Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology

by Christopher Heaney Narrated by Christian Barillas

Overview

When 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 preHispanic 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 the world.
Inspired, nineteenth-century US anthropologists disinterred and collected Andean mummies and skulls to question the antiquity and civilization of the American “race” in publications, world's fairs, and US museums. Peruvian scholars then used those mummies and skulls to transform anthropology itself, curating these “scientific ancestors” as evidence of pre-Hispanic superiority in healing.
Bringing together the history of science, race, and museums' possession of Indigenous remains, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, Empires of the Dead illuminates how South American ancestors became coveted mummies, skulls, and specimens of knowledge and nationhood. In doing so it reveals how Peruvian and Andean peoples have learned from their dead, seeking the recovery of looted heritage in the centuries before North American museums began their own work of decolonization.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"To 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

"Heaney uses an impressive variety of archives to trace a five-century-long history of the Andean dead, from powerful and agential ancestors to tools of Spanish colonial power, objects of natural science, curiosities at the World's Fairs, specimens for racist theories-but also a way for Peruvians to reclaim their past. Thoroughly researched, this book succeeds brilliantly in unravelling the complicated history and untangling issues surrounding Andean human remains in both Western and Peruvian museums... Heaney's writing is engaging and clear and will appeal to specialists and nonspecialists alike. More than a history book, Empires of the Dead is a must-read for every Andean archaeologist and bioarchaeologist who seeks to contextualise and question their practice." — Amandine Flammang, Antiquity

"In Empires of the Dead, Heaney documents half a millennium of relations between the living and the dead in what we now call America, a period in which the latter have been venerated, plundered, burned, mourned, collected, 'harvested,' exported, hoarded, auctioned, exhibited, disputed and even repatriated... Heaney has a special talent for moving the historical narrative into the territory of contemporary anxieties." — Marco Avilés, El País

"Heaney's careful five-hundred-year history of the uses of Peruvian Indigenous dead and his analysis of their importance will appeal to those studying human remains, scientific racism, colonialism, nationalism, and anthropology around the world... his careful articulation of Indigenous mortuary culture and its transformations through the colonial and republican periods establishes a strong precedent for the movement, reburial, and resignification of the Peruvian dead in foreign collections." — Ashley Kerr, H-Sci-Med-Tech

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159367013
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	10/24/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	424,973

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