Books by Christopher Heaney
Oxford University Press, 2023
Available for $24.50 with code AAFLYG6 at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/empires-of-the-... more Available for $24.50 with code AAFLYG6 at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/empires-of-the-dead-9780197542552?cc=us&lang=en&#
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 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 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.
Isis, 2018
As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe’s encounter with two “ancient” bodily knowledg... more As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe’s encounter with two “ancient” bodily knowledges. The first is well known: the embalmed Egyptian dead who were ground into a materia medica named mumia and later were collected as “mummies” themselves. Yet mummies owe their global possibility— of ancient sciences of embalming and environmental manipulation apprehensible worldwide—to the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with the Incas’ preserved dead, the yllapa. This article argues that their confiscation and display desecrated their sacred affect, but their recategorization as “embalmed” bodies allowed Indigenous Peruvian writers to argue for the Incas’ lost medical sophistication. European scholars then used that sophistication to establish “mummies” as a comparative category. The original yllapas decayed, blurring both Inca sovereignty and the colonial Latin American sciences that anatomized it, but their imagined resurrection in the preserved bodies of other “ancient Peruvians” turned the “Inca mummy” into a highly collectible scientific object, embodying a newly national past of ancient learning and anti-imperial indictment.
Papers by Christopher Heaney
The American Historical Review, 2022
From 1820 through 1920, American anthropologists acquired more human remains of Andean origin tha... more From 1820 through 1920, American anthropologists acquired more human remains of Andean origin than those of any other individual population worldwide. Samuel George Morton, the Smithsonian, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the American Museum of Natural History all made “ancient Peruvians” core to their collections, racializing the Americas’ past and present by using “ancient Peruvians” as a historic set against which living Native Americans might be compared. This process fueled the collection of Indigenous remains in general and confirms Americanist historians’ need to attend to entanglement: US scholars were adapting a Peruvian tradition of knowledge and grave robbing in which the Andes possessed the Americas’ oldest, wealthiest, most “civilized,” and most plentiful human remains. It also reminds us that recent and useful conceptualizations of early American history as vast had disturbing early republican counterparts—in this case, a violent science that entangled precolonial, colonial, and republican North and South American temporalities and embodied them in the “historic” Indigenous dead. Reckoning with history’s role in colonization includes recognizing the literal, even spirited, remains of entanglement as historical forces in their own right, with temporalities beyond those of the United States.
History of Anthropology Review, 2017
This piece explores an exhibit at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago whose lack of study is particu... more This piece explores an exhibit at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago whose lack of study is particularly notable, given the extraordinary real estate and notice it claimed in anthropology’s exposition space: a reproduction of the coastal Peruvian “Necropolis” of Ancón, which organizers billed as “probably the largest burying ground, either pre-historic or modern, in the world." Excavated and mounted by George A. Dorsey (1868-1931)—Franz Boas’s later rival and a student of the fair’s anthropological coordinator, Harvard’s Frederic Ward Putnam—its presentation of upwards of fifty wrapped and unwrapped mummy bundles shown as if in the process of excavation apparently “attracted more attention than any exhibit in the [anthropological] building." The Ancón display was essential to what Boas, Putnam, and others believed was the anthropological exposition’s core mission at the Fair: offering a ‘Pre-Columbian’ baseline against which white American society—and supposedly disappearing Northern Native Americans—could be judged. To do so, Dorsey had spent time, effort, and Putnam’s money to excavate burial grounds that Peruvians—elite and indigenous—had long dug and interpreted for themselves. The Peruvian “Necropolis” and its bundles filled with bodies and artifacts were the basis for Dorsey’s subsequent Ph.D. in anthropology, which was the very first awarded to an American in the United States, and the first awarded at Harvard. It also became the gold standard for what Putnam proposed as a “new scientific practice” for archaeological collection and excavation, in which the indigenous dead were not collected separately from their works and tools, but with them, to reconstruct lives less comparable to those of Europe. This apparently epistemic shift in how anthropology approached its historical and non-European subject was as informed by the very nature of Peruvian mortuary practices—in which each interment was an archive of the living—as by ethnological debates in Cambridge, or expanding American settler colonialism.
Reviews in American History, 2019
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2019
put those qualities on display. They include not only a list of books dispatched from Spain to Li... more put those qualities on display. They include not only a list of books dispatched from Spain to Lima toward the end of the seventeenth century but also – of use not only to area specialists but also to scholars of the early modern drugs trade more generally – an extensive list of the materia medica that circulated in the Spanish Atlantic. If there were a criticism to make, it is that key concepts in the history of science and medicine which bear directly on the material in question and which figure prominently in Newson’s discussion remain underdeveloped. The author draws heavily on the idea of the ‘medical marketplace’ and, although well aware of the pitfalls of such a framing (see the discussion on pp. 175–8), Newson’s analysis tends to suppose that patients’ choices concerning medical treatment amounted to mutually exclusive therapeutic decisions (so the licensed apothecary before and often instead of the unlettered healer). The book is also essentialist in its handling of concepts like ‘science’, ‘experience’, ‘experimentation’ and ‘empiricism’, the meanings of which are treated as self-evident rather than historicised. What, if anything, these things might have meant to apothecaries and their patients in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Lima is unclear. These and other questions may linger. But that is part of the value of Newson’s book. Thanks toMaking Medicines, scholars can now approach such issues with far greater clarity and specificity than they could have otherwise. The book will be a key point of reference for future studies not only on the Viceroyalty of Peru but in colonial Latin America.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2016
Between 1472 and 1572, the conquests of Peru were many: by the Inca, who in the 15th century spre... more Between 1472 and 1572, the conquests of Peru were many: by the Inca, who in the 15th century spread from their southern Andean heartland in Cusco to build an empire that stretched from what is now southern Colombia to northern Chile and Argentina; by the Spanish conquistadors under the leadership of Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, who reached down from Panama in search of the rumored wealth of the kingdom of “Birú” and fatefully encountered the aspirant Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca in November of 1532; by the Spanish crown, which intervened after the revolt of Atahualpa’s brother Manco Inca in 1536 and the rebellion of the conquistadors in the 1540s; and by the Inca’s former subjects, the Spaniards’ Indian allies, and their mestizo sons, who ended independent Inca resistance by helping to capture Atahualpa’s nephew in the Vilcabamba valley in 1572. This essay sketches the century-long arc of those many conquests, which together yielded a historical entity not quite li...
Indigenous Visions, 2018
This chapter examines how anthropology affected Peruvian archaeologist Julio César Tello's sense ... more This chapter examines how anthropology affected Peruvian archaeologist Julio César Tello's sense of himself. Indigenous individuals like Tello often were present at archaeology's inception, as informants and laborers, and their participation directed their more personal trajectories. Tello came to anthropology at a moment when the physical categories that informed the scientific racism of the nineteenth century were being complicated in favor of a more cultural bent. Tello overcame multiple worlds of prejudice by using skulls, the materia prima of nineteenth-century scientific racism. Like Boas, Tello collected the indigenous dead, and his collection was central to his early career. Yet unlike Boas, whose turn to a cultural study of texts in a university setting forestalled an honest reckoning with the physical collections of Native remains held by America's museums, Tello never left the dead behind. Understanding this distinction reveals how North American anthropology's turn to culture also prefaced a tragic erasure of its obligations to the indigenous dead.
Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830, 2018
Long before Jamestown colonists grappled with prior Castilian colonization in the New World, the ... more Long before Jamestown colonists grappled with prior Castilian colonization in the New World, the sixteenth-century entanglements of English and Spanish royal bodies produced an irreal indigenous offspring worthy of Christian imperial ambitions. These were the “Peruvians,” but they were neither the Incas Francisco Pizarro encountered nor their Andean subjects. Rather, they were the Peruvians of England’s imagination, a branch added to the American family tree by promoters of colonization during the intellectually fecund marriages of Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Katherine of Aragón, to Henry Tudor (1509–1533) and that of Katherine and Henry’s daughter Mary to Katherine’s great-nephew Philip (1554–1558), the future king of Spain. These Peruvians were the perfect subject people: formerly idolatrous but now Christianized and tractable, they and their alchemical land made and relinquished gold and silver as prolifically as Henry had made and lost queens. This land, Peru, was even posited as a possible “New England”—if it could be reached.
This chapter explores the roots from which these Peruvians and that Peru grew. It traces the intellectual entanglements between two scholars who shaped English understandings of South America in the mid-sixteenth century: the Renaissance humanist Sir Thomas More, whose allegory Utopia was translated into English in 1551, and, more extensively, the cosmographer and alchemist Richard Eden (c. 1521–1576), “England’s first literary imperialist,” whose 1555 publication, The Decades of the New Worlde or West India, translated the earliest “decades” of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s account of Spain’s efforts in the New World, De Orbe Novo. Specifically, it shows that Eden’s Decades borrowed from Utopia to praise Spanish efforts in the New World, and to use the example of Peru to encourage English navigators and merchants to contribute to and profit from an expanding “Christian empire” of native peoples.
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2020
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2019
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Books by Christopher Heaney
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 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 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.
Papers by Christopher Heaney
This chapter explores the roots from which these Peruvians and that Peru grew. It traces the intellectual entanglements between two scholars who shaped English understandings of South America in the mid-sixteenth century: the Renaissance humanist Sir Thomas More, whose allegory Utopia was translated into English in 1551, and, more extensively, the cosmographer and alchemist Richard Eden (c. 1521–1576), “England’s first literary imperialist,” whose 1555 publication, The Decades of the New Worlde or West India, translated the earliest “decades” of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s account of Spain’s efforts in the New World, De Orbe Novo. Specifically, it shows that Eden’s Decades borrowed from Utopia to praise Spanish efforts in the New World, and to use the example of Peru to encourage English navigators and merchants to contribute to and profit from an expanding “Christian empire” of native peoples.
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 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 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.
This chapter explores the roots from which these Peruvians and that Peru grew. It traces the intellectual entanglements between two scholars who shaped English understandings of South America in the mid-sixteenth century: the Renaissance humanist Sir Thomas More, whose allegory Utopia was translated into English in 1551, and, more extensively, the cosmographer and alchemist Richard Eden (c. 1521–1576), “England’s first literary imperialist,” whose 1555 publication, The Decades of the New Worlde or West India, translated the earliest “decades” of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s account of Spain’s efforts in the New World, De Orbe Novo. Specifically, it shows that Eden’s Decades borrowed from Utopia to praise Spanish efforts in the New World, and to use the example of Peru to encourage English navigators and merchants to contribute to and profit from an expanding “Christian empire” of native peoples.