Description
Book SynopsisWhen the Smithsonian''s Hall of Physical Anthropology opened in 1965 it featured 160 Andean skulls affixed to a wall to visualize how the world''s human population had exploded since the birth of Christ. Through a history of Inca mummies, a pre-Hispanic surgery called trepanation, and Andean crania like these, Empires of the Dead explains how ancient Peruvians became the single largest population in the Smithsonian and many other museums in Peru, the Americas, and beyond. In 1532, when Spain invaded the Inca empire, Europeans learned that Inca and Andean peoples made their ancestors sacred by preserving them with the world''s oldest practices of artificial mummification. To extinguish their power, the Spaniards collected these ancestors as specimens of conquest, science, nature, and race. Yet colonial Andean communities also found ways to keep the dead alive, making Inca mummies a symbol of resistance that Spanish American patriots used to introduce Peruvian Independence and science to
Trade ReviewTo the Incas, mummies were ever-living ancestors. After colonial clergy hauled them from their caves, law exposed them to looting. Christopher Heaney opens a startling postcolonial chapter in this story. Victorian-age antiquarians traded in 'Inca' bones, believing skulls would reveal Amerindia's 'civilized' or 'primitive' racial nature. Relentlessly, astutely, Heaney tracks our scientific forebears through their bone stampede—and leaves us standing uneasy in our own museums. * Frank Salomon, University of Wisconsin *
Heaney deftly analyzes Native Andean, Peruvian, and US and European knowledge-making and the relations among them, showing that to understand ideas about race in the United States and Europe we must consider the experiences of US and European scientists abroad. Foreigners who collected Andean bones and skulls learned from local scientists, and their collecting was indebted as well to Andeans' own ways of dealing with dead ancestors. * Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, author of The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950 *
An outstanding, clear, and insightful examination of the transnational life of Andean mummies that have fascinated scholars for years and continue to do so to this day. * Marcos Cueto, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro *
Archaeology is, of course, always about the past, but only after translation into the present tense. In Christopher Heaney's masterful telling, the sun-bleached mummified Incan crania on the Smithsonian's infamous Skull Wall become active agents in their own history. Their conflicted finders-keepers' legacy bridges the imperialist Golden Age of museum skull-collecting to link modern Peruvian institutions sometimes reclaiming some of those functions for themselves—all underscoring ongoing international debates over what should be done with the dead. * David Hurst Thomas, author of Skull Wars *
Empires of the Dead takes us from pre-contact display of emperors and ancestors to the present day...Empires of the Dead should shape current debates, if only by reminding us that today's museum collections are more accurately understood as 're-collections'. * Erin L. Thompson, LRB *
Table of ContentsA Note on Orthography A Note on Images Introduction: Death's Heads: Humanity's Peruvian Ancestors at the Smithsonian Part 1: Opening, 1525-1795 1. Curing Incas: Andean Lifeways and the Pre-Hispanic Imperial Dead 2. Embalming Incas: Huayna Capac's Yllapa and the Spanish Collection of Empire 3. Mummifying Incas: Colonial Grave-Opening and the Racialization of Ancient Peru Part 2: Exporting, 1780-1893 4. Trading Incas: San Martín's Mummy and the Peruvian Independence of the Andean Dead 5. Mismeasuring Incas: Samuel George Morton and the American School of Peruvian Skull Science 6. Mining Incas: The Peruvian Necropolis at the World's Fairs Part 3: Healing, 1863-1965 7. Trepanning Incas: Ancient Peruvian Surgery and American Anthropology's Monroe Doctrine 8. Decapitating Incas: Julio César Tello and Peruvian Anthropology's Healing 9. The Three Burials of Julio César Tello; or, Skull Walls Revisited Epilogue: Afterlives: Museums of the American Inca Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
