US-POLITICS-JUSTICE-COURT-TRUMP

Contributor

For The Washington Post

(Chris Gash for The Washington Post)

APTOPIX Israel Holocaust Remembrance

The Washington Post

op-allen-democracypromo

Stormy Daniels

UGCR

RUSSIA-US-DIPLOMACY-BASKET-COURT

(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-LAMOTT

Sonia Sotomayor,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts,Samuel Alito,Elena Kagan,Amy Coney Barrett,Neil Gorsuch,Brett Kavanaugh,Ketanji Brown Jackson,Michael Dreeben

Children holding hands

ONE TIME USE FOR OP-CARNEY KIDS 

FEDERALISTGALA

Four Dalmatian Puppy

other

People visit the site of the Nova festival, in Reim

Fake Electors Indictment Arizona

Israel Palestinians Campus Protests

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Biden’s false claim that inflation was 9 percent when he took office

Did Obamacare ‘massively’ increase the cost of health care?

RFK Jr.’s ‘history lesson’ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flunks the fact test

Puppy abandoned with heart-rending note is adopted, named Minerva

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

The new dining reality: Smaller groups and shorter weeks

Commanders will open at Tampa Bay and close against the Cowboys; here’s everything we know

The 26 best new restaurants in the D.C. area

Some cruise prices are about to get a little more clear

When budget flights actually make good budget sense

Tired of overcrowded national parks? Here’s how to go backcountry camping.

Trump allies call trial a ‘sham.’ Public opinion isn’t cooperating.

Biden and Trump agree to CNN debate in June, ABC faceoff in September

 Key Senate matchups set for November in Maryland, West Virginia

Senators studied AI for a year. Critics call the result ‘pathetic.’

Even remote and hybrid work can burn you out. Here’s how to avoid it.

Netflix will air NFL’s Christmas games, a major step for streaming service

Sam Feist, longtime CNN executive, will become CEO of C-SPAN

Michael Cohen testimony ties Donald Trump to hush money payment

Look to the cloud to protect the life documents saved on your computer

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

How America tried and failed to stay White

After a borderland shootout, a 100-year-old battle for the truth

D.C.’s secret garden

U.S. offers aid as Zelensky drops foreign trip due to Russian advance

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico shot and gravely injured

A mountainous country loses its last glacier

Ask Amy: My mom lied about how much she supported my sister

Carolyn Hax: Aging mom’s increasing anxiety robs child of a valued confidante

Miss Manners: Dinner host hates clearing the table for guests

States see legalized sports betting as a tax windfall — but at what cost?

Haiti’s plight is a case study in the ‘responsibility to protect’

No, Apple, people do not want tech to crush everything in its path 

Angela Alsobrooks Wins Maryland Senate Seat 

Katherine Frey

Christopher Heaney is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and the author of “<a href="https://amzn.to/45wjiCN" target=_blank>Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology</a>.”

When the Smithsonian’s Hall of Physical Anthropology opened in 1965, visitors met a wall of 160 “ancient Peruvian” skulls arranged like a mushroom cloud. Their bloom visualized how humanity’s population had “exploded” since the “Beginning of the Christian Era.” Every three crania in this “Skull Wall” represented 100 million people. Nine skulls represented the 300 million believed alive in 1 A.D. A thunderhead of 106 stood for the 3.5 billion humans alive in “The Space Age.”

A reporter for The Post asked the National Museum of Natural History’s director, a physical anthropologist named T. Dale Stewart, the obvious question: Why had they chosen “Peruvian Indian” skulls to embody the biggest thing anthropology could say about recent humanity? “We used Peruvian skulls,” Stewart replied, “because we had so many of them.”

Stewart’s answer was notably direct, compared with what followed. The Skull Wall came down in the 1980s, when Native Americans pushed U.S. institutions to address the thousands of ancestors and kin whose body parts were taken by military surgeons and anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries. The National Museum of the American Indian Act in 1989 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990 sought to address these remains but contained loopholes that let U.S. museums retain much of their collections behind closed doors.

The Skull Wall needed to come down. But without it, most Americans have been able to ignore the skeletons in our institutions’ closets, let alone the white supremacism — but also, surprisingly, in the Peruvians’ case, the pride — that put some of those ancestors there.

The numbers are astounding. ProPublica reported this year that museums, universities and federal agencies still possess <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/repatriation-nagpra-museums-human-remains" target=_blank>the remains of 110,000</a> Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Alaska Natives. If we include other groups — such as Black Americans, and Filipinos whose brains were sought by Smithsonian anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2023/smithsonian-brains-collection-racial-history-repatriation?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template" target=_blank>as The Post reported </a>last month — the numbers are even larger. The Natural History Museum has at least 30,700 human bones and other body parts. Responding to The Post’s reporting, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III asserted that “all the remains, all the brains, need to be returned if possible.”

That “if possible” might give us pause. What is the challenge here, when faced with a problem as seemingly clear as the existence of so many ancestors in our “nation’s attic”?

For more than a decade, I have been researching the history of the looting of Andean ancestors in the Americas. Their remains represent up to 16 percent of the Smithsonian’s total collection, the institution’s largest single group: 4,851 individuals, some labeled only “Peru,” a country whose population is now 33.72 million. The reason there are so many “ancient Peruvians” suggests why repatriation to a nation can be complicated: Peruvian officials at first allowed them to go to the United States.

It’s a history as old as the declaration of Peruvian independence in 1821, after which the revolutionary José de San Mártín sent Europe its first “Inca mummy,” to King George IV and the British Museum. Peru’s revolutionary government claimed ownership of Peruvian “antiquities” but was laissez-faire with pre-Hispanic human remains. When Europeans and North Americans visited Peru’s first National Museum — which opened in 1826, two decades before the Smithsonian’s founding — they met an “Inca mummy” in every corner. Collectors followed Peruvian antiquarians into the dry coastal countryside, where three centuries of tomb-raiding had so scattered “the skulls of the dead … upon the surface of the soil,” wrote one Viennese collector, they “seemed as though they were so many anatomical preparations.”

Smithsonian Institution secretary: This is how the Smithsonian will reckon with our dark inheritance

The Peruvian government traded on the ancestors of its Andean citizens. In 1859, it denied a Viennese collector’s request for a rare fossil in Lima’s National Museum but approved the trade of a “Mummy of the gentile ancients of Peru.” Peru was represented at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 with an array of mummies and skulls, leading one American to wonder whether “that republic raised only mummies.”

What was behind these exchanges? Peruvians studied whether their former emperors were embalmers superior to those of ancient Egypt or whether Peru’s rich natural resources “accidentally” preserved these remains. Their export was meant to decolonize European histories that denied that a place like Peru could be sovereign, historic, modern and scientific.

But White Americans looted Andean skulls and mummies at a massive scale, to assert the ancient inferiority of Indigenous peoples. Craniologist and white supremacist Samuel George Morton collected Peruvian skulls, believing they were the Americas’ best-preserved historical population, whose large numbers allowed increasingly “scientific” measurements of the fundamentally racist presumption that skull size and shape revealed intelligence, “civilization” and a people’s fate.

Other scholars embraced Morton’s “Peruvian” lesson that large series of skulls (rather than single “types”) yielded better science. By the 20th century, Peruvians were the largest population at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, San Diego’s Museum of Us and, of course, the Smithsonian. They were gradually surpassed by other groups vulnerable to colonialism, slavery and poverty — illustrating how a science founded in supremacism spread.

This is the shared legacy we need to address.

As Peruvian communities learn of the Andean mummies and skulls in U.S. museums, many might, like other descendants around the world, call for a return similar to what Peru achieved for the remains <a href="https://amzn.to/3Z1b5DW" target=_blank>excavated from Machu Picchu in 1911</a>. Or, they might guide U.S. museums’ research, collaborating with Smithsonian curators committed to the remains’ care. Americans who benefit from the Smithsonian (and have benefited it, through contributions and taxes — which is just about all of us) need to support these efforts.

But we must also learn a more diverse history of anthropology, less defined by the United States. The Smithsonian and the Peabody Museum possess two of the world’s largest and most important collections of Andean skulls with signs of trepanation — a surgery that alleviated blunt force trauma and internal bleeding. These are in the United States because two Peruvian surgeons — one of them a Harvard-trained anthropologist of Andean descent named Julio César Tello (1880-1947) — brought them in pride, to correct American anthropology’s bigoted hierarchies. The skulls’ post-surgical healing revealed that, before the late 19th century, Andean peoples were more successful at this high-risk medical procedure than anyone else in the world.

This is the history behind the Skull Wall, which was joined in the old Hall of Physical Anthropology by a stunning 7-by-12 foot “mural” <a href="https://siarchives.si.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/torch/Torch%201966/SIA_000371_1966_03.pdf" target=_blank>depicting Inca trepanation</a> at Machu Picchu. The artist, Alton Tobey, staged the scene at Machu Picchu, basing it on Tello’s “scientific ancestors.” This also came down in the 1980s, but it remains in storage. While museum officials address the Skull Wall’s inhabitants, the painting should go back up, reminding us of how global the Smithsonian’s healing will be.

Christopher Heaney

washpost

The Smithsonian can’t ignore the Peruvian skulls in its closet

the-washington-post

Cultural institutions along the National Mall

staff

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Submit a guest opinion

Today's Opinions newsletter

Opinions

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.