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Speaker: Dr. Christopher Heaney, Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Penn State. Author of Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu (2010).
Moderated by: Harvard Andean Working Group
By 1873, seven years after the founding of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, over 400 of the 684 skulls in its collection were from the Andes. Thus began a specialization that linked Harvard to Peru, which one Andean archaeologist—Julio César Tello (Harvard AM, 1912), “the Boas of Peru”—used to point anthropology to a more complicated end. This entangled history of Peruvian science and Americanist anthropology reveals how Indigenous actors have redirected their study, a debt to recognize as American institutions account for their role in the hemispheric disinterment, excavation, and display of Indigenous kin.
Presented in collaboration with the Harvard University Department of History, the Harvard Department of Anthropology, and the Harvard History of Science Department's Early Sciences Working Group.
Contact information: Manny Medrano mmedrano@g.harvard.edu