanish natural historian and colonial administrator
Antonio de Ulloa used the lineas of “thickness” of skulls he observed in Peru’s “ancient
sepulchers” to claim that all Native Americans, whether in Peru or Louisiana, were
capable of monumentalism but cowardly and brutish. Ulloa’s vast American history
was one in which Peru and its bodies were the prime referent.37
Thomas Jefferson thought otherwise. His desecration and description of a Monacan
burial monument in Virginia in 1783—sometimes taken as “scientific” excavation’s
start in North America—responded to Europeans who saw North American climates
as degenerative, but to Ulloa as well. Jefferson flattened multiple cultures, languages,
and, here, Monacan remains to argue that Native North Americans were the measure
by which American history should be judged. Jefferson’s Americans were vigorous and
brave but incapable of monumentalism—degenerated by their treatment by the Span-
ish, but not the climate.38
34 Heaney, “How to Make an Inca Mummy,” 18–19; Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, “Variétés dans
l’espèce humaine,” in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du roi, vol.
3 (Paris, 1749), 371–530, here 515–16 (my italics).
35 Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh, 1973),
155; Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, NJ, 1971).
36 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and
Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA, 2001); Neil Safier, Measuring the
New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008), chap. 6. In the 1760s and 1770s,
Cornelius de Pauw and William Robertson focused on the Peruvians, using Spanish descriptions of
those tombs’ material evidence to attribute them a legacy of sacrifice, idolatry, cannibalism, and limited
metallurgical abilities but not civilization. Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains,
ou mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1768), 66, 140–41,
185-6, 190-1, 213, 290, 324; Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou mémoires
intéressants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1768), 169–70, 177–9, 211–12, 216–
17; Cornelius de Pauw, Défense des recherches philosophiques sur les Americaines (Berlin, 1770), 166–67;
William Robertson, The History of America, vol. 1 (London, 1777), 255; William Robertson, The History
of America, vol. 2 (London, 1777), 202–4; William Robertson, The History of America, vol. 3 (London,
1777), 253–54, 259.
37 Antonio de Ulloa, Noticias americanas: Entretenimientos phisicos-historicos sobre la América Meridional,
y la Septentrianal Oriental (Madrid, 1772), 313–14. See also Strang, Frontiers of Science, 80–82. By
contrast, Petrus Camper (1722–89), the Dutch comparative anatomist who first racialized the angle of
faces, never measured a Native American skull. Della Collins Cook, “The Old Physical Anthropology and
the New World: A Look at the Accomplishments of an Antiquated Paradigm,” in Bioarchaeology: The
Contextual Analysis of Human Remains, ed. Jane E. Buikstra and Lane A. Beck (New York, 2006), 27–72,
here 33.
38 David Hurst Thomas, “Thomas Jefferson’s Conflicted Legacy in American Archaeology,” in Across the
Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America, ed. Douglas Seefeldt, Jeffrey L. Hantman,
and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, VA, 2005), 84–131, here 88–89. For timing, and Jefferson’s reference

Jefferson was far from the first white North American to disturb Indigenous ances-
tors and graves. Settlers and soldiers disinterred the ancestors of resistant Indigenous
communities from the sixteenth century, displaying and dissecting them in “semisci-
entific spectacles,” asserting their passage to history. Jefferson was also far from the
first to dig graves in a “Peruvian” vein, or evoke Incas.39 The difference was that he did
so to banish Peru’s shadow and resist Ulloa’s vasting. “Of the Indian of South Amer-
ica I know nothing,” read his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), “for I would not
honor with the appellation of knowledge, what I derive from the fables published of
them. These I believe to be just as true as the fables of Aesop.” To French inquiries

as to “Indian monuments,” he replied that he “kn[e]w of no such thing … for I would
not honour with that name arrow points, stone hatchets, stone pipes and half-shapen
images.” To that end, he cast the sacred Monacan earthwork he opened as an “aban-
doned” burial “mound,” not a “monument”; he believed it revealed a jumbled, unstrat-
ified dead, evidencing no degeneration of a boldness that he believed was original to all
Americans—but also no evidence of a degenerated Peruvian civility.40
The Peruvian dead’s reputation outlasted Jefferson’s oblique assault because the
supposedly disjunctive comparison of their early “American” past to the Indigenous
present remained useful. In 1792, Philadelphia’s American Museum magazine pre-
sented Ulloa’s meditations on the sameness of Indians’ skulls in Peru and Louisiana
as an interesting puzzle, given that the Incas seemed to have sprung from “some race
more enlightened than the other tribes of Indians, a race of which no individual seems
to remain in the present times.”41 US antiquarians extended this sentiment to the inte-
rior, correcting Jefferson, arguing that the living Native peoples who continued to con-
duct ceremonies on these monuments were not descended from the “lost” Peruvian,
Israelite, or Viking “Moundbuilders” who built them. The former could be extirpated,
to Don Antonio de Ulloa’s Noticias americanas at key moments during his writing and revising Notes on
the State of Virginia, see Douglas L. Wilson, “The Evolution of Jefferson’s ‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 112, no. 2 (2004): 98–133; Eduardo Mendieta, “Enlightened
Readers: Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, Jorge Juan, and Antonio de Ulloa,” in Decolonizing American
Philosophy, ed. Corey McCall and Philip McReynolds (Albany, 2021), 83–110; and Thomas Jefferson,
fair copy MS of Notes on the State of Virginia, 1783–84, 14, Massachusetts Historical Society (website),
accessed February 22, 2016, www.masshist.org/thomasjeffersonpapers/notes/nsvviewer.php?page=14.
Jefferson privately allowed Ulloa had produced the only “respectable evidence on which the opinion of [the
Americans’] inferiority of genius has been founded,” but he believed that “in N. America we are to seek
their original character.” Jefferson to Chastellux, June 7, 1785, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital
Edition, ed. James P. McClure and J. Jefferson Looney (Charlottesville, VA, 2008–21), accessed April 28,
2021, https://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN-01-08-02-0145.
39 Heaney, “A Peru of Their Own”; DeLucia, Memory Lands, 53 (“semiscientific”), 54, 70–74, 134–35,
145–47; Tom Arne Midtrød, “‘Calling for More Than Human Vengeance’: Desecrating Native Graves
in Early America,” Early American Studies 17, no. 3 (2019): 281–314; Strang, Frontiers of Science, 26;
Tom Cutterham, “Manco Capac and the Global American Founding,” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early
American History, August 19, 2013, https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/08/19/manco-capac-and-the-
global-american-founding/.
40 Jefferson, fair copy MS of Notes on the State of Virginia, 35.1; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of
Virginia (London, 1787), 36–38, 57, 96. Jeffrey L. Hantman, Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative
Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People (Charlottesville, VA, 2018), chap. 2, reconstructs the
Monacan earthwork’s sacralization.
41 Antonio de Ulloa, “Of the Indigenous Inhabitants of Both Parts of America,” in American Museum; or,
Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, vol. 12 (September 1792), 150.

the latter appropriated as settler ancestors. Defending removal in an address to Con-
gress in 1830, Andrew Jackson explained that the “monuments” and “fortresses”
were “memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared
to make room for the existing savage tribes” now making way for “our extensive
Republic.”42
By then, the Peruvian example was used to justify not just “tread[ing] on the graves
of extinct nations”—per Jackson—but opening them to know them.43 In 1799, the
American Philosophical Society published Benjamin Smith Barton’s speculation
that Ohio’s “monuments” were made by “Toltecas,” who—Barton believed, based

on a translation of very recent work by the Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero
(1731–87)—were the Mexican “ancestors of the Peruvians,” whose high reputation was
known from Acosta and others. By cross-multiplication, then, “the ancient inhabitants
of North-America were as polished as the nations of South-America.” Barton called on
fellow republicans to “open the tombs of the ancient Americans” to “throw some light
upon the[ir] ancient history … If we are not sufficiently animated by the love of sci-
ence, let us remember, that in the tombs of the Mexicans and Peruvians, the Spaniards
have discovered treasures of gold, of silver, and of precious stones.”44 This was Andean
grave opening nationalized, “ancient Peruvian” history made ancient American: a call
to entangle the nets of New World empires, knowledges, and treasures taken from
Incas, Spaniards, and the Native living.45
Yet when it came to the data that Ulloa cited and Atlantic race science increasingly
sought—skulls—North America initially came up short.46 This was for two reasons.
One was that Native North Americans had, since the sixteenth century, challenged
settlers who made trophies of their dead. Forced west, some groups carried ancestors
with them, while others, like prominent Choctaw Peter Pitchlynn, revisited sacred
mounds “composed of the bones of my ancestry.”47 The second, material reason was
that North America’s wet climate made “ancient” remains particularly vulnerable to
desecration. Of his excavation, Jefferson noted that the “sculls were so tender that
42 Whitney A. Martinko, “‘So Majestic a Monument of Antiquity’: Landscape, Knowledge, and Authority in
the Early National West,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 16, no.
1 (2009): 29–61; Christina Snyder, “The Once and Future Moundbuilders,” Southern Cultures 26, no. 2
(2020): 96–116; Nicholas A. Timmerman, “Contested Indigenous Landscapes: Indian Mounds and the
Political Creation of the Mythical ‘Mound Builder’ Race,” Ethnohistory 67, no. 1 (2020): 75–95; Andrew
Jackson, second annual message to Congress, December 7, 1830, 7 Reg. Deb. x (1831).
43 Jackson, second annual message to Congress.
44 Benjamin Smith Barton, “Observations and Conjectures concerning Certain Articles Which Were Taken
out of an Ancient Tumulus, or Grave, at Cincinnati … May 16th, 1796,” Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 181–216, here 184, 201, 211–12, 215. See also Henry M. Brackenridge to
Thomas Jefferson, Baton Rouge, July 25, 1813, in McClure and Looney, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Digital Edition.
45 For early republican science specifically as a matter of imperial knowledge, see Strang, Frontiers of Science.
46 This also meant that a more-linguistic ethnology shaped by Native peoples reigned through the 1830s. Sean
P. Harvey, Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Cambridge, MA,
2015).
47 Heaney, “A Peru of Their Own,” 631–43; DeLucia, Memory Lands, 147; Morton, Crania Americana, 81;
Fabian, The Skull Collectors; Strang, Frontiers of Science, chap. 7; Hantman, Monacan Millennium, 73–76;
Snyder, “The Once and Future Moundbuilders,” 108–11 (“composed,” 111).

they generally fell to pieces on being touched.”48 Later scholars did little better. By
1799, Barton had examined only fragments of a thighbone and tibia from a monu-
ment that Cincinnati’s settlers bisected with a street; the other bones were “mould-
ered.”49 Barton later seems to have received a skull from Illinois, near Cahokia, that
he sent to the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who used it, and
that of a “Cherokee,” for his “proof ” that humanity had five basic varieties descended
from Caucasians, one of which was “American.”50 Their export nonetheless proved
the rule of singular examples, which through 1820 were inconclusively compared to
other singular examples taken from the Native American living and their confiscated

lands. 51
What changed was Peru’s independence, after which Spanish American scholars
and patriots presented mummified Incas and “ancient Peruvians” as embodying a
redeemed sovereign history. Between 1821 and 1826, the Andes became a world empo-
rium of dry American antiquity: José de San Martín declared Peru’s independence and
promoted its sovereign knowledge by sending an “Inca” mummy to England’s King
George IV for the British Museum; Peru’s National Museum opened in the former
quarters of Lima’s inquisition with an “Inca” mummy in every corner; Blumenbach
received his first “ancient Peruvian” crania of ten, which became his largest “American”
group; and the surgeon’s mate of the USS Franklin delivered ten skulls of “Indian[s]
from [the] south-west coast of Peru” to an anatomy professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, where—even after the Indian Removal Act of 1830 exposed many inter-
ments to desecration—the Peruvian dead by 1832 outnumbered Native North Ameri-
cans nearly four to one.52
That year, a Philadelphian struggling to acquire skulls for his lectures asked a sec-
ond naval surgeon headed to the Pacific for “skulls of Native Indians—or Ancient
Peruvians—or South Sea Islanders—anything in the shape of a skull will be a treat
to me, for I have paid considerable attention to comparative Anatomy Craniology.”53
Shortly thereafter, Samuel George Morton received an “Ancient CHIMUYAN from the
48 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 158–59. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880, 64–66,
notes these two barriers.
49 Barton, “Observations and Conjectures concerning Certain Articles Which Were Taken out of an Ancient
Tumulus, or Grave, at Cincinnati … May 16th, 1796,” 211–12, 215.
50 Cook, “The Old Physical Anthropology and the New World,” 33; Achim, “Skulls and Idols,” 31.
51 Daniel Drake, Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country (Cincinnati,
1815), 207–8; Caleb Atwater, Description of Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western
States (1820; repr., New York, 1973), 171, 185, 209–10.
52 Heaney, “How to Make an Inca Mummy”; Charles Samuel Stewart, A Visit to the South Seas, in the U.S.
Ship Vincennes, during the Years 1829 and 1830: With Scenes in Brazil, Peru, Manilla, the Cape of Good
Hope, and St. Helena, vol. 1 of 2 (New York, 1831), 179–81; Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Nova Pentas
Collectionis Suae Craniorum Diversarum Gentium (Göttingen, 1828), 10–11; Thomas Bendyshe, trans.
and ed., The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (London, 1865), 351, 355; William
E. Horner, Catalogue of the Anatomical Museum of the University of Pennsylvania: With a Report to the
Museum Committee of the Trustees (Philadelphia, 1832), 40–42.
53 Samuel George Morton, “Account of a Craniological Collection: With Remarks on the Classification of
Some Families of the Human Race,” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society 2 (1848): 217–22,
here 217; Samuel George Morton, letter book, Morton to William Samuel Waithman Ruschenberger,
February 28, 1832, Princeton University Library Special Collections.

ruined city near Truxillo,” Peru, sent by yet another collector—Morton’s first “Ameri-
can.” He thought the skull “splendid” and began a memoir about it.54
***
When we accept that this Peruvian memoir became Crania Americana’s earliest sec-
tion, as Morton admitted to a critical ally in 1840; that he pulled from three cen-
turies of “Peruvian” mortuary scholarship to write it, from Andean chroniclers like
Garcilaso to continental counterparts theorizing Peruvian skulls reaching Europe;

and that Morton fulfilled that promise by making the “ancient Peruvians” his larg-
est data set, the entanglement of Andean grave opening with American race sci-
ence becomes even more important to understand. 55 Morton demonstrated that
the ancient Peruvians’ and Incas’ numbers and prior desecration and study yielded
a historic series against which an averaged Native North American living could be
compared to determine whether Peru’s attributed civilization was the heritage of
Indigenous Americans at large. This cross-historical comparison was a methodology
that Morton and the American School of Ethnology then applied to more infamous
“questions” of race history, such as ancient “evidence” for white supremacy and
Black chattel slavery.
Morton’s use of Andean grave opening and its knowledges was thus a kind of sci-
entific parasitism, riding atop Peruvian projects of intellectual decolonization in
which “ancient” or Inca dead embodied a national history that was precolonial but
also un-Christian—a “gentile” dead outside the republican body politic. 56 Like other
foreign scholars, Morton also benefitted from the distance between the early pro-
posal that Peru’s National Museum house the contents of excavated huacas, and the
reality that foreigners were ushered into huaqueo’s stream, sometimes in the name of
scientific exchange. 57 As one French captain wrote of the 1830s, “Knowing from the
country’s tradition that the great valley covered with sand situated to the south of the
Morro of Arica had been a burial place of the ancient Peruvians, I asked the governor
of Arica for authorization to carry out some excavations in this valley of tombs. He
answered me with great politeness that, since all those dead had not been baptized,
54 Fabian, The Skull Collectors, 38; Murphy D. Smith, A Museum: The History of the Cabinet of Curiosities of
the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, 1996), 29n60.
55 For the “Peruvian” start to Crania Americana, see note 6; for his reading, see Crania Americana, 96–104.
Also see Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880, chap. 3.
56 For the republican appropriation of Inca symbols, while living Native peoples were cast outside the nation,
see Cecilia Méndez G., “Incas Sí, Indios No: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and Its Contemporary
Crisis,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 1 (1996): 197–225; Natalia Majluf, “De la rebelión al
museo: Genealogías y retratos de los incas, 1781–1900,” in Los incas, reyes del Perú, ed. Thomas Cummins,
Gabriela Ramos, Elena Phipps, Juan Carlos Estenssoro, Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, and Natalia Majluf (Lima,
2005), 253–319; and Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish
America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC, 2007). For this sort of knowledge production as also decolonizing,
see Thurner, History’s Peru, chap. 4; Gänger, Relics of the Past; and Nicola Miller, Republics of Knowledge:
Nations of the Future in Latin America (Princeton, 2020).
57 Decreto Supremo no. 89, Lima, April 2, 1822, in Rosalía Ávalos de Matos and Rogger Ravines, “Las
antiguedades peruanas y su proteccion legal,” Revista del museo nacional (Lima) 40 (1974): 373.

I could do what I wanted.”58 Peruvian “ancients” were only sometimes national ances-
tors. They were also the condemned spirits of a pre-Christian age.
Morton’s collectors thus used Peru’s National Museum like a shopping list, following
local excavators to the well-preserved dead left behind by prior grave openers and anti-
quarians. Morton dedicated Crania Americana’s US edition to the naval surgeon William
Samuel Waithman Ruschenberger, who, after visiting the National Museum’s mummies,
sought knowledge from living Peruvians on how to find Morton’s skulls. At Arica, “an
Indian, who was fishing with a cast net,” told him how to find tombs: one had “to stamp
upon the ground, and dig where it sounded hollow.” Another “native gentleman” told

Ruschenberger how artifacts revealed the “occupation pursued by the deceased while
living.”59 Duly educated, Ruschenberger “dug up with [his] own hands,” decapitated,
and dissected the dead of “eight or ten graves” at Arica.60 From the sands of the massive
shrine of Pachacamac, looted since the 1530s, he gleaned a further twenty-three skulls
for Morton—his largest single infusion before Crania Americana’s publication.61
Ruschenberger’s skulls were useful not simply because he could confirm that some
came from “monuments” (not “mounds”) but also because Morton could cross-
reference them with mummified Andeans entering other American collections. In
1835, the Peale family’s Philadelphia Museum displayed an “Inca Family”—what seems
to have been the first three Andean mummies to reach the United States. Morton
stripped the flesh from one’s head, to facilitate measurement, but not before noting
its hair.62 Likewise, Morton thought an “embalmed head,” from a Boston collection of
mummies and skulls imported in 1837 from the “vicinity” of Arica, “the most perfect
instance of embalming, among the American nations, that has come under my notice.”
Besides confirming Peruvian claims of Inca anatomical knowledge, they preserved
“American” racial phenotypes: brown complexions and hair that, as Morton said of
Peale’s mummy, “lost none of its natural black color.”63 Morton used the head’s illustra-
tion as Crania Americana’s first evidentiary engraving, the mummified link between
the book’s frontispiece life portrait of Ongpatonga (Big Elk), chief of the Omaha, and
the many Peruvian skulls that followed.64
58 Abel Aubert Du Petit-Thouars, “Nouveaux renseignements sure les momies péruviennes du Morro
d’Arica,” in Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, vol. 43 (1856), 737–38,
here 737; Pascal Riviale, “La marine française et l’archéologie du Pérou au xixe siècle,” Bulletin de l’Institut
Pierre Renouvin 2, no. 46 (2017): 123–37.
59 William Samuel Waithman Ruschenberger, Three Years in the Pacific: Including Notices of Brazil, Chile,
Bolivia, Peru (Philadelphia, 1834), 243–44, 340, 341.
60 William Samuel Waithman Ruschenberger to Samuel George Morton, March 3, 1833, box 2 (“November
1832–April 1836”), Samuel George Morton Papers, Series 1, American Philosophical Society (hereafter
cited as Morton Papers, APS).
61 Morton, Crania Americana, plates 8–11.
62 “Heathen Idols,” Southern Pioneer and Philadelphia Liberalist 5, no. 11 (1835): 87; Morton, Crania
Americana, 108; Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular
Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York, 1980), 317.
63 Morton, Crania Americana, 105, 108; John H. Blake, “Notes on a Collection from the Ancient Cemetery at
the Bay of Chacota, Peru,” in Reports of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Connection
with Harvard University, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1880), 277–304.
64 Fabian observes that Morton liked Ongpatonga’s portrait because it embraced “more characteristic traits”
“than any Indian portrait he had seen.” Fabian, The Skull Collectors, 80–81.

When Crania Americana was complete, Morton could boast to have examined nearly
one hundred “ancient Peruvians” and Incas, measuring thirty-three—23 percent of his
total. The Andean dead haunted more than a fifth of Crania Americana’s pages and
eighteen of the volume’s seventy-eight plates, far and away more than any other group.65
No prior work of anatomy could claim so large a non-European set, and Morton used it,
and Peruvian history, to stake a surprisingly radical claim regarding Andean skulls, phe-
notype, and American civilization. European counterparts—including Charles Darwin
in 1838—theorized that these “peculiar skulls” represented a “fossil” race unconnected
to America’s living, “exterminated on principles. strictly applicable to the universe.”66

Yet Morton, like Ulloa before him, believed that ancient Peruvians, Incas, and North
America’s living Indians belonged to the same larger race. Perhaps most importantly,
Morton trusted in Peruvian scholarship as well. For that reason, Morton was sure that
Peru’s “ancient” branch, despite having “heads so small and badly formed,” possessed
civilization, built monuments, and at least equaled the Egyptians: that “what most
excites our admiration in the one, must be also conceded to the other.”67
In sum, Morton privileged Peru’s vast history over the supposed limitations of Andean
crania’s shape and size. And because Morton believed, like Barton, that the same migra-
tion that brought the Toltecas from Mexico to the US interior brought the Incas to
Peru—and because he believed that Peru’s plentiful skulls were identical to the few taken
from monuments in Mexico and Wisconsin—Morton concluded that in studying the
ancient Peruvians and Incas he studied the early “American” past as a whole.68 Claiming
this Peruvian and Tolteca-Incan civility allowed Morton to present himself as “something
of a ‘patriotic epistemologist,’” historian and anthropologist Mark Thurner observes,
“defend[ing] ‘American civilization’ against European cynics” like Mexican and Peruvian
scholars before him.69 Rather than opportunistically collecting Peruvians to “plummet”
the average size of nonwhite crania, Morton used them to elevate American history.
***
We do not associate Samuel George Morton with a celebration of Indigenous civiliza-

tion because he renounced that aspect of Crania Americana almost immediately. The
problem was that Morton highlighted a supposed contradiction between two of his
claims: that the size and elongated shape of the “ancient Peruvian” cranial type was
wholly “natural,” and therefore not due to the head binding observed among Andean
people by the invading Spanish; and that the original owners of these skulls were none-
theless “civil” despite possessing an internal cranial capacity “probably lower than that
65 Stephen Jay Gould, “Morton’s Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity: Unconscious Manipulation of Data
May Be a Scientific Norm,” Science 200, no. 4341 (1978): 503–9, here 508.
66 Charles Darwin, notebook E, 1838, 63–65, in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology,
Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert,
David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 414.
67 Morton, Crania Americana, 99, 119.
68 Morton, Crania Americana, 113–14, 216–30.
69 Thurner, History’s Peru, 107.

of any other people now existing.” In Crania Americana’s final pages, he attempted
to synthesize these findings—which were only contradictory if you believe that cra-
nial capacity corresponds to intelligence, which it does not—by hinting that the brain’s
proportions and shape might matter more for civility than absolute size.70
Allies and critics alike called foul. George Combe, the world’s leading phrenologist,
practiced in the “science” of interpreting the size and shape of the head, had writ-
ten an appendix for Crania Americana claiming that measurements of “barbarous”
and “savage” skulls would ultimately reveal more of their capabilities “than the hasty
impressions of travellers.”71 When Combe got his copy, he was indignant that Morton,

150 pages before, contradicted him, privileging travelers’ and chroniclers’ defense of
Peruvian abilities over the cranial “evidence.” “How can we account for the civiliza-
tion?” Combe replied. “There is no people with heads so rationally deficient as these
ancient Peruvians who are civilized or who constructed … The ancient Peruvians with
such heads, if they be natural, could not, if now living, [create] such monuments,
unless they form an exception to all other races.” Morton’s celebration of the ancient
Peruvians contradicted not only phrenology but history’s “laws” as well. If ancient
Peruvians were as developed as Morton said, then their succession by the Incas needed
to be explained. “A superior race is never exterminated by an inferior one,” Combe
thundered. “How came the ancient Race to perish, if they were capable of such efforts
at their remains indicate?”72 Did Morton understand that Crania Americana’s Peru-
vian emphasis implied that it was not race that shaped history?
In other words, Morton’s attempt to add depth and context to the study of American
history by incorporating the embodied Peruvian past was only acceptable insofar as this
entanglement did not change the supremacist claim that Native peoples were falling—and
not persisting, as they actually were—because of racial inferiority, and not something more
contingent. Morton’s response to Combe illustrates sociologist Karen E. Fields and histo-
rian Barbara J. Fields’s point that one of bioracism’s defining characteristics is its ability to
be poured between beakers, altering its specific “scientific” shape without abandoning the
core prejudicial assumption that races exist and can be studied to clarify history.73 Acced-
ing to the senior scholar, Morton temporized that the skulls of ancient Peruvians were
probably not so naturally small—that they were likely artificially compressed to assert cul-
tural belonging. Their relative civilization became an artifact of an original size and shape
closer to that of Native North Americans.74 Morton’s dalliance with a more variegated
“American” history told through Peruvian sources was thereby disciplined by Atlantic race
science’s mounting cynicism regarding Spanish American knowledge.75
70 Morton, Crania Americana, 132, 133, 260–61.

71 George Combe, “Appendix,” in Morton, Crania Americana, 270.
72 George Combe to Samuel George Morton, February 28, 1840, box 4 (“April 1838–September 1840”),
Morton Papers, APS. See Poskett, Materials of the Mind, 99–105, for a nuanced account of Combe and
Morton’s exchange.
73 Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012; repr.,
London, 2014), 4–6.
74 Morton to Combe, March 2, 1840, MSS 7256/48–49, NLS.
75 For the latter, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, and Strang, Frontiers of
Science, 335–36.

Closing the cranial distance between ancient Peruvians and North Americans did not
lift the latter. Instead, before he died in 1851, Morton received more Peruvians than
any other population, and he used them to suggest that they revealed an early America
where genius was limited and whose fall presaged that of Native Americans in gener-
al.76 Claiming support for his modified theories in French scholar Alcide d’Orbigny’s
L’Homme Américaine (1839), Morton hazarded that Peruvians’ proximity to North
Americans revealed the former’s base “barbarism,” not civilization—that whatever
“mental superiority” Spanish Americans claimed for them was the genius of the few,
a privileged class of Incas whose destruction activated “the dormant spirit of the peo-

ple,” transforming “the gentle and unoffending Peruvian … in to the wily and merciless
savage.” And because the superior handful were linked to the “vast multitude of savage
tribes whose very barbarism is working their destruction from within and without,”
each would “partake of the fate of the extremes themselves; and extinction appears to
be the unhappy, but fast approaching doom of them all.”77
By collecting “ancient Peruvian” skulls, then, Morton entangled an American his-
tory as vast as the hemisphere and its human origins. But in squaring that history with
North Atlantic supremacism’s assumptions regarding the ends of Indigenous peoples,
the most important past that Andean skulls were allowed to embody was the inferior-
ity or extinction of a wider race. This method of expanding American history via race
science was even more explicit in Morton’s second book, which extended his Peruvian
methodology of averaged historical series to the question of slavery. In Crania Aegyp-
tiaca (1844), Morton read his next largest collection, of ancient Egyptian skulls, as
“Caucasian,” asserting their difference from their servants and slaves, whom he claimed
to know via the skulls of seventy-nine “Negroes born in Africa.” Proslavery allies made
his implications explicit: that “Negroes” had always been inferior to whiter peoples.78
American history was already vast, Crania Americana and Crania Aegyptiaca claimed.
It stretched from Peru to Egypt and beyond—and there was always one group who
dominated others.
***
The space opened by understanding the Peruvian dead as original to what became
the American School of Ethnology helps explain the Skull Wall. Before Peru gained
its independence and the diaspora of a long-hyped Peruvian dead began, scholars col-
lected American remains as singular types (“a Cherokee skull”) or trophies of violence,
76 Morton, Catalogue of Skulls of Man and the Inferior Animals, in the Collection of Samuel George Morton,
v–vi; Fabian, The Skull Collectors, 113.
77 Samuel George Morton, An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America:
Read at the Annual Meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, Wednesday, April 27, 1842 (Boston,
1842), 7, 18. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880, 83–90.
78 Samuel George Morton, Crania Aegyptiaca; or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from the
Anatomy, History and the Monuments (Philadelphia, 1844), 21, 66; Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and
Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC, 2004); Fabian, The Skull Collectors, 105–10;
Lyra D. Monteiro, “Racializing the Ancient World: Ancestry and Identity in the Early United States” (PhD
diss., Brown University, 2012), chap. 2; Mitchell and Michael, “Bias, Brains, and Skulls,” 87–89.

but not as racially historicized series whose large numbers provided “better” aver-
ages.79 Afterward, they did, if only to dispute Morton and his ilk by critiquing their
science on its own terms—by challenging the use of skull measuring and averaging to
reflect on civilization and history—or by modifying their anatomical conclusions. One
way to do so was to collect as many skulls of as many types as possible, to approach the
size of the Peruvian population on which Morton had banked his claims.
Those collections likewise took advantage of Peru’s preexisting culture of grave
opening and the remains it kicked up. Morton himself shaped the agenda, using his
“ancient Peruvian” surfeit for trades, encouraging scholars to convert other skulls

to their “race.”80 Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, of which Morton
became secretary, encouraged members of the US Exploring Expedition to the Pacific
(1838–42) to seek out “the ante Peruvian remains from the tombs.”81 The resulting
collection joined what became the world’s largest collection of human remains, the
Smithsonian, whose first ethnological catalog began with three “ancient Peruvian”
mummies from graves at Arica and eight crania abandoned by looters of Pachacamac’s
“Egyptian-like” buildings.82 By 1859, they sat in the Smithsonian’s upper hall with
a “Head-dress” of beetle wings and monkey bones that the US consul in Guayaquil,
Ecuador, attributed to “Atahualpa, the last of the Incas, brought from the Temple of
the Sun.”83
A century later, the headdress was reclassified as having been made by “Jivaro Indi-
ans,” but the “ancient Peruvians” hung on the Skull Wall, now embodying human
history.84 By then, the Peruvian dead had become the common population of Ameri-
canist anthropology and its collections in the United States and beyond—a product of
Peruvian grave opening and the archaeology it inspired, as well as the perception that
“ancient Peruvians” were easily acquired and useful to dispute with. By 1863, less than
twenty-five years after Crania Americana’s publication, an essay in the Transactions of
79 By comparison, the German anatomist and abolitionist Friedrich Tiedemann beat Morton to publication
with an 1836 study of cranial capacity, based on measurements of 489 crania from Blumenbach’s five races
(and from them concluded there were no significant racial differences between Europeans and Africans),
but attended to their range, not averages, which did not require the sort of massive set that the ancient
Peruvians “provided” Morton and his followers. Mitchell and Michael, “Bias, Brains, and Skulls,” 81–83.
80 John Edwards Holbrook to Samuel George Morton, April 1837, box 3 (“May 1836–March 1838”), Morton
Papers, APS; Mitchell and Michael, “Bias, Brains, and Skulls,” 87.
81 The expedition’s members included Titian Ramsay Peale—who had given Morton access to the
Philadelphia Museum’s mummies—and zoologist Charles Pickering, who had been party to Morton’s
correspondence regarding the Peruvian dead and corresponded with him during the expedition. Charles
Pickering to Samuel George Morton, August 7, 8, 1840, box 4 (“April 1838–September 1840”), Morton
Papers, APS; Benjamin H. Coates to the Committee of the Academy of Natural Sciences, September 26,
1836, Collection 39 (“US Exploring Expedition, 1838–42: Letters, 1836”), Academy of Natural Sciences
Archives, Philadelphia; Barry Alan Joyce, The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Exploring
Expedition, 1838–1842 (Lincoln, 2001), 17–22, 38.
82 Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition: During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840,
1841, 1842, vol. 1 of 5 (Philadelphia, 1845), 278–81; Peale, “Collection of the United States South Sea
Surveying and Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842.”
83 William J. Rhees, An Account of the Smithsonian Institution, Its Founder, Building, Operations, etc.,
Prepared from the Reports of Prof. Henry to the Regents, and Other Authentic Sources (Washington, DC,
1859), floor plan, 69, 71–72.
84 Accession 135, box 17, folder: Accessions, RU 7508 (“National Institute”), SIA.

the Ethnological Society of London offered footnotes for twenty-two separate studies of
Andean skulls and mummies since Peruvian independence, in which the order of busi-
ness remained whether the “contradiction” of their starry history and their skull size
and shape confirmed or belied correspondences with the “civilization” of the Aymara
and Quechua “races” of republican Peru and Bolivia.85 No other article in the journal
had a literature half as deep. In 1873, the curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of
American Archaeology and Ethnology used Peru’s history, and the two-thirds of the
museum’s dead that were from Peru, to critique the claim that brain size indicated
intelligence—while nonetheless likening Peruvians to “Apes.”86

In other words, the Peruvian dead were useful because there was agreement as to
their importance but a scientifically attractive lack of consensus regarding their spe-
cific meaning as racial and historical subjects.87 Looking back from the Skull Wall, we
might say that what the Peruvian dead did best was build up Americanist anthropology
and its museums, from the first PhD dissertation in anthropology ever written by a US
citizen, to the staging of an Andean cemetery at the field-defining exposition at the
Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.88 The collecting wave crested in the 1910s, when Yale
historian Hiram Bingham emptied Machu Picchu and its surroundings of every skull
and mummy his expedition could find, and the physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička
more than doubled the Smithsonian’s human holdings largely via the human remains
left by huaqueros—Stewart’s “gold miners.” Hrdlička displayed them to assert physi-
cal anthropology’s authority on American prehistory and pathology.89 This had been
the usefulness of the “ancient Peruvians” since Buffon—a swaying rope bridge between
America’s past and present, whose traverse seemingly gave scholars authority over
deep history and the humans made to embody it.
What did Peruvians think of North Americans’ use of the Andean dead? Peru’s
scholars thought Morton’s conclusions laughable. The year that Morton died, the
founder of Peru’s National Museum, Mariano Eduardo de Rivero, in his widely read
Peruvian Antiquities, dismissed the Philadelphian’s claim to have studied “Inca”
skulls. The surgeon and antiquarian José Mariano Macedo, who himself handled
skulls and read the physiognomy of pre-Inca portrait vases, likewise thought Morton’s
85 Charles Carter Blake, “On the Cranial Characters of the Peruvian Races of Men,” Transactions of the
Ethnological Society of London 2 (1863): 216–31.
86 See note 3; Wyman, “Report of the Curator,” 6.
87 In science-and-technology-studies terms, they were “boundary objects,” “scientific objects which inhabit
several intersecting social worlds … and satisfy the informational requirement of each of them.” Susan Leigh
Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and
Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3
(1989): 387–420, here 393.
88 Dorsey, “An Archaeological Study Based on a Personal Exploration of Over One Hundred Graves at the
Necropolis of Ancon, Peru”; Christopher Heaney, “Fair Necropolis: The Peruvian Dead, the First American
Ph.D. in Anthropology, and the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago, 1893,” History of Anthropology
Review 41 (2017), histanthro.org/notes/fair-necropolis; Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, eds.,
Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World’s Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology (Lincoln,
2016).
89 Christopher Heaney, Las tumbas de Machu Picchu, trans. Jorge Bayona Matsuda (Lima, 2012); Redman,
Bone Rooms, chap. 4.

conclusions bad science.90 Yet Andean crania were now amassed in their own right in
Peru. Local scholars made still larger collections to raise and lower the reputations of
“ancient Peruvians,” Incas, and living Andean peoples, challenging North Americans
models of racial knowledge by refining their own.91
The loss felt by Andean communities who first knew these ancestors, however,
matters more. Morton’s collectors self-servingly cast Peru as a good place to collect
because coastal “Indian” huaqueros showed them the ropes, as “present inhabitants of
the country, of Indian origin, evince no respect for [ancient cemeteries], although not
wanting in those sentiments which lead them to view with horror the desecration of

the last resting places of those whom they consider their kindred.”92 Belying that claim
was the fact that huaqueros often left the remains of those they looted in place, even
propitiating them with coca. As spirited, transtemporal beings, they sickened those
who disturbed them. Inland, collectors met Christian communities who paraded the
mummified “beautiful grandparents” again, or who chased off looters.93 Peruvian sol-
diers forced “superstitious” communities to reveal the dead for foreign travelers.94
This entanglement of the Andean dead’s care, assault, and study with American
anthropology and history writ large also magnified settler colonial violence in the
United States. As noted, Morton’s particularly Peruvian Golgotha showed that scholars
with large series of crania could measure, average, and generalize on a more statistical
scale. Around these Peruvian cores, single heads from other groups were—however
awful it is to reproduce this mindset—insufficient. In 1836, Morton sent out a form let-
ter observing that of his sixty-three “American” skulls, “but twenty-three of these are
North Americans,” soliciting US Army surgeons’ help in acquiring the heads of living
and resistant Creeks and Seminoles and others to, in essence, reproduce his Peruvian
core.95
90 Mariano Eduardo de Rivero and Johann Jakob von Tschudi, Antiguedades peruanas (Vienna, 1851), 35;
Sociedad Peruana de Historia de la Medicina, Vida y obras de José Mariano Macedo (1823–1894) (Lima,
1945), 8, 56; Ricardo Dávalos y Lissón, “La colección de antigüedades peruanas del doctor Macedo,” El
Comercio (Lima), February 16, 1876; José Mariano Macedo, “Memorandum histórico,” 1880, Colección
Manuscritos de José Mariano Macedo, Lima. I thank Stefanie Gänger for sharing this latter source; see her
Relics of the Past, 124, for Macedo’s antiquarianism.
91 Ignacio la Puente, “Estudios etnográficos de la Hoya del Titicaca: Novena Conferencia dada en la Sociedad
Geográfica de Lima … el 28 de Diciembre de 1893,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 3, nos. 10–12
(1894): 379, 878; Christopher Heaney, “Seeing Like an Inca: Julio C. Tello, Indigenous Archaeology, and
Pre-Columbian Trepanation in Peru,” in Blackhawk and Wilner, Indigenous Visions, 344–77. For how more
socially and spatially contingent, but no less hierarchical, understandings of race and nation developed in
Latin America, sometimes to counter North American scientific racism but as frequently rearticulating old
ideas, see Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America.
92 Ruschenberger, Three Years in the Pacific, 341; Blake, “Notes on a Collection from the Ancient Cemetery at
the Bay of Chacota, Peru,” 279 (quote).
93 Antonio Raimondi, “Enumeración de los vestigios de la antigua civilización entre Pacasmayo y la
Cordillera,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 13, no. 2 (1903): 159–71, here 165–66; Antonio
Raimondi, “Itinerario de los viajes de Raimondi en el Peru de Lima a Morococha (1861),” Boletín de la
Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 6, nos. 1–3 (1896): 42; W. F. Lee to Spencer Fullerton Baird, October 9, 1882,
accession 11867, RU 305, SIA; Gänger, Relics of the Past, 138.
94 George Kiefer to Spencer Fullerton Baird, July 25, 1885, accession 14978, RU 305, SIA; Adolph Francis
Bandelier, The Ruins at Tiahuanaco (Worcester, MA, 1911), 19, 25; George A. Dorsey, “A Ceremony of the
Quichuas of Peru,” Journal of American Folklore 7, no. 27 (1894): 307–9; Heaney, Las tumbas, chap. 13.
95 Mitchell and Michael, “Bias, Brains, and Skulls,” 87; Strang, Frontiers of Science, chap. 7.

Between 1830 and the 1920s, then, that large Peruvian core—repeated in other col-
lections as well—provided “scientific” cover for the looting of other Native tombs,
fortified by similar arguments: that they were born to die because of their “race,” and
needed scientific salvage as they allegedly joined other supposedly “fossil” Americans
in history. In the 1860s and 1870s, army surgeons in Indian country dug up or decap-
itated some 4,500 Native North American skulls for the Army Medical Museum that
later went to the Smithsonian.96 One irony, historian of medicine Elise Juzda argues,
is that these skulls then gathered scientific dust because curators believed their num-
bers were never large enough for statistical techniques. When they were studied, their

potential connection or comparison to the numerically significant Peruvians was fore-
grounded.97 Likewise, mummified remains from the US Southwest were of interest
at Chicago’s World’s Fair because they showed that the story of early humanity also
“unfolded here in America, to take its place beside and confirm the Peruvian record of
the early life of man on this continent”—the full Andean “Necropolis” in the anthro-
pology building next door.98
What we are looking at, then, is how overlapping histories of colonial and republican
mortuary violence against Native peoples in the Americas were entangled, extended,
made vast, and thereby built to last. Peru’s “ancient” grave robbing became cause for
American scientific study and civilizational salvage, rippling out from the Andes to
amplify similar waves in North America, yielding a tsunami of hideous historical con-
cordance: that if Native peoples weren’t already portals to a vast American past, they
soon would be, if the “ancient Peruvians” were any measure.99 The Peruvian dead’s
importance to this process was increasingly less explicit, until they became a dehistori-
cized population “natural” to US museums—integral outsiders standing for the species
in the Skull Wall.
***
The remains of this entangled, imagined extinction include its claims of completion—
that Native peoples were wholly vanished by Spanish colonialism on the one hand
and the US settler state on the other. Both were untrue, but history can be complicit
in maintaining their credence. As recently noted by Mt. Pleasant, Wigginton, and
Wisecup, history’s periodizations can remove Indigenous stories to the pre-Colum-
bian and colonial pasts, privileging Euro-American nations as the “ultimate” history,
obscuring how republics remain a colonizing experience for millions of Native peoples
96 Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880, 101–2; Riding In, “Six Pawnee Crania”; Lonetree,
Decolonizing Museums, 13; Redman, Bone Rooms, chap. 1.
97 Elise Juzda, “Skulls, Science, and the Spoils of War: Craniological Studies at the United States Army Medical
Museum, 1868–1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40, no. 3
(2009): 156–67.
98 Redman, Bone Rooms, 50; Heaney, “Fair Necropolis.”
99 See Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge,
MA, 2008), for how Anglo-American colonialism, here intellectual and scientific, rode prior waves of
unseen violence against Native North Americans caused by Spanish colonialism. For how Native peoples
aimed this mortuary violence back at white soldiers and collectors, see Strang, Frontiers of Science, chap. 7.

across the hemisphere.100 The Skull Wall could hardly be more literal, with “ancient”
Peruvian Indians illustrating global history in US terms: “Christian Era,” “Settlements
in America,” “the Civil War,” “the Space Age.”
By contrast, the rallying of hemispheric consciousness around a shared “indigenous
longue durée” of persistence and change is an electrifying outcome of the last forty
years—a facing down of national historiographies that hid survivors from one anoth-
er.101 In An American Sunrise (2019), Joy Harjo, poet laureate of the United States,
invokes the First Continental Gathering of Indigenous Peoples, which met before the
Columbian quincentenary, in Ecuador in 1990, to “ponder how we would continue to

move forward past” the damage done to the “earth mind, body and spirit”—how “to
continue our sovereignty as Native nations.” But republican myths still set the table.
“In the women’s circle,” Harjo writes, “a striking Bolivian Indian woman in a bowler
hat stood up. She welcomed us, and noted that she was surprised at all of the Natives
attending from the United States.
‘We thought John Wayne had killed all of you.’ (This was not a joke.)
‘And why,’ she asked, ‘Do you call yourselves America? This hemisphere is one body,
one person. She is America.’”102
To qualify America as vast gets us closer to the message of Harjo’s Bolivian coun-
terpart: an embodiment surpassing nationalist histories of non-European disadvan-
tage and death—a wider ancestry, occupied but refusing dispossession.103 But the
north-facing itinerary of the message reminds us that revision’s direction and ends
matter. The search for more expansive histories predates the republic, originating in
Spanish American imperial scholarship, as well as a global Indigenous counter-con-
sciousness.104 But it has at times—as in US-directed race science—entangled what it
finds beyond its borders into skull walls that take other people’s pasts as dead, and the
United States as history’s end.
Addressing the lasting presence of these histories has become ever more urgent. To
return to the literal skull walls at hand: in 1990, the Native American Grave Protec-
tion and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) charged US institutions receiving federal funds
with reporting and facilitating the repatriation of human remains and sacred beings,
but only to federally recognized tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. While
some institutions used the letter of that law to drag their feet, scholars and activists
documented their collections’ debt to slavery as well.105 Their critiques were magni-
fied in 2020, when student organizers in Philadelphia called upon the Penn Museum
at the University of Pennsylvania to go from voicing solidarity with the Black Lives
100 Mt. Pleasant, Wigginton, and Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous
Studies,” 223–30.
101 James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 42.
102 Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise: Poems (New York, 2019), 26.
103 As Harjo closes: “These lands aren’t our lands. These lands aren’t your lands. We are this land.” Harjo, An
American Sunrise, 108.
104 For the early modern roots of the latter, see Nancy E. van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle
for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Durham, NC, 2015).
105 For critiques of NAGPRA’s limitations and museum-defensive outcomes, see Riding In, “Decolonizing
NAGPRA,” and Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums, 159–66.

Matter movement to extending repatriations of Morton’s skulls begun under NAG-
PRA (about one hundred had been undertaken) to the entire collection, highlight-
ing the remains of fifty-five formerly enslaved individuals. The museum began a
formal review and in April 2021 apologized and committed to reburying thirteen Black
Philadelphians, returning the fifty-five, and beginning the work of repatriating the
rest.106 The process made waves in the museum world, and it was likely a factor in
Harvard and its Peabody Museum’s apologizing in January 2021 for “Harvard’s role in
collection practices that placed the academic enterprise above respect for the dead and
human decency,” as well as their forming a committee to survey human remains across

all Harvard’s museums. In April 2021, the New York Times reported that the Smithso-
nian was undertaking a similar review.107
One challenge is that these museum-led deliberations engage questions of respon-
sibility and harm but retain considerable power in what they include and exclude as
matters of temporal concern. In the case of Penn, the museum was more prepared to
address the nineteenth century than the twentieth. The week after the apology for
the Morton collection, it emerged that its curator and a fellow anthropology profes-
sor, now at Princeton, possessed the bones of two children believed to be Katricia and
Delisha Africa, killed in the Philadelphia police’s bombing of the Black liberation group
MOVE in 1985; the city had given the remains to the Penn anthropology faculty for
identification, but in the years since they had used them for teaching. By July of 2021,
Penn’s museum claimed to have delivered all remains in their possession to the Africa
family, but critics believe that bones may have been lost along the way (a charge the
museum denies). As of September of 2022, the museum’s determination to rebury the
remains of the thirteen Black Philadelphians in the Morton collection was similarly
under fire, as a possible clearing of museum conscience that evades the input of possi-
ble family members or descendant communities.108
The Andean remains still in Morton’s collection are not footnotes to this story: as
in the nineteenth century, it could be argued that the presence of an “anonymous”
106 Komala Patel, “Penn Museum to Remove Morton Cranial Collection from Public View after Student
Opposition,” Daily Pennsylvanian, July 12, 2020; Gabriela Alvarado, “The Penn Museum Must End Abuse
of the Morton Collection,” Daily Pennsylvanian, June 25, 2020; Paul Wolff Mitchell, “Black Philadelphians
in the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection,” Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society (website),
February 15, 2021, https://prss.sas.upenn.edu/penn-medicines-role/black-philadelphians-samuel-george-
morton-cranial-collection; Stephen Salisbury, “Penn Museum Apologizes for Its ‘Unethical’ Collection
of Human Skulls and Says It Will Repatriate Remains of Black Philadelphians and Others,” Philadelphia
Inquirer, April 12, 2021.
107 Lawrence S. Bacow, “Steering Committee on Human Remains in Harvard Museum Collections,” Harvard
University (website), January 27, 2021, https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2021/steering-
committee-on-human-remains-in-harvard-museum-collections/; Jennifer Schuessler, “What Should
Museums Do with the Bones of the Enslaved?,” New York Times, April 23, 2021.
108 Maya Kassutto, “Remains of Children Killed in MOVE Bombing Sat in a Box at Penn Museum for Decades,”
Billy Penn (website), April 21, 2021, https://billypenn.com/2021/04/21/move-bombing-penn-museum-
bones-remains-princeton-africa/; Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad, “Decades After Philadelphia’s MOVE
Bombing, Penn Museum Still Keeps Secrets on the Remains of 12-Year-Old Girl,” Hyperallergic (website),
20 April 2022, https://hyperallergic.com/725976/philadelphia-move-bombing-penn-museum-still-keeps-
secrets-on-the-remains/; Remy Tumin, “Penn Museum to Bury Skulls of Enslaved People,” New York
Times, 9 Aug. 2022.

international core supports the scientific umbrella under which other supposedly
“unknown” remains might be kept from family members, like the victims of the Phila-
delphia police’s bombing.109 That Penn itself highlights the challenge of its “unknown”
international populations makes that connection important to understand: its plan,
after addressing the Philadelphia thirteen, is to turn to fifty-three of the remaining
fifty-five formerly enslaved “Africans” in Morton’s collection that came not from the
United States, but from a fellow doctor in Havana. About them, the museum initially
said, “not much is known … other than that they came to Morton from Cuba.”110
The claim that “not much is known” is familiar to communities and scholars work-

ing to repatriate similarly “unaffiliated” Native remains; one counterproposal has been
the commitment of the dead to Philadelphia’s Black community, respecting a shared
hemispheric experience of chattel slavery. In that light, the museum’s citation of a
framework like NAGPRA—which could “necessitate agreements with West African
countries” and, “potentially, with Cuba”—could seem like further prevarication.111
Might that sort of “nuance” further entangle the collected, the possessed, in historio-
graphical webs not of their own making? Or, might engaging with more Atlantic-cen-
tered histories—in which Morton and Philadelphia become a periphery of the sciences
of race and slavery employed by that Havana doctor, Don José Rodríguez Cisneros—
build solidarities and commitments less nationally defined?112
The example of Andean remains—the largest original population in Morton’s collec-
tion, and those of the Peabody and the Smithsonian—underlines how attempts to disen-
tangle those webs without mapping them can sometimes pull them tighter. In the early
twentieth century, republican Peruvian scholars decried the export-oriented looting
and antiquarianism that had sent a diaspora of “Inca” mummies and pre-Hispanic arti-
facts to an increasingly imperial United States, in particular. A more nationalistic Peru-
vian archaeology critiqued North Americanist anthropology’s biological racializations
109 Even to include Katricia and Delisha Africa in an essay on the Andean remains in American museums
likewise risks dehumanizing them, subjecting their personal stories—and family members’ present grief—
to the sort of aggregating argument that Morton himself employed. I thank Lyra Monteiro for talking
through these issues with me and encouraging me to name them. In the face of the Penn Museum’s approach
to the remains in their possession, her advocacy and research has been steady in its call for scholars to
be explicit about their positionality, and I look forward to her forthcoming essay on the subject. When
I saw in 2011 that my wider research spoke to Morton’s use of the “ancient Peruvian” dead, I was naïve
to my own position in that history’s present. Until 2020, for example, I was unaware that a museum and
curator I contacted, who gave me access to Morton’s collection, possessed the remains of victims of present
police violence. Addressing how a research project that began in Peruvian history becomes accountable
to Philadelphia’s present suggests the obligations of each to understand the other. Identifying connection
or entanglement is not theoretical work: it shines a light in several directions, engaging lives, ancestors,
losses, and descendants existing in multiple temporalities at once. It is what is specific about these lives
and afterlives that make their violence and responsibilities so necessary to address. But one specificity does
not deny or subject another, and understanding their entanglement opens us to still-vast presents, and to
radical efforts to make past losses right.
110 “Update on the Morton Collection,” Penn Museum (website), accessed August 1, 2020, www.penn.
museum/sites/morton/collection.php (“not much is known” is no longer part of the website’s language).
111 Salisbury, “Penn Museum Apologizes for Its ‘Unethical’ Collection of Human Skulls and Says It Will
Repatriate Remains of Black Philadelphians and Others,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 12, 2021.
112 Mitchell and Michael, “Bias, Brains, and Skulls,” 87–88, for Rodríguez Cisneros. Cf. Kieran Healy, “Fuck
Nuance,” Sociological Theory 35, no. 2 (2017): 118-127 for the trouble with “nuanced” rhetorical questions,
like I’m using here.

and, in 1929, the Peruvian state flatly claimed ownership of pre-Hispanic remains—a
local entanglement that implicated US history as well. Whether in the United States or
in Peru, pre-Hispanic Andean bodies became even more “meant” for museums—their
relative numbers in the United States even rising as other populations are returned.113
As recent as 2015, Peru has even been framed as a NAGPRA-free space to study the
dead and their grave goods, because of how Peruvians are claimed to have inherited the
Incas’ “ancient” pride in displaying them.114 Such pride that Peru’s government appar-
ently protested when the American Museum of Natural History, preempting NAGPRA,
decided to remove its Andean mummies from display.115 This backstory of the Skull Wall

and its ancestors could be limned as the vast early America of one republic’s imagination
borrowing from and then fueling the claimed Inca ancestries of another.116
Yet in grappling with this shared past, nuance remains critical, lest a rush to dis-
patch its debts reproduces the national and racial assumptions that fueled these
ancestries’ collection in the first place. The “ancient Peruvians,” for example, include
remains collected in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, which each feature different rela-
tionships to Indigeneity and the state. Peru is particularly complex, in that some
Andean communities evade anti-Indian racism by rejecting epistemologies that
link them to the “ancient” dead. Some credit “beautiful grandparents” as having
achieved a community’s sovereign emergence from colonial bondage—in the sev-
enteenth century—but deny them as biological ancestors. Others avoid “gentiles”
dangerously jealous of those who continue on their land. Still others take them as
ancestral but, as they’ve done since the sixteenth century, participate in excava-
tion, shaping outside researchers’ ritual and intellectual agenda, sometimes joining
their ranks. Those same Peruvians build and work in increasingly local and com-
munity-specific museums, protecting the dead from real, ongoing threats of loot-
ing, seeking funding to curate or display them more respectfully.117 Returns could
113 “Son de propiedad del Estados los monumentos históricos existentes en el territorio de la nación anteriores
a la época del Virreinato,” La Prensa (Lima), September 4, 1929; Heaney, Las tumbas de Machu Picchu;
Raúl H. Asensio, Señores del pasado: Arqueólogos, museos y huaqueros en el Perú (Lima, 2018). Salvatore,
Disciplinary Conquest shows how these flows constituted US scholarly imperialism in South America.
114 L. Samuel Wann, Guido Lombardi, Bernadino Ojeda, Robert A. Benfer, Ricardo Rivera, Caleb E. Finch,
Gregory S. Thomas, and Randall C. Thompson, “The Tres Ventanas Mummies of Peru,” Anatomical
Record 298, no. 6 (2015): 1026–35, here 1027. Indeed, some Latin American archaeologists take US-
originating decolonial praxis as imperialistic, denying the complexity of local and national identity. Rafael
Pedro Curtoni, “Against Global Archaeological Ethics: Critical Views from South America,” in Ethics and
Archaeological Praxis, ed. Cristóbal Gnecco and Dorothy Lippert (New York, 2015), 41–47.
115 Liv Nilsson Stutz, “To Gaze upon the Dead: The Exhibition of Human Remains as Cultural and Political
Process in Scandinavia and the USA,” in Archaeologists and the Dead: Mortuary Archaeology in
Contemporary Society, ed. Howard Williams and Melanie Giles (Oxford, 2016), 268–92, here 281.
116 For how twentieth-century Peruvian intellectuals’ celebration of Incas and Indigeneity discriminated
against rural Andean peoples, see Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and
Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991 (Durham, NC, 2000).
117 Frank Salomon, “Unethnic Ethnohistory: On Peruvian Peasant Historiography and Ideas of Autochthony,”
Ethnohistory 49, no. 3 (2002): 475–506; Sarah C. Chambers, “Little Middle Ground: The Instability of a
Mestizo Identity in the Andes, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Appelbaum, Macpherson, and
Rosemblatt, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, 32–55; Alexander Herrera and Kevin Lane, “‘Qué
hacen aquí esos pishtaku?’: Seños, ofrendas y la construcción del pasado,” Antípoda: Revista de antropología
y arqueología, no. 2 (2006): 157–77; Bethany L. Turner and Valerie A. Andrushko, “Partnerships, Pitfalls,
and Ethical Concerns in International Bioarchaeology,” in Social Bioarchaeology, ed. Sabrina C. Agarwal

partner with those museums—but this might presume as much of local need as
keeping them in place. The vanished dead of more immediate concern for some
communities are the eighteen thousand disappeared by the Shining Path and the
Peruvian military in the 1980s and 1990s, or the 216,000 killed by COVID-19
through September 2022—lost interments of the present, rather than the nineteenth
century.118 In other words, temporality matters, and cannot be dictated from without.
Once again, the Smithsonian has been here before. Taken down from the Skull
Wall in the 1980s, the 160 “ancient Peruvians” that constituted humanity remain in
the National Museum of Natural History’s collection, along with another 4,691 skel-

etal lots from Peru. Researchers access them for bioanthropological topics—such as
cranial modification and pre-Hispanic skull surgery—that survive not knowing where,
exactly, they were disinterred.119 By contrast, in 1996, the Smithsonian’s new National
Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) addressed thirteen “ancient” Peruvian bones
in its collection by repatriating them to an “area in Peru of great symbolic relevance to
its present-day Indian communities,” near the apu—mountain being—Ausungate. 120
A Peruvian archaeologist at the museum reached out to Mariano and Nazario Turpo,
father and son paqos capable of communicating with apus, who helped reinter the
remains in their town of Pacchanta, in the Cuzco region.
However, as anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena notes, the Turpos did not see
this as “repatriation of ancestral remains.” Rather, they called it “burying suq’a in
Pacchanta.” And “suq’a are not just bones,” De la Cadena reminds us,
let alone bones of ancestors that need to be buried in the rightful place, as is the
case in North America. Rather, suq’a are remains of beings from a different era;
popular wisdom in Cuzco has it that these beings were burned by the sun, an
episode that marks the separation between our era and that of the suq’a. Their
current contact with living beings (mostly humans but perhaps also plants and
and Bonnie A. Glencross (Chichester, 2011), 44–67; Sonia E. Guillén “A History of Paleopathology in Peru
and Northern Chile: From Head Hunting to Head Counting,” in The Global History of Paleopathology:
Pioneers and Prospects, ed. Jane Buikstra and Charlotte Roberts (Oxford, 2012), 312–28; Asensio, Señores
del pasado; Heaney, “Seeing Like an Inca”; Alexander Menaker, “Becoming ‘Rebels’ and ‘Idolaters’ in the
Valley of Volcanoes, Southern Peru,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23 (2019): 915–
46; Sandra Rodríguez, “Recuperando la mirada, el cuerpo y la voz: El cuerpo del ‘Otro’ en los museos,”
Politeama (website), September 22, 2019, https://politeama.pe/2019/09/22/recuperando-la-mirada-el-
cuerpo-y-la-voz/.
118 Isaias Rojas-Perez, Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in
Peru’s Postwar Andes (Stanford, CA, 2017). For a comparison from Ecuador: “It’s not that we don’t want
this,” an Otavalan leader told anthropologist Kathleen S. Fine-Dare at a meeting in which non-Indigenous
archaeologists called NAGPRA racist. “It’s just that there are too many other things we have to do.”
Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, “Bodies Unburied, Mummies Displayed: Mourning, Museums, and Identity Politics
in the Americas,” in Border Crossings: Transnational Americanist Anthropology, ed. Kathleen S. Fine-Dare
and Steven L. Rubenstein (Lincoln, 2009), 67–118, here 93.
119 As Guillén, “A History of Paleopathology in Peru and Northern Chile,” 313, notes. See John W. Verano, Holes
in the Head: The Art and Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru (Washington, DC, 2016), and Laura
N. Pott, Rita M. Austin, Andrea R. Eller, Courtney A. Hofman, and Sabrina B. Sholts, “Population-Level
Assessment of Atlas Occipitalization in Artificially Modified Crania from Pre-Hispanic Peru,” PLoS One 15,
no. 9 (2020), http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239600.
120 Edgardo Krebs, “The Invisible Man,” Washington Post, August 10, 2003.

animals) can cause diseases and even bring death. Nazario remembered: The suq’a
was with its body, with its bones; it was in the museum, they brought it here. He
was not too concerned, he said, about this suq’a because he thought they had lost
power: You know, Marisol, there was nothing like petroleum [before], or gas, nor
priests to say masses, or holy water. That is why suq’akuna were bold. But now—I
do not know if it is because they have been blessed, or because of the gas—they have
become tamed, they are not that evil [anymore].
What the NMAI delivered as the “remains of the ancestors,” the Turpos received as

suq’akuna, “potentially dangerous entities,” which they met with “several important
despachos”—offerings—“to prevent and curtail the possible negative effects of bring-
ing suq’a to the village.” The NMAI officials who came for the occasion “were thrilled to
witness what they thought was a celebration of the repatriation,” not seeing that for the
Turpos it was an extension of a far older contest between and combination of Andean and
Christian temporalities and museum functions. The suq’akuna had been “tamed” by their
time away, their blessing by a priest, and possibly even their treatment with gasoline, which
twentieth-century ethnological museums used to preserve “specimens” from insects.121
This was not Nazario’s “mistake,” de la Cadena notes, but indicated the complex-
ity of his relationship to what he called the “Museo del Inka Americano, thus avoiding
[Peru’s] negative connotation of Indian.” The NMAI next brought him to Washington
to consult on its exhibit. Those parts of his life that were “Quechua … without mix-
tures” went on display in a section on ancestral “traditional knowledge.” Now interna-
tionally famous, Nazario returned to Peru better positioned to work in Cuzco’s tourism
industry as an “Andean shaman.”122
In sum, this repatriation may have reassured the NMAI, but what Washington and
Pacchanta also exchanged was a longer, imperial history of engaging Andean bodies of
knowledge as American antiquities, in which US partners retained considerable power
in making “ancestral” what was still active, potentially toxic, or distinct. Yet in engag-
ing these museums of the American Inca, Andean peoples crafted still more entangled
ancestries in turn.
***
The lessons here are more ambiguous than we might want. Decolonizing history, like
decolonizing museums, requires sharing authority after recognizing past entanglement
and harm—in this case, a vast colonial project of unearthing the dead that swelled with
121 Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham, NC, 2015),
211–12; “Preservation of Collections,” in Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, vol. 2 of 2,
ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Washington, DC, 1912), 305–6. I thank Christina Snyder for catching the
possible significance of petroleum. For how tribes have had to address contaminated repatriations, see
Eric Hemenway, “Trials and Tribulations in a Tribal NAGPRA Program,” Museum Anthropology 33, no. 2
(2010): 172–79, here 177.
122 De la Cadena, Earth Beings, 221, 226, and story 6, passim. For a like complication to seeing the NMAI as
“decolonizing,” see Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums, chap. 3.

independence, overflowing empires, republican borders, and the Native polities and
peoples that straddled them.123 It was a shared expression of Peruvian and US history
whose material, racialized consequences remain in effect even as its monumentalism is
dispersed in archives, storerooms, unexamined nationalisms, and even critical histo-
ries. Engaging with entanglement is thus no idle gesture—its remains draw us from the
early and republican Americas to the present.
But it also sends us backward as well. We miss a step when we presume unidirec-
tionality in history’s revision, in which the US example is the prime referent, to
which contexts are entangled, disentangled, or returned without questioning central

assumptions—such as, in this case, the idea that the ancestral dead are trapped in US
time, rather than lively beings who have survived multiple colonialisms. Prescribing
a solution can even delegate decolonization to populations presumed exterior to the
nation: selecting one Andean town to take on suq’akuna rather than thinking toward
the 20,000 Peruvians and Peruvian Americans in Paterson, New Jersey, by 2000. The
approximately 668,500 estimated to be in the United States by 2019 will have their
own relationship to the thousands of perceived countrymen, some millennia old, that
preceded them in US museums by a century or more—a perdurance that the historiog-
raphies of two republics struggle to contain.124
The hope of these ambiguities, in the face of the impossible violence and love they
also represent, is in where they take us. The Skull Wall fell decades ago, but its remains,
like those of other historiographical skull walls, are still at hand. The responsibility
of entanglement does not dictate an endless search for context and nuance, serving a
status quo—nor does it dictate quick solutions in packing its remains for “home.”125
Rather, it underscores how empire, decolonization, and their mutual diasporas so
shape the present that there are few stories they do not touch. When we train our-
selves, our students, and our publics to recognize the joint actors connecting, differ-
entiating, haunting, and hinging the Americas’ many histories—that precede the Skull
Wall and will outlast its space age; that are already and still Indigenous, Andean, Afri-
can, or Peruvian; that are more present than vast, more pressing than past; whose heirs
are already home—then we’ve still just begun.
Christopher Heaney is an assistant professor of Latin American history at the Pennsyl-

vania State University, where he has taught since 2018. His first book, Cradle of Gold:
123 Again, see Araujo et al., “AHR Conversation,” for an excellent discussion on museum decolonization and
history.
124 Gianncarlo Muschi, “Desarrollo de la informalidad y prácticas alternativas en la comunidad peruana
de Paterson, Nueva Jersey,” Antípoda: Revista de antropología y arqueología, no. 43 (2021): 51–73;
2019 American Community Survey 1-year estimates, table B03001: Hispanic or Latino Origin by
Specific Origin, US Census Bureau (website), generated April 26, 2021, https://data.census.gov/cedsci/
table?q=B03001%3A%20HISPANIC%20OR%20LATINO%20ORIGIN%20BY%20SPECIFIC%20
ORIGIN&tid=ACSDT1Y2019.B03001&hidePreview=true.
125 As Hicks warns, romanticizing entanglement in museums—or, here, history—can suspend thinking about
ongoing colonial violence or its restitution, just as the rhetoric and performance of decolonizing museums
can seek to “cancel … debts that arise from the colonial past,” soothing the consciences of the already
powerful. See Hicks, The Brutish Museums, esp. chaps. 2 and 3, here 19.

The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu
Picchu (2010), was revised and translated in 2012 as Las tumbas de Machu Picchu. His
essays have appeared in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, the William
and Mary Quarterly, Reviews in American History, and the New Yorker. His forth-
coming Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American
Anthropology (Oxford University Press) explores how colonial and republican encoun-
ters over Andean practices of curing death shaped museums and sciences of indigene-
ity in Peru and the Americas.
This essay’s research and writing were supported by a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, the Consortium for

History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, a Fulbright-Hays Graduate Fellowship, and the McNeil Center
for Early American Studies Barra Postdoctoral Fellowship. Its road to publication was long and reflective, and it
received crucial feedback at turns along the way: at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies Friday Seminar,
the Latin American & Latino Studies Program Seminar Series at the University of Pennsylvania, the inaugural
meeting of the Asociación Peruana de Historia y Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Salud, the
2018 Omohundro Institute Conference, the Social Sciences Research Council Fields of Inquiry Graduate Student
Conference, and from the History and Philosophy of Science Working Group at UT Austin. I thank those groups’
participants for their thoughtful comments and suggestions, as well as those readers of versions of this essay who
charged me with making it better: especially, Erika Bsumek, Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, Hannah Carney, Mackenzie
Cooley, R. Alan Covey, Ann Fabian, Seth Garfield, Paul Wolff Mitchell, Lyra Monteiro, Dan Richter, Jordi Rivera
Prince, Julia Rodriguez, Nancy Shoemaker, Christina Snyder, Cameron Strang, Sarah Van Beurden, Matthew
Velasco, Adam Warren, Eyal Weinberg, Jeremy Zallen, and two rounds of anonymous reviewers of the AHR. Amy
Kohout in particular gave feedback on portions of this essay many times over, for which I am very grateful. Last, I
thank the editors of the AHR, whose patience and counsel kept this essay alive.

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1072 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1073

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1074 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1075

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1076 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1077

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1078 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1079

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1080 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1081

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1082 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1083

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1084 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1085

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1086 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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We do not associate Samuel George Morton with a celebration of Indigenous civiliza-

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70 Morton, Crania Americana, 132, 133, 260–61.

1088 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1089

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1090 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1091

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1092 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1093

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1094 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1095

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1096 AMERIC AN HISTO R I C A L R EV I EW C HRI STO PHE R HE A N E Y

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S ku ll Walls S E PTE M B E R 2 0 2 2 1097

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