Empires of the Dead

Download or read book Empires of the Dead written by Christopher Heaney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When the Smithsonian Institution's first Hall of Physical Anthropology opened in 1965, the first thing visitors saw were 160 Andean skulls fixed to the wall like a mushroom cloud. Empires of the Dead explains that Skull Wall's origins, and this introduction establishes its scope: a history from 1532 to the present of how the collection of Inca mummies, Andean crania, and a pre-Hispanic surgery named trepanation made "ancient Peruvians" the single largest population in the Smithsonian and many other museums in Peru, the Americas, and the world. This introduction argues that the Hall of Physical Anthropology displayed these collections while hiding their foundation on Indigenous, Andean, and Peruvian cultures of healing and science. These "Peruvian ancestors" of American anthropology reveal the importance of Indigenous and Latin American science and empire to global history, and their relevance to debates over museums and Indigenous human remains today"--