UPenn Museum Removing Morton Skull Collection from View - My Research Notes

Recently, Hyperallergic ran an article about the removal of the Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection from view at The Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).

As part of a UPenn student-driven initiative which formed Penn & Slavery Project, demands have been placed upon the university and the museum to repatriate the human remains of Native Americans and enslaved black people from the US and Cuba. The Penn & Slavery Project conducted a study which included,

“information on other cases in which the university’s medical school has historically stolen body parts from enslaved people without consent after their death.”

In response to these demands, UPenn and the Museum have taken some steps to mediate the reckoning saying,

“The museum has also amended the collection’s webpage to say that it is “not a memorial lauding Morton or his scholarship” although it still describes the collection as “an exceptional historic resource.”

Elsewhere on its website, the museum posted a statement in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, in which it recognizes that “this museum was built on colonialism and racist narratives.”

http://pennandslaveryproject.org/

https://hyperallergic.com/577941/penn-museum-to-remove-skull-collection-of-enslaved-people/

It was almost 10 years ago that I was able to conduct research on the Samuel G. Morton Collection at The Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I put the findings into a research paper, “Thinking A Head: Contemplating Race and Ritual in 19th Century Skull Collecting.” I wanted to share some of my notes from that essay which I’ve abbreviated here: 

Samuel G. Morton (1799-1851) was a distinguished physician in Philadelphia, UPenn graduate, as well as, a geologist, naturalist, ethnologist, and physical anthropologist. Morton engineered a skull collection of nearly 1,000 human crania “the American Golgotha” between the 1830s and 1840s that has since been dismissed by some scholars as “race science.” His publication of this collection, Crania Americana, 1839, was an expensive tome whose sale price was the equivalent of a book for sale today at $500. When he was just about to stall the publishing endeavor, Morton met with providence when his recently deceased uncle bequeathed a small fortune to him and he was able to finish the project. Morton would continue in this vein of research and publish Crania Aegyptiaca in 1844.

In Crania Americana, Morton endeavored to offer scientific evidence based on biological determinations of cranial measurements analyzed according to phrenological prescriptives. Phrenology has since been dismissed as a pseudo-science that measured the indentations and protuberances on a person’s head in order to determine their inner morality, character, and position in life. During his introductory remarks in Crania Americana Morton contends, “I have long admitted the fundamental principles of Phrenology… Yet I am free to acknowledge that there is a singular harmony between the mental character of the Indian, and his cranial developments as explained by Phrenology.” The majority of Morton’s collection was comprised of Native American skulls.

Morton sought to demonstrate the differences between what he identified as the five races:  Mongolian, Ethiopian, Caucasian, American, and Malay. These skulls were acquired, cleaned, sorted, varnished, measured, filled up, and displayed. Morton rarely labored to retrieve skulls himself as most of the skulls in his collection were brought to him by doctors, explorers, soldiers, naturalists, travelers, and grave robbers. One particular grave robber in correspondence with Morton reported to him that, “Grave robbing gave him a ‘rascally pleasure.’”

In contrast to his noble assessment of the Caucasian family, Morton’s descriptions of the Native American family and the African family are a stockpile of loaded pejoratives. Regarding the Native American family Morton states,

In their mental character the Americans are averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful, and fond of war, and wholly destitute of maritime adventure. They are crafty, sensual, ungrateful, obstinate and unfeeling, and much of their affection for their children may be traced to purely selfish motives. Their mental faculties, from infancy to old age, present a continued childhood…they are not only averse to the restraints of education, but for the most part are incapable of a continued process of reasoning on abstract subjects…

 Morton creates a pyramid of power with the Caucasian family at the top, the African family at the bottom and the Native American family somewhere in the middle. Like his assessment of the Native American family, Morton’s diagnosis of the African family is also quite injurious saying they are,

Characterized by a black complexion, and black, woolly hair; the eyes are large and prominent, the nose broad and flat, the lips thick, and the mouth wide. In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity…Like most other barbarous nations their institutions are not infrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty. The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts.

 Morton’s finagling and fudging of data rankings and his a priori methodological dalliances reveal a stolid determination to present a particularly contrived racial mythology. Ann Fabian states in The Skull Collectors that Morton’s intellectual network in Philadelphia, “helped Morton to establish a ‘natural history’ of race that pretended to have ‘discovered’ the racial differences that it, in fact, had helped to invent.”   

The performative nuances of death rituals and the reifying of destructive stereotypes through the compulsive reiteration of material and visual rhetoric exemplify Morton’s collection of skulls. Almost all of the plates illustrated in Crania Americana are of Native American skulls. Morton does not include any visual images of Caucasian skulls. These motivations to exclusively include images of the fragmented native body and the clear omission of a fragmented Caucasian body derive from an adherence to postcolonial principles of Otherness. This is the affirmation of the bourgeois body through the negation of the ‘uncivilized’ body.

The Samuel G. Morton Skull Collection is currently at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. As stated in her book, The Skull Collectors, Fabian questions how to assess the worth of this collection. Morton, who was often in financial straits and made very little profit from his collection, was forced to consider the value of this collection at various times. As Fabian states, “Years passed and the dust yellowed the varnish on Morton’s skulls. At the turn of the 20th century, Alex Hrdlicka, America’s leading physical anthropologist, dismissed the collection as a worthless remnant of misguided phrenology.” Since this time the collection has dwindled somewhat, transferred ownership, and questions of repatriation of the human remains has been an issue. As a result, some of the Native American crania from Morton’s collection have been repatriated for proper burial under the Native American Grave Protection Repatriation Act (NAGPRA.)

While conducting research at the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Anthropology, University Museum, where the Morton collection is housed, I stumbled upon a serendipitous discovery. My visit at the museum unknowingly coincided with the visit of a group of physical anthropologists from the Smithsonian Museum. Led by Douglas Owsley, Division Head of the Department of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian, and Curator of North America Forensics; his team was at the collection examining various crania from different collections and taking measurements. Doug Owsley is a notable physical anthropologist and coincidentally referred to often in an article by Ann Fabian, author of The Skull Collectors, titled, “Bones of Contention” from 2001. In the article Fabian describes Owsley’s active role in the controversial discovery of Kennewick Man and his position against Native American repatriation. Because of the sequestering of Native American skulls by Morton the remaining skulls in the collection were never buried. In Grief, Mourning, and Death Ritual, the author describes the importance of a proper grieving process stating that, “the removal of the corpse from family care has produced problems for survivors in that the grieving process may not take place if they are distanced from the reality of corporeal death.” However, Morton was familiar with Native American burial practices as Fabian quotes Morton as saying,

The Indians have an extraordinary veneration for their dead.’…‘which sometimes induces them, on removing from one section of the country to another, to disinter the remains of their deceased relatives, and bear them to the new home of the tribe.

One particular skull from the Morton collection was being surveyed by Owsley’s group. The skull was identified as belonging to a young female, Pawnee, about twenty-four years old whose cause of death was blunt force trauma near the left temporal bone. However, Owsley’s team wanted to determine if this cause of death was by scalping. Upon further discovery, it was determined that she had not died from scalping. Interested in viewing a Pawnee skull that was thought to have suffered blunt force trauma due to scalping, I analyzed the skull after the Smithsonian team reviewed the evidence and recorded the data. After studying the skull and the illustrated plates in Crania Americana I proposed that this was the same Pawnee skull from Plate 38. However, with a collection of over 1,000 human crania, it was difficult to ascertain if this skull was indeed the same skull illustrated in Crania Americana because it was not labeled as such. In Crania Americana, Morton simply states regarding the Pawnee saying, 

The Pawnees consist of two nations, the Pawnees proper, and the Ricaras or Aricaras, which last are also called Black Pawnees. The former inhabits the country on the River Platte, and the Ricara villages are below the Mandans, on the Missouri. These tribes speak a language different from any other on this continent. They do not differ much, in their physical character and belligerent habits, from the surrounding nations, but they have until lately practiced the singular custom of sacrificing human victims to Venus, “The Great Star.” This ceremony was performed annually, and immediately preceded their harvest labors, the success of which it was designed to promote. The practice is said to be an anomaly among the North American nations. 

I returned to the Smithsonian team and presented my findings to Owsley. Owsley reviewed the visual evidence in Crania Americana measuring the parietal and temporal bones, and indications of blunt force trauma and told me, “You have a match. It is the same skull.” He told me that if I cleaned the skull from the debris and stain of human handling – that it would be “beautiful.” I walked from the fourth floor where the Smithsonian team was meeting back to the basement of bones where I was conducting research in the archives of bones and ephemera. Clutching the bubble-wrapped Pawnee skull to my chest in its Ziploc bag I reflected on the significance of the subjectivity of these remains. The young Pawnee woman was a just a little younger than I was at the time of her death by blunt force trauma. I held her close to my chest and cried. These human remains were never buried. This research project has been an exercise in cleaning the debris and stain of racial discourse smeared on the consciousness of our national body.

(Below I’m including pages from Crania Americana that were the match and the photographs that I took of the young Pawnee woman’s crania.)