My latest feature
I’m delighted to share what I hope will be my big story of the year (maybe of my life?): a deep dive into the history and future of the Morton Collection, a collection of about 1300 human skulls assembled in the 19th century to study racial differences. Samuel Morton, its creator, was the first physical anthropologist in the United States and also a race scientist. (He was also from a Quaker family—like me!—and a generally progressive milieu. Living with immense cognitive dissonance is truly white people’s evil superpower!) Starting in 1830, Morton’s friends and contacts sent him hundreds of human skulls from all over the world, which he then measured and placed into hierarchies. It won’t surprise you to learn that most of the skulls were taken from Indigenous, Black, enslaved, colonized, poor, institutionalized, or otherwise marginalized people. Morton used their own bones to investigate, quantify, and legitimize their supposed inferiority. This is the birth of physical anthropology. Racist and eugenicist ideas would remain the norm in the field up until World War II.
Once those ideas fell out of favor (because no one wanted to be a Nazi—those were the days, huh?), the Morton Collection had a sort of second life as a powerful and undeniable example of scientific racism itself. At a time when most museums were basically hoping no one would notice the human remains in their collections—or worse, ask how they got there—the Penn Museum in Philadelphia was very open about the racist history of the Morton Collection. It was also very open to research on the skulls themselves. Some of that research focused on the life stories of people in the collection, including how racism and enslavement physically affected them. Other research focused on human variation, studying the ways our bodies are different in ways that aren’t about race.
After the uprisings of last summer, however, that balance between recognizing the collection’s past and welcoming research on it in the present began to seem more and more untenable. Why did (mostly white) scientists get to decide what to do with the remains of enslaved Black people? Why were they still in museums at all? And was there a way to get them home? You’ll have to read the story for more, and don’t miss the sidebar at the end about what biological anthropology’s future could look like. I’ve been told it’ll make you cry.