A diagrammatics of race: Samuel George Morton's ‘American Golgotha’ and the contest for the definition of the young field of anthropology

Introduction: A diagrammatics of race

This article is part of a special section that engages with what my co-editors and I call diagrams of relatedness in our inter-university project (https://www.unilu.ch/snfsinergiatree). In the introduction to this special section, we engage with what has been referred to as diagrammatics in the humanities and social sciences and provide an overview of the historiography on the use of diagrams to establish relations between individuals and groups of organisms in genealogy, natural history and biology, anthropology, and ethnology and heredity from the middle ages to the present. In the project, we are interested in questions such as: What different understandings of relatedness – of ancestry, descent, and kinship – are associated with particular diagrams, and what are their social and political implications, for example, with respect to incest prohibition with the aid of arbores consanguinitatis, (male) hereditary succession of power and wealth by means of genealogical trees, or the determination of ‘purity of blood’ with limpieza de sangre tests (Sommer et al., in press)?

With regard to anthropology as well as biology, when considering diagrams of relatedness, one might first think of phylogenetic trees (see e.g. Sommer, 2005, 2015). Indeed, as in the case of genealogy, the tree diagram has been identified as a ‘canonical icon’ (Gould, 1995; 1997: 30) in these realms. However, in this article, it is rather the introduction of a diagrammatic method for the construction of ‘racial categories’ ¹ and their comparison in the young field of physical anthropology that is under concern. In the now classic The Mismeasure of Man (1996[1981]: 62–141), the late Stephen Jay Gould drew attention to the development of a metric approach in physical anthropology in the 19th century that depended on novel instruments. While the constitutive new images – that is, diagrams – were not Gould's focus, Christine Hanke (2007) has more recently shown the connection between metric-statistical procedures and mechanical-objective visualizations including tables, curves, and drawings in the construction of ‘race’ and sex in the journal Archiv für Anthropologie for the later period between 1890 and 1915. The diagrammatic repertoire of anthropology more broadly has been the object of an earlier special issue in this journal on ‘Diagrammatic Renderings of Human Evolution and Diversity in Physical, Serological and Molecular Anthropology’, which, with the exception of the introduction, focuses on the 20th century (Sommer and Lipphardt, 2015).

However, it is the period that the late George Stocking (1973: xii) has referred to as the dark ages in the history of anthropology, the last decades of the 18th century to the mid 19th century, that is of particular importance for an understanding of how diagrams came to play such a great role. It was a time when practitioners were in the process of defining the field: Whose methods would be adopted in the endeavour variously called anthropology, ethnology, or ethnography? A strong voice in that time in-between, in that transition from environmentalism to physical anthropology, was James Cowles Prichard, who was in fact viewed as the founder of modern anthropology not only by his British contemporaries but also, as will be of particular concern, by Americans. Even though Prichard was not an environmentalist, he stood for the traditional comparative historical approach to the study of ‘man’. At the same time, there were the fledgling beginnings of physical anthropology in the work of such authors as Peter Camper and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. On all of these drew the so-called father of American physical anthropology: the physician Samuel George Morton. To engage with the transition from a comparative historical to a comparative physical approach, I thus focus on a network of researchers whose work has been considered fundamental for the development of anthropology by their contemporaries as well as by historians of science.

Like Camper, Blumenbach, Prichard, and Morton, those who brought change to anthropology in the final decades of the 18th century to the mid 19th century were to a large part trained in anatomy and natural history, and they looked to their fields for inspiration. In the new physical anthropology, skulls became central objects of study. Human skulls were already collected and studied in medicine. However, the new ‘science of man’ regarded the study of humans as part of natural history and was thus distinct from medical and medical anatomical inquiry into human beings (Sloan, 1995: 113). The comparing and measuring of skulls in anthropology was inspired by the classification efforts in comparative zoology and the nascent palaeontology (e.g. Armstrong-Fumero, 2014: 12–17; Stanton, 1960: 24–9, 42–3). As Ann Fabian (2010: 30) has put it for Morton, ‘Morton took up questions that comparative anatomists had asked about the shape and size of skulls of different animals, but instead of looking at various animals, he compared human races.’

However, Morton was also inspired by phrenology, which was entirely focused on the analysis of skull shapes and an important source of diagrammatic and metric methods. Furthermore, Camper also drew on diagrammatic techniques from art, another realm in which skulls were collected and studied, and we will see that early physical anthropologists retained some aesthetic considerations in their work. Finally, Morton was regularly revered as the new Blumenbach or even the new Prichard during his lifetime (e.g. Stanton, 1960: 39), and, in histories of physical anthropology, Camper, Blumenbach, and Morton have long been identified as pioneering the quantitative approach (e.g. Shapiro, 1959: 373–6). But the focus on diagrams will reveal that Prichard criticized the metric approach as practised by Morton and Camper, while beginning to integrate diagrams in his work, and that Blumenbach's method was diagrammatic without necessarily being metric.

We will therefore have to ask which qualities of diagrams suited the project of physical anthropologists. This may be approached by considering some types of diagrams that will be of central importance in the main body of this article through the diagrammatology of Charles Sanders Peirce, who was born the year Morton published his magnum opus, Crania americana (1839), and who was brought up in an Anglo-Saxon supremacist, pro-slavery environment by his father (e.g. Raposa, 2021). However, while acknowledging Peirce's own racist background, scholars at the same time apply his philosophy to anti-racist causes (Neville, 2018). Now for Peirce, the diagram is a subcategory of the icon, and the icon is characterized by similarity to the object it represents. Diagrams are distinguished from the other two subcategories of icons – the image and the metaphor – by representing ‘the relations of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts’ (quoted from Bauer and Ernst, 2010: 43), such as in our case the geometric drawings of the outlines of skulls in which were inserted the lines for comparative measurement. However, these subcategories are not strictly separated. The subcategory of diagrams also contains images, and images can also be read diagrammatically, as when the lithographs of realistic drawings of skulls were studied by observing the proportions and relations of their parts. In doing so, the observer performed a diagrammatic operation, making the image a diagram.

A diagram can also represent a set of objects that stand in rational relation to each other, as with, in this case, the tables containing the numbers for the mean cranial capacities of different human groups. Diagrams may thus show relations between the parts of one thing and/or relations between a set of things, as also in a map of ‘racial distribution’. Furthermore, there exist relations between diagrams. As a rule-based representation of a phenomenon, an actual diagram is less apprehended as the elements and relations of the individual material object than read as a generalized type (as in the case of the standardized schemata used to represent skulls, which allowed certain operations and measurements). This already suggests that diagrams are tools for mental experimentation and manipulation, as we will see at work, for example, when skull types were diagrammatically morphed into each other. For Peirce, this is a great strength of diagrams, but in operating with a diagram there also lies the danger of taking the diagram for the thing itself. Characteristics that are associated with objects prior to their analysis – for instance, primitive or advanced characters with specific human groups – may thus enter the experiments with diagrams and lead to the perception of misleading patterns. Even while diagrams make knowledge evident in that it becomes perceptible – diagrams demonstrate something – in this way, common-sense, ideological prejudice as well as wishful thinking may enter its production (Peirce, 1903, 1906; Stjernfelt, 2000; 2007: 23–48).

Another central aspect of diagrams is that, in contrast to objects such as skulls, they can easily circulate. The centrality of the processes of accumulation and circulation of objects (of knowledge) for scientific practice through the transformation of things into so-called immutable mobiles has especially been worked out by Bruno Latour. In Science in Action (2002[1987]), he investigated the transformations through which events, things, and humans are made into mobile and stable inscriptions that can be combined with each other. In cascades of successively higher degrees of abstraction, objects like skulls may be translated into drawings, numbers from measurements, and means in comparative tables that categorize, order, and hierarchize. In this process, objects like skulls are decontextualized – they no longer carry the traces of their unethical acquisition in contexts of violence and exploitation. Transformed into diagrams, they can be globally distributed, (re)used, and further transformed, in my case in the project of sampling, standardizing, and ordering humanity.

In the following, I begin by engaging with Prichard's comparative historical Researches Into the Physical History of Man (1813) and ask how he reacted to the physical anthropology of Camper and Blumenbach, which, as we will see, was aesthetic, diagrammatic, and in the case of Camper also metric. In the main part of the article, I then analyse Morton's now decidedly diagrammatic and metric approach to human crania. A close reading of Crania americana (1839) in particular will reveal the intent to instruct in a kind of diagrammatics that had not yet prevailed. Morton used diagrams to introduce and explain measuring devices and the carrying out of measurements (on the use of diagrams in connection with instruments, see Gessner, 2014; Higton, 2014), and he taught the reader in diagrammatically constructing racial types. I shall end by asking how Prichard was affected in his later editions by the new physical anthropology of Morton, and I will look at Morton's legacy in the form of Types of Mankind (1854) by his friends Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon: Did his fervent supporters also carry through his diagrammatic and metric method?

As already hinted at, there was more at stake than the question of the right methodology or the pre-evolutionary explanation of the causes of human differentiation. Of central concern to the practitioners treated here was the issue of human origins, of whether humans originated in one pair and in one geographical region, or whether the human varieties had separate origins and at different locations. The terms monogenist and polygenist for the proponents of these views were actually introduced only in the late 1850s by Gliddon (Douglas, 2008: 53). Connected to this debate was the question of whether humans constituted different varieties that belonged to the same species, or if they could be divided into several species. I will therefore argue that while there was a diagrammatics of relatedness – a way of using diagrams to evidence inter-variety kinship – diagrams were also used to deny relatedness, to create differences within humankind that amounted to the status of unrelated species. This diagrammatics of race, as I call it, was enmeshed in matters of racial politics. Despite aspirations to objectivity, the history of physical anthropology makes it clear that diagrams were not purely epistemological but also political tools in the contexts of imperialism, colonialism, and the associated ‘racial’ violence.

Aesthetics, diagrammatics, and metrics: The beginnings of physical anthropology

Prichard's Researches Into the Physical History of Man, first published in 1813, was a foundational text. He was internationally recognized as the father of modern ethnology or anthropology. As we will see, his encompassing contribution could not be disregarded even by his adversaries (Stocking, 1973: ix–xii). Although Prichard called his approach physical history, it rested on classical literature (of historical geographers), later travel writing (by James Cook, Joseph Banks, Johann Forster, Mungo Park, Alexander von Humboldt, etc.), oriental studies, antiquarian and Christian chronological treatises, and natural history (Carl von Linné, Buffon, George Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire). Among these influences was William Jones, who had suggested the affinity of the European languages to ancient Sanskrit and their common but lost origin, and who had retraced the history of humanity philologically to a single family in Persia in ‘On the Origin and Families of Nations’ (Jones, 1807[1792]). Indeed, the comparative historical approach to languages was the most important pillar of Prichard's work, followed by studies of religions, political institutions, manners and customs (Stocking, 1973: xxxiv–xliii; see also Augstein, 1997).

However, there were already the beginnings of another anthropology in place, one that aimed at determining human history and kinship on the basis of physical characteristics that were taken to be durable. The way in which Prichard engaged with this literature is insightful. He at times even seems to have ridiculed what the Dutch physician Camper ‘fancied’ (Prichard, 1813: 48). Prichard understood Camper to establish a scale of animals and human types according to their beauty and intelligence on the basis of the so-called facial angle. While Prichard was able to do without illustrations in the 558 pages of text in Researches (though he included vocabulary tables and genealogical/chronological lists), Camper's dissertation of 1768, which was published posthumously in 1792 (and translated into German by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring), was built around diagrams of skulls from his rather modest collection, which, besides crania from his and neighbouring countries, contained only eight such from Africa and Asia (on the collection, see Camper, 1792: xiv).

Camper's first two diagrams, which have since been reproduced frequently and often out of context, showed a row of skulls framed and transversed by lines above a series of corresponding heads (Camper, 1792: ‘TAB. I’ and ‘TAB. II’). They were representations of his method. Camper had aligned a European with his more ‘exotic’ human skulls and an ape skull for comparison. The inspection of the proportions of the skulls thus arranged made him realize that the differences between them were captured by a line from the forehead (supraorbital ridge) to the upper lip (incisors). In order to transfer the diagrammatic method into a diagram for measurement and demonstration, Camper invented a construction through which horizontal, vertical, and diagonal strings could be strung. It allowed him to produce geometrical drawings that preserved the skulls’ proportions and to arrive at points of comparison and to draw lines (on the technique, see Karliczek and Jank, 2010: 71–5). In the drawings, he arranged the skulls along a horizontal line through the base of the nose and the auditory tract, which together with the first line provided the above-mentioned facial angle. In the resulting first diagram, there is a series of skulls and heads of increasing facial angle from a monkey on the left, to a juvenile orangutan and the Angolan child, whom he had publicly dissected in Amsterdam in 1758. The fourth skull (‘Kalmyk’; Camper, 1792: 16) and head represented all of Asia. In the diagram, the Angolan seems to approach the ape, but Camper stated that the similarity disappeared as soon as one considered other regions of the body or the head (ibid.). ²

The first skull and head on the left of Camper's second diagram are of a European with a facial angle of 80°. Everything above that Camper relegated to the realm of art, and everything below 70° provided a resemblance to the apes. Now Camper made explicit use of the experimental nature of diagrams. He changed the European skull's line from forehead to upper lip step by step so as to increase the facial angle, or to move from reality into art. When doing so, the head became gradually shorter; in the last figure of the series, in which the facial angle reached its maximum of 100°, the eyes were in the middle of the face. If one were to move above 100°, however, the head would become malformed. Camper explained that the ancient Greeks did go up to the maximum of 100° in their art, as the last figure showed, while the Romans used only 95°, as in the second-last figure. If one carried out the experiment in the other direction beyond the first diagram, Camper suggested, the Angolan would become ape and monkey and then dog and bird. Camper did so in drawing without reproducing the resulting diagram (1792: 16–24). Thus, due to the correlation of parts, the experimentation with the facial angle enabled one to diagrammatically morph one human type into another. This is demonstrated in Figure 1 for the transformation of a Black African into a European and back again (ibid.: 28–9).

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Figure 1.

Camper, 1792: ‘TAB. VI’.

Camper drew, painted, and sculpted human faces as a hobby and noticed that in European art, Black Africans tended to look like ‘blackened Europeans’. Nor was he satisfied with the existing methods for capturing the physically beautiful. In a distinctly diagrammatic way, he wanted to show how beauty resided in relations between parts and that these could be expressed in measures. In doing so, he was drawing on an artistic tradition. In fact, Camper had encountered something very similar to his facial angle in Albrecht Dürer's work (on Dürer, see Camper, 1792: 20). However, in zoology, too, the correlation of parts was a central concept and Camper situated his treatise in natural history. Besides art, he wanted to contribute to the ‘natural history of man’ and that is how he was understood: The facial angle, the first angular measurement for the comparative analysis of human skulls, became a mainstay of physical anthropology (e.g. Meijer, 1999; Visser, 1990). Camper, though making aesthetic judgements about the human varieties, used the power of diagrams to experiment with relations to demonstrate that the human varieties were exactly that: variations on a single type according to the law of the correlation of parts.

For Prichard (1813: 46–55), however, it was moot to base the comparison between individuals – which in this case stood for entire human groups – on one measurement. ³ He took issue with other attempts at physical anthropology like Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring's and George Cuvier's, too. But there was one savant who had pioneered the study of skulls that Prichard had much more reverence for, so much so that he dedicated his Researches of 1813 to him: the Göttingen physician Blumenbach, who was also a friend. It is therefore necessary to engage with Blumenbach's work with respect to the question of a diagrammatic approach. Referring to Camper (among others), Blumenbach issued his six instalments of Decas (Altera/Tertia/Quarta/Quinta/Sexta) Collectionis suae carniorum diversarum gentium illustrata (1790–1820), in which a series of 10 skulls each was represented on copper plates and described. In his most famous work, De generis humani varietate nativa liber: cum figuris aeri incises (1776), to the contrary, there were no illustrations of skulls until the third edition of 1795.

Blumenbach was proud to announce that his skull collection was more extensive and varied than that of his friend Camper (Blumenbach, 1798: 2), and in this third edition, he distinguished five human varieties on its basis, which he called Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan. He emphasized that all of these showed great variation within themselves and merged into each other through imperceptible gradations; no characteristic had been found that was exclusive to one group. This meant that classification was arbitrary, although Blumenbach did hold that his own was truer to nature than others. He discussed possible causes such as the Bildungstrieb, climate, way of life, bastardization, illnesses, and/or accidents for differences in hair colour and structure, skin colour, face, and skull shape, Camper's facial angle, peculiarities in teeth, ears, sexual organs, feet, and hands, as well as differences in stature. Overall, like Camper and Prichard, Blumenbach wanted to defend the unity of humankind; it constituted one species and was of common origin (ibid.: 91–202).

Blumenbach, too, was interested in the relations of parts, especially with respect to the skull, but he accused Camper of not having used his points and lines consistently in his drawings, and he thought that Camper's facial angle did not work as a criterion for distinguishing varieties, for more than one reason. There were very different skulls from different nations that might have the same facial angle, while similar skulls might differ in this angle. The profile alone was not very informative. Blumenbach therefore proposed another approach. It seemed nearly impossible to capture all proportions with one line, but this was best achieved with the Scheitelnorm, also referred to as norma verticalis. One had to arrange the skulls without lower jaws on their cheekbones (Jochbein) along a line on the table and look at them from behind, as he did in the diagram that has since become famous, and which shows three skulls from different continents from above and behind as well as the line of their orientation (Blumenbach, 1798: Plate 1). This allowed him to present all the important characteristics at once. The ‘oval Caucasian skull’ that Blumenbach put in the middle, which for him possessed the most beauty and symmetry, was from a female Georgian. In comparison, ‘the Ethiopian skull’ to its left, which was from a female from Guinea, had something akin to a beak, according to his judgement, and ‘the Mongolian skull’ to the right, represented by ‘a Reindeer-Tungus’, looked as if it had been flattened and thus protruded on both sides (ibid.: xv–xxvi, 143–61, 203–24).

These observations, combined with the associated diagram of skulls adjusted along a visible line, again suggest a diagrammatic approach to skulls in which one variety is moulded into the other through correlated changes in parts. In this moulding, Blumenbach (1798: 204) took the Caucasian variety to be the original: It had developed into the two extremes on both sides, into the Ethiopian and the Mongolian. In his second fold-out plate (my Figure 2), Blumenbach introduced two intermediary forms, ‘the American’ (skull from the Caribbean) and ‘the Malay’ (skull from Tahiti, both from Joseph Banks).

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Figure 2.

Blumenbach, 1798: ‘Taf. II’.

But Blumenbach did not think that the Caucasian degenerated, as he called it, into the American and the Malay, and that these forms then developed into the Mongolian and the Ethiopian, respectively. Rather, while the Malay seemed to have developed from the Caucasian, the American was of Mongolian origin (Blumenbach, 1798: Plates 1 and 2, note). In other words, the arrangement of the skulls does not indicate actual lines of transformation of one form into another; it does not suggest a tree with two shoots branching out from the Caucasian, as has been proposed by Gould (1996[1981]: 401–12, with an image of the ‘tree’ on p. 409; see also Junker, 2019: Figure 6.4, which proposes another tree structure as underlying Blumenbach's diagram). Blumenbach's visual order is not tree-structured; it is non-hierarchical. It follows anatomical affinity, mostly concerning the breadth of the skull, rather than descent. This is why the American is between the Caucasian and Mongol instead of to the left of both of them. In other words, for Blumenbach, degeneration was reversible; in adapting to American climates, in diverging from the Mongolian, the American type in fact returned somewhat to the Caucasian anatomy.

What a diagrammatic reading of the line of skulls in order of anatomical affinity was meant to convey was not actual genealogy, but, like Camper's morphing experiments, it was to show that human variation was gradual. It suggested to the eye the possibility of transforming the primordial type into varieties under observation of the relations of parts (and, at least to a degree, vice versa). As elaborated in the introduction of this paper from the perspective of Peircean diagrammatology, diagrams were not only the choice of tool of representation because they are inherently about the relation of parts, they were also explored in their capacity to perform experimentation, either by making them dynamic, as in the case of Camper, or by provoking the experiment in the beholder's mind, as in the case of Blumenbach. In the end, like Camper's, Blumenbach's diagrammatics was to demonstrate the single origin and unity of humankind, but unlike Camper's, it was not metric – it did not necessarily involve instruments and measurements. ⁴

Prichard quoted Blumenbach's work in the original Latin and even included a translation of the latter's conclusion with regard to the five skull forms in his Researches. At the same time, Prichard observed that the skull bones were strongly shaped in development by the muscular system and that the differences in head shape could not be specific because of the individuality of this system. Prichard declared that none of the peculiarities described were constant and confined to one ‘race’. What were described as Black African and Mongolian skulls appeared also among Europeans, and even more so the other way around. Though this was acknowledged by Blumenbach, Prichard took issue with the other researcher's insistence on the constancy of his descriptions (Prichard, 1813: 56–65). ⁵

All of the above, Prichard's ethnological and chronological knowledge, Camper's aesthetic and metric, and his and Blumenbach's diagrammatic approach, entered the physical anthropology of the Philadelphia physician Morton – but under opposite theoretical and political signs. The anthropologists so far treated were monogenists – they believed in a single origin of humankind, a humankind that constituted one species – and their monogenism was associated with an anti-slavery position. To the contrary, as we will see in the final part, Morton's work was taken on by polygenists and pro-slavery advocates. So we have set the scene that Morton entered, clearly with the aim of leaving his own mark on the definition of a new anthropology (or, as he called it, ethnology or ethnography).

Samuel George Morton and his (paper) skulls

Morton graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a medical degree and, after a brief tour of Europe, he returned to Philadelphia, where he practised medicine, lectured on anatomy, and wrote on geology, zoology, and palaeontology. He wanted to follow Blumenbach and others in the application of the comparative anatomical approach from these fields to humans, and when working on the different skull forms in the five ‘human races’ for a lecture held in 1830, he realized that more ‘specimens’ were needed. On his death in 1851, he left behind 867 cleaned and polished skulls – a collection in which the Native American remains were particularly important. Since he was of ill health, the so-called American father of physical anthropology had to rely on a network of helpers. As Ann Fabian (2003; 2010: 9–46) has detailed, it was therefore opportune that Morton was corresponding secretary of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which made him preside over the traffic in information and specimens. When he issued his call for skulls, phrenologists, army men, and doctors, as well as naturalists around the country, responded. Their correspondence detailed grave robbing. Morton's collecting project was enmeshed with the frontier violence of the 1830s and 1840s, when eastern nations were forced off their ancestral lands. Native American veneration for the bones of their dead made grave robbing a dangerous endeavour, as did rival looters. But war and disease were on Morton's side. They filled graveyards and removed those who guarded the dead.

The skulls from all over the continent allowed Morton to approach the question of the Native Americans’ identity in his Crania americana of 1839. However, Morton's collection was much more encompassing. His gruesome booty encompassed heads from all over the world, including those of ‘lunatics’ and ‘idiots’ (Morton, 1849a: n.p.), murderers and convicts, prostitutes, even pirates, and such from hospitals and poorhouses. For his second skull atlas – Crania aegyptiaca of 1844 – the (former) US consul of Kairo, Gliddon, provided him with over 100 Egyptian skulls in a large-scale plundering project. Gliddon billed Morton for packing, shipping, transportation, and wages for various labours, such as grave robbing, or bribes for hospital workers. Despite the aspect of the unethical and the uncanny, Morton and other skull collectors made no secret of the origins of their loot (Morton, 1839, 1844, 1849a).

Morton made his skull series – which had been dubbed the American Golgotha by a collector – available to visitors. And he exchanged skulls with other collectors. Most importantly, however, he circulated them on paper, so that they might easily reach the great anthropologists in Europe as well. In 1839, he did so through the work Crania americana, or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America, to Which Is Prefixed an Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species. It was among the more opulent of the 19th-century skull atlases, more extensive than the preceding Decas by Blumenbach and more encompassing than Crania britannica, which followed (Davis and Thurnam, 1856–60, dedicated to Blumenbach and Morton). Morton had hired the Philadelphia lithographer, John Collins, to draw his skulls onto stone for the substantial appendix of plates (Fabian, 2003).

The image Morton chose as the frontispiece of Crania americana first seems to suggest a traditional ethnological treatise. It is a drawing of a representative of ‘another race’, such as found in the third edition of Prichard's Researches (1836–47; on these, see Augstein, 1996: 326–35). It shows a Native American leader who was painted from life by a Philadelphia artist and lithographed by another artist of that city. But its traditional look is misleading. This is not simply a portrait. It is a diagram, or at least Morton wanted the reader to look at the image like that. As typical for Morton's play of cross references between bones and paper, and image and text, he referred the reader to page 292, where he described the warrior and orator of the Omawhaws as type specimen, as ‘seen in the retreating forehead, the low brow, … the large, aquiline nose, the high cheekbones, full mouth and chin, and angular face’ (Morton, 1839: 292).

Before entering the main text, the reader is then presented with the map of the world reproduced as my Figure 3, ‘shewing the geographical distribution of the human species’ (Morton, 1839: Map). Morton wrote that the distribution of the five races ‘in the primitive epochs of the world’ (ibid.: 95, note) was represented after Blumenbach. However, this map anticipated Morton's main findings, which strongly diverged from Blumenbach's views. Morton would not argue but ‘demonstrate’ that the Native American peoples constituted their own ‘race’, with the exception of ‘the Esquimaux’ and Greenlanders, who had migrated from Asia and were now a mixture of Mongolians and Americans. But on the map, this intermixture had not yet taken place: The ‘great races’ were still neatly separated from each other in what Morton largely took to be their original territories. It was only in the course of time, he imagined, that this perfect order would have been disturbed through major migrations and admixture. This is therefore not so much a diagram of relatedness as one that denies a kind of relatedness that at the time was still taken more or less for granted: It denied the notion of ‘the family of man’ in the sense of a humankind that had descended in its entirety from a single pair or stock at a common place of origin from where it eventually populated the earth.

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Figure 3.

‘The World – Shewing the Geographical Distribution of the Human Species’ (Morton, 1839: Engraving, n.p.).

Morton prefaced his paper skull collection with a 95-page ‘essay on the varieties of the human species’ (1839: Subtitle, 1) and the 22 families he thought they comprised (ibid.: 1–95). Regarding the great divisions of humankind, Morton again proclaimed to follow Blumenbach, with the difference that ‘the word race is substituted for variety’ (ibid.: 5, note). Morton provided a list of the races and families with a short general morphological and temperamental description, followed by longer treatments of each. He estimated that the most intelligent and advanced families belonged to the ‘Caucasian Race’ (ibid.: 5). As is typical of his descriptions, the overview of the Caucasians reads like a diagram in words, with the face, for example, being ‘small in proportion to the head’ and having ‘well-proportioned features’ (ibid.). This already makes clear that while parts of the same skull were set in relation to each other, the judgements (‘small’, ‘well-proportioned’) depended on the comparison of these proportions to those found in other skulls and ‘races’.

Morton stated that the Caucasians had originated in the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian, from where they had migrated and developed into the best types. However, he observed that major migrations had mostly been confined to the temperate zones with the exemption of ‘the civilized communities of modern times, in which the spirit of migratory enterprise is without limit’ (Morton, 1839: 1). Generally, everyone ‘thinks no part of the world so desirable and delightful than his own’ (ibid.). Drawing on Blumenbach and in a manner reminiscent of Camper's aesthetics, Morton described the Caucasian profile as approaching that of the Greek: Some Caucasians were as beautiful as classical sculptures. Dissociating himself from Prichard, who had called the Caucasian families Indo-European nations, Morton was of the opinion that real affinity was best determined through anatomical study. Indo-European might describe their languages, but anatomy determined the peoples. Morton continued in this vein, with the ‘Ethiopian Race’ (1839: 6), and in particular the ‘Hottentot’, taking the lowest rung on the ladder from highest animal to highest human (ibid.: 90).

However, in Crania americana, Morton was most interested in the ‘American Race’ (1839: 6), especially in the ancient Peruvians (ibid.: 96–112). This extinct type was older than the Incas and was now known only from remains taken from graves. From the remains that had been robbed from tombs, Morton concluded that though the ancient Peruvians had had lowly features, they had already been civilized. Morton's physical descriptions of ‘the American types’ followed the order of the paper skull collection at the end of the book, so that the readers might see the peculiar characteristics and proportions for themselves while contemplating the measurements provided in tables. Plate 4 of the appendix (my Figure 4), for example, was in the explanatory text described as the type specimen for the ancient Peruvians. In addition, Morton included many outlines of skulls throughout his discussion of ‘the American race’, and my Figure 5 of Mexican skulls shows that he called these skull drawings diagrams. Figure 5 makes clear that even if the drawings did not contain lines or numbers, they were set in relation with numbers and looked at with eyes trained in lines, volumes, and the facial angle. The production of these woodcuts had been a challenge. Morton had turned to artists who worked with the camera lucida and the graphic mirror in vain. In the end, Morton drew the images himself by means of an instrument adapted for the purpose by John S. Phillips of the American Academy of Sciences. This craniograph, the workings of which were explained in Crania americana by means of a diagram, allowed one to draw the skulls on glass in reduced size while maintaining the proportions. The outlines could then be transferred to paper and wood (ibid.: 294).

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Figure 4.

‘Peruvian of the Ancient Race’ (Morton, 1839: Plate 4).

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Figure 5.

Diagrams and measures of skulls (Morton, 1839: 154).

The reader was instructed in this kind of diagrammatic analysis to construct self and other in the section on anatomical measurements (Morton, 1839: 249–61). Linear measurements could be obtained with craniometer and callipers, but the facial angle (following Camper) that informed about the projection of the face in relation to the head was of particular importance, and Blumenbach's norma verticalis, too, was discussed on the basis of a diagram containing the line of skull orientation. In order to render Camper's measure more scientific and accurate, Morton, unlike Camper himself, determined the facial angle directly from the skulls with the original type of facial goniometer (an instrument devised by his friend Dr Turnpenny). As in the case of the craniograph, this instrument was explained on the basis of a diagram, as Morton called it (ibid.: 252–3), and it was accompanied by other diagrams (my Figure 6) showing the lines that gave the facial angle drawn on skulls. E gave a facial angle of 66° for the first diagram of a ‘Cowalitsk’ (Hawaiian) head. In the second, ‘much better formed head’ ‘of a Peruvian Indian’ (ibid.: 250), it amounted to 76°.

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Figures 6a and 6b.

Facial angles (Morton, 1839: 250).

Nonetheless, the facial angle was no indication of cranial capacity and thus intelligence in Morton's view (something that Camper had never claimed). To determine brain size and intelligence through the measurement of the internal skull capacity, as well as particular portions of the skull, in cubic inches with white pepper seed, Morton had Phillips design yet another instrument. Morton again included an instruction diagram of that instrument in the book, accompanied with textual explanations (1839: 253–4). Finally, he provided a table that summarized all the measurements for the American skulls, which ran over three pages (ibid.: 257–9). The ethnic origin was given for each skull, followed by the skull's catalogue and plate number, if present, and the measurements. There was no particular order here, and since Morton changed measurements in the table while the book was in print, the table did not always correspond to the text above. It was only by providing the means of the different measurements for the five major divisions of Native American nations in another table that the numbers began to gain meaning, but at the same time, this showed that the ‘Barbarous tribes’ (ibid.: 260) had greater cranial capacities than the ‘Demi-civilized tribes’ (Toltecans and ancient Peruvians; ibid.). Morton was able to achieve ‘real order’ only when, after having gone to this length of individually measuring the American skulls, he reintegrated them as a unity, as a means in brain size, into Blumenbach's five-part system, which was thereby transformed into a ‘racial hierarchy’ based on numbers in a table (my Figure 7).

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Figure 7.

‘On the Internal Capacity of the Cranium in the different Races of Men’ (Morton, 1839: 260).

However, there was an alternative scientific approach present in the book that was just as objectifying and judging as the ethnological one: the phrenological system. Morton had studied for an advanced medical degree in Edinburgh, then the British centre for phrenology, and made the acquaintance of the phrenologists Johann Spurzheim and George Combe in Europe. In the Crania americana, he now included a note by Phillips, in which Phillips explained how he had made phrenological measurements of the same skulls with the use of a craniograph, callipers, dividers, a graduated strap, and a measuring frame (Philipps, in Morton, 1839: 262). These measurements related to mental attributes such as self-esteem, firmness, hope, and benevolence, and the results were listed in a table that ran over six pages (ibid.: 263–8). Morton emphasized that he had not carried out the entire work from the phrenological perspective; he called himself a learner and preferred to let the reader judge the two approaches. Nonetheless, he agreed with the phrenological assumption that the brain was the organ of the mind and that different parts performed different functions. Also, the interpretations from phrenology corresponded with his ideas about the ‘mental character of the Indian’ (ibid.: n.p.).

These interpretations were those of the famous phrenologist Combe himself, who was also given a voice in the book at the beginning of the appendix (Combe in Morton, 1839: 269–91). Combe had to make his judgements on the ‘races’ before reading Morton's, so he ‘solicit[ed] the reader’ ‘not to condemn phrenology’ alone, should the conclusions from ethnology differ from ‘the phrenological inductions the reader will be enabled to draw by applying the rules now to be laid down’ (ibid.: 270). Combe himself concluded that the Caucasians were the most disposed to advance, and within them the ‘Teutonic race’ (ibid.: 271) much more so than the Celtic in France, Scotland, and Ireland. Asian peoples were not prone to reach a high grade of civilization. Neither were the inhabitants of Africa, where ‘no nation is at this day to be found whose institutions indicate even moderate civilization’ (ibid.); rather, their history constitutes ‘an unbroken scene of moral and intellectual desolation’ (ibid). Even so, some ‘African tribes’ (ibid.) were more advanced than those ‘tribes of native Americans, who have continued wandering savages’ (ibid.: 271–2). Combe judged that the ‘American race’ (ibid.: 272) had been and remained ‘primitive savages’ (ibid.), ‘in a state of the rudest barbarism’ (ibid.), with no inclination to learn from the Europeans who surrounded them. These national differences were not due to climate, Combe explained, since ‘races’ under similar climates differed, and also not to institutions, because the institutions came after the people who built them to their inclinations and purposes. Rather, the form (size and proportions) of the brain corresponded to dispositions and talents of individuals and nations.

Plate 71 (my Figure 8) showed a Swiss skull. Combe had included visual aids in the image in the form of lines, so that the reader might be able to observe the extraordinary mental vigour of the Swiss. Combe led the reader step by step through the diverse measurements with reference to the Swiss skull, adding further diagrams where necessary (Combe, in Morton, 1839: 280–1). This diagrammatic skull could then ‘serve as a standard by which to compare the skulls of the other tribes represented in this work’: ‘By comparing the dimensions of this Swiss skull as they appear to the eye in the plate, with those of the other skulls delineated in this work, all being drawn as large as nature, their relative proportions will become apparent’ (ibid.: 277, 278). The reader was thus once again instructed in how to read the realistic lithographs of skulls in the appendix, which did not contain any diagrammatic elements as diagrams.

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Figure 8.

‘Swiss’ (Morton, 1839: Plate 71).

My Figure 8 is therefore the same kind of image as those in Morton’s appendix (see my Figure 4), with the exception that a diagrammatic approach was indicated in the plate itself for didactic purposes. Phrenological measurements were different from ethnological ones, however, which becomes evident from the phrenological chart following the Swiss skull at the end of the book (my Figure 9). This chart should be used by the reader in combination with Combe's corresponding textual explanations to do a phrenological reading of the skulls himself, ‘to judge of the size of the different parts of the brain in relation to each other’ (Combe, in Morton, 1839: 278). The different regions of the skull were correlated to mental characteristics, measures of which for the skulls in general were given in the six-page-long table after Phillip's note mentioned above. In following Combe's phrenological interpretations of the realistic skull lithographs, the reader should verify that skull shapes of nations foretold whether they would be subjugated or even exterminated by another, or rather live in civilized freedom. Colonial histories with all their violence and exploitation were thereby naturalized (ibid.: 278–83).

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Figure 9.

‘Phrenological Chart’ (Morton, 1839: Plate 72).

In sum, Crania americana was a book that instructed in a new scientific approach, not in the method of comparative philology, history, and culture, but in reading osseous remains to enable the establishment of ‘human races’ – the ‘human races’ as (originally) distinct and nearly unchanging entities. This approach was not only diagrammatic, as Blumenbach's was, but decidedly metric. While Camper and Blumenbach had used the dynamics of diagrams to show the possibility of the human varieties’ development from one original type, Morton, in contrast, lay the basis of diagrammatic and metric techniques that froze their anatomies in a hierarchical arrangement. Seemingly, no longer part of the same genealogical family, they remained juxtaposed to each other like numbers in a table. Morton therefore instructed in the diagrammatic reading of images (see my discussion of Peirce at the beginning of this article) and made use of the ability of diagrams to set (aspects of) objects in rational relation to each other, not in order to demonstrate kinship, but to deny it.

However, the book also represents a point at which it was not yet decided whether this new approach would be the one of ethnology or phrenology. This, as Morton and Combe put it, would be decided by the readers and by time. Indeed, scholars let themselves be instructed, some preferred ethnology, some phrenology and others the combination, and they used Morton's movable images to spread the word and fight for the cause of one camp. Morton himself donated Crania americana to European institutions to promote his new science of ethnology. He sent important scholars, such as Alexander von Humboldt, a presentation copy. But the late 1830s saw the institutions in financial difficulties and the book did not sell well, despite Combe's efforts to launch it in the United States and Europe (Fabian, 2003). At the same time, Crania americana was received by institutions from the Asiatic Society of Bengal to the Société Ethnologique in Paris and the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries in Copenhagen, which indicates that the volume was understood to contribute to different branches of knowledge (Poskett, 2015; 2019: 78–114).

Into this fray entered Morton's second paper skulls collection, Crania aegyptiaca of 1844, which was possible due to the plundering of Egyptian sepulchral grottoes, catacombs, and pyramids largely organized by Gliddon, to whom Morton dedicated the volume. The oldest remains were estimated to be at least 2500 years old, which was within the range of the date given to the deluge at 3154 BC. On this basis, Morton approached the controversial questions of whether the ancient Egyptians were Jews, Arabs, Hindus, Nubians, or Black Africans, and whether civilization had started in Egypt or rather in Ethiopia. To ascertain the position of the ancient Egyptians in the ‘hierarchy of races’, Morton compared the mummies with the monuments, that is, the images and statues of the people, and with the skulls in his collection (1844: 1–3).

Morton concluded that the ancient Egyptians were Caucasian. Most importantly for his overarching argument, he ‘showed’ that in ancient Egypt the main ‘existing races’ of his day had already been present, and even in similar relations, meaning Black Africans as slaves and serfs and some Caucasians as human gods. And with civilizations as old as in Egypt and in the Americas, humankind and the human varieties would have to be referred even further back in time (Morton, 1844: 65–7). Morton's conclusions from the two skull atlases could be read as arguments in favour of polygenism. However, it seems that Morton openly stated only that the ‘main races’ were rather groups themselves containing ‘races’, all of which had originated independently and in the geographical region in which they now lived, and to which they were adapted, in the third edition of his catalogue of 1849 (Morton, 1849a: ix, note), where he also gave measures of facial angles and cranial capacities to once and for all establish the ‘hierarchy of races’. Even then, such clear statements were hidden in footnotes (see also Morton, 1849b: 223, note).

This seems to fit the observation by Paul Wolff Mitchell and Paul S. Michael that Morton never took clear sides in the slavery debate, whether in public or in private, and that he had friends and colleagues in both parties, including outspoken pro-slavery race supremacists as well as outspoken abolitionists. Even the man who funded the lithographs for Crania americana and the lithographer Collins were anti-slavery activists. Furthermore, while studying in Edinburgh, Morton became friends with the physician Thomas Hodgkin, who spoke out for the Native Americans. Nonetheless, Morton's close association with polygenist slaveholders and their use of his work for their cause seem to speak for themselves (Mitchell and Michael, 2019: 86–7). As we are going to see, after Morton's death, the Egyptologist Gliddon and the surgeon and Alabama plantation owner Nott placed Morton's ethnology squarely into a polygenist and racist frame.

Prichard's third edition of Researches (1836–47) and Nott's and Gliddon's Types of Mankind (1854)

James Poskett has shown in his research on the transatlantic network instantiated by Crania americana that Prichard communicated with Morton and was the first to display Morton's illustrations for Crania americana, which he received from Morton himself, in Europe at the 1839 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Birmingham. In return, Morton dedicated the foreign edition of Crania americana also to Prichard and presented the book as part of the same enquiry. Through Prichard, Morton was even made honorary member of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. Prichard hoped to secure financial and institutional support for what he, too, had recently come to call ethnology. He wanted a section for it in the Association and he received some money for printing and circulating a questionnaire for travellers and others to gather information on the ‘races of man’. In the questionnaire, Prichard referred to the importance of the skull to distinguish ‘races’. At the same time, he dismissed phrenology in his review of Crania americana, which competed with his ethnology for recognition (Poskett, 2015; 2019: 78–114; Prichard, 1841).

However, in view of Prichard's third edition of Researches, which was published in five volumes between 1836 and 1847, these observations are surprising. Prichard may have paid more serious attention to physical anthropology, especially craniology, than before, as Poskett (2015: 269) notes. The first volume of the third edition contained nine lithographic plates of skulls and a new chapter on national forms of skulls (Prichard, 1836–47: Vol. 1, 275–321). Nonetheless, the entire oeuvre was again one big argument for monogenism and the similarities and overlap between the human groups making up the single human species. Even in this Chapter 5 of the first volume, Prichard maintained that the so-called characteristics of the Black Africans were also found in the other varieties, and that they did not approach the ape any closer than other ‘races’. Still harbouring aesthetic concerns, he emphasized that there were many exceedingly beautiful Black Africans. Furthermore, he continued to reject the facial angle and the claim that there were constant differences in cranial capacity between ‘races’ – the very two measurements Morton most relied on.

Rather, Prichard followed Blumenbach in favouring the comparative holistic method; he recommended that the trained eye study different skulls that were aligned from all sides. This approach made him distinguish the symmetrical/oval skull forms – mostly found in Europeans and western Asians – from the narrow/elongated/prognathous forms – mostly found in Black Africans. In the plates showing his pyramidal, broad-, or square-faced skull form, typical of the Turanian variety (his alternative term for the Mongolian), he actually introduced the triangle between the zygomas (cheekbones) and the apex of the forehead (my Figure 10), ‘the lateral projection of the zygomas being so considerable, that if a line drawn from one to the other be taken as a base, this will form with the apex of the forehead a nearly triangular figure’ (Prichard, 1836–47: Vol. 1, 282). In sum, Prichard gave in to a diagrammatic anthropology rather than a metric one, and he actually instrumentalized Morton's Crania americana to support the notion that the Native Americans were of one stock, without discussing Morton's ‘polygenism’ (Prichard, 1836–47: Vol. 5).

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Figure 10.

‘Pyramidal Skulls’ (Prichard, 1836–47: Vol. 1, Figures 11 and 12).

It was in fact Morton's Crania aegyptiaca of 1844 that proved most amenable to the polygenist cause, first and foremost of Nott and Gliddon. After Morton's death in 1851, Nott and Gliddon gained access to his correspondence and writings, and they used it to produce the expensive, but highly successful volume Types of Mankind of 1854, with its 360 woodcuts, which they dedicated to their father of anthropology. At this moment, craniology became overtly political. In his introduction, Nott referred to the importance of the new science's findings for the denunciation of philanthropic arguments against slavery, around which a great controversy was going on at the time and which had, for example, been an issue in the annexation of Texas (Nott and Gliddon, 1854: 49–61).

In his contribution to the book, Nott meant to show that progress had come about only through Caucasians: Black Africans never approached civilization, and the monuments of Peru and Mexico were laughable compared to the achievements of Caucasians from the Egyptians up to modern Anglo-Americans. Nott claimed that Morton had proven how deficient ‘other races’, especially Black Africans, were with respect to brain size. He had also proven that in the 4000 years since the Egyptian monuments, Black Africans had remained the same and remained slaves. Progress, Nott declared, had largely been due to the war between ‘races’, to the ‘superior races’ who had migrated into the territories of the ‘stationary ones’ and seized their lands. So the replacement of ‘lower by higher races’ was a law inscribed by the creator. Nott also overtly attacked Prichard and his ‘false theory’ of monogenism, although he conceded the latter's great achievement in bringing into being ethnology. Since the knowledge from Egypt and Morton's work, however, all such views of human unity and equality had become obsolete and this was why, in Types of Mankind, they really cited only Morton. The ‘human races’ were separate creations; they in fact constituted separate species each of which had its own place of origin (Nott and Gliddon, 1854: 62–297, 372–465; for more on Nott, see Erickson, 1986; Keel, 2013).

However, Types of Mankind is a confusing and also rather confused volume. Although ostensibly building an edifice to Morton's physical anthropology and containing excerpts from Morton's manuscripts, it does not add much in this respect. If anything, it has more in common with Prichard's approach, for the long Parts 2 and 3 by Gliddon are an engagement in philology, and with different chronological traditions, and thus refer to a far older style (Nott and Gliddon, 1854: 466–716). Gliddon tried to figure out to which ethnicities and geographical regions the authors of the Old Testament had referred and arrived at the conclusion that Genesis 10 engaged only with Caucasian descent. The sons of Noah had all been Caucasian. The authors had known nothing of Ethiopia or sub-Saharan Africa, only about Egypt, and they had been unacquainted with Asia proper and the Americas. Finally, in accordance with the subtitle Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History, the great number of illustrations in the book were reproductions of art, with comparatively few such of skulls and skull series taken from other works like Morton's Crania aegyptiaca (see e.g. figures in ibid.: 147–51, 190).

Interestingly enough, towards the end of ‘his’ first part, Nott included the drawing of the types of mankind shown as my Figure 11 and added:

If, as we have reiterated times and again, the types depicted on the early monuments of Egypt have remained permanent through all subsequent ages – and if no causes are now visibly at work which can transform one type of man into another – they must be received, in Natural History, as primitive and specific. When, therefore, they are placed beside each other (e.g., as in Figs. 336–338) such types speak for themselves; and the anatomist has no more need of protracted comparisons to seize their diversities, than the school-boy to distinguish turkeys from peacocks or pecaries [sic] from Guinea-pigs. (Nott and Gliddon, 1854: 456)

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Figure 11.

Nott and Gliddon, 1854: Figures 336–8.

Thus, in the end, Nott betrayed his intuitive approach to the question of ‘human races or species’, a deep-rooted knowledge, or we would say prejudice, about their relative worth and appropriate station in life – no need for elaborate measurements. Morton had transformed Blumenbach's horizontally overlapping skull characters of the five human varieties into static numbers diagrammatically separated in hierarchical order. Nott's inert series from the Caucasian skull down to the Black African skull, too, counteracted Camper's and Blumenbach's dynamic and experimental diagrammatics of morphing types into each other: Nott explicitly declared it impossible that the ‘races’ had formed one out of the other.

Finis: A diagrammatics of race

In the above I have looked at a time in the history of anthropology when different scholars vied for the power of definition of the new field. While there is a tendency to subsume Camper, Blumenbach, and Morton under the physical anthropological approach, the focus on diagrammatics revealed that not only their conclusions but also their approaches differed. Morton wanted to stand on the shoulders of the first giants, but he felt he had to render Camper's facial angle objective by measuring it with a precision instrument and he made Blumenbach's general diagrammatic reading of skulls metric. It seems to have been this use of instruments and measurements that began to freeze the dynamics of diagrammatically comparing and morphing proportions and relations of parts in (copper-plated) skulls. The practice of ascribing a particular measure to a line, an arche, a volume, and an angle initiated a process that eventually literally set them in stone. In Morton's work, the measures acquired a life of their own, formed the basis of means, and translated human groups into static numbers in hierarchical tables. Morton compromised with Prichard, but in his work, the diagrammatic approach was significantly transformed.

As outlined for diagrams more generally in the introduction, in the case of Morton and the phrenologists who contributed to Crania americana, even traditional ethnographic portraits and certainly realistic lithographs of skulls without any geometric or numeric elements had to be read diagrammatically. However, the diagrams of Morton, Nott, and Gliddon worked differently from those of Camper, Blumenbach, and Prichard and for opposed theories that were associated with equally opposed political views. Diagrams were weapons in the battle over the ‘real anthropology’, and they forged or denied degrees of relatedness between human groups at the time of Native American removal and (conflict over) slavery. Through Morton, Camper's facial angle and Blumenbach's horizontal and holistic comparison of five cranial varieties were turned into instruments in the creation of clearly demarcated and stable ‘races’ along an axis of increasing intelligence and humanness, qualities that were thus reduced to measures in tables. Morton's work was a crucial step in the direction of establishing a truly racial diagrammatics for a genuinely racial anthropology – a diagrammatics that instructed in denying rather than establishing relations.

At the same time, also Camper and Blumenbach collected skulls and the anthropologists treated in this article further objectified the sampled people and their communities by studying their remains, by reproducing and distributing these remains, and not least through turning them into diagrams – immutable but mobile inscriptions that reduced human beings to readable and measurable angles, proportions, and volumes. In the mid 1960s, Morton's skull collection was donated to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In the aftermath of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, over 100 skulls were restituted to Native American nations. In 2020, in the current movement of the decolonization of museums and their collections, Morton's ‘Golgotha’, until then held in open storage, has definitely been closed to the public. This has further sparked discussion about ethical legacies, including in a participant observation series in History of Anthropology Review, an excerpt from which I would like to use to end this article:

The descendant community of the Morton Collection can be said to be all those whose ancestors suffered under Western colonialism, ‘specimen’ collecting practices, and the brutality of life in the industrializing United States and elsewhere. The one thing the people in the collection had in common was their or their community's disempowerment. (Kakaliouras, 2021)