Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology
Oxford University Press, 2023
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.
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Cover image: Yachaya, La Sabiduria (Relief of paint, textiles, glass, wood, feathers, plaster, straw, wire mesh and objects over canvas, 1998-2013) is a mixed-media sculpture by the Cuban-German artist Nancy Torres, one of a series of ersatz Andean mummy bundles Torres created and opened as commentary on European colonialism’s looting of American sovereignty and Indigenous ancestors. Collection of the artist.
Excerpt
In older times—before Christians came to the empire that the Incas called Tawantinsuyu, before they called that empire Peru—men and women healed the living with knives, and they cured the dead with air. They hadn’t always done so. The Yauyo people remembered a time when the dead “came back to life on the fifth day exactly” and were welcomed by their people with prepared food and drinks. “Now I’ll never die again forever!” they would say. This was not a good thing. The people so “swiftly increased in number” that they hungrily crowded the land. One day a man returned to life a day late and his wife, enraged, threw a corncob at him. “Why are you so damn lazy?” she shouted. “Other people never let us down by failing to come. But you, yesterday, you made us wait for you, and all for nothing.” The man’s spirit flew back to their ancestral source, never to return. Ever after, the dead made way for the living, yielding their present fertility, and the living, in grateful grief, devised new ways to keep their loved ones close.
Here is a story about them.
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Advance Reviews
"To the Incas, mummies were ever-living ancestors. After colonial clergy hauled them from their caves, law exposed them to looting. Christopher Heaney opens a startling postcolonial chapter in this story. Victorian-age antiquarians traded in 'Inca' bones, believing skulls would reveal Amerindia's 'civilized' or 'primitive' racial nature. Relentlessly, astutely, Heaney tracks our scientific forebears through their bone stampede―and leaves us standing uneasy in our own museums." -- Frank Salomon, University of Wisconsin
"Heaney deftly analyzes Native Andean, Peruvian, and US and European knowledge-making and the relations among them, showing that to understand ideas about race in the United States and Europe we must consider the experiences of US and European scientists abroad. Foreigners who collected Andean bones and skulls learned from local scientists, and their collecting was indebted as well to Andeans' own ways of dealing with dead ancestors." -- Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, author of The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950
"An outstanding, clear, and insightful examination of the transnational life of Andean mummies that have fascinated scholars for years and continue to do so to this day." -- Marcos Cueto, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro
"Archaeology is, of course, always about the past, but only after translation into the present tense. In Christopher Heaney's masterful telling, the sun-bleached mummified Incan crania on the Smithsonian's infamous Skull Wall become active agents in their own history. Their conflicted finders-keepers' legacy bridges the imperialist Golden Age of museum skull-collecting to link modern Peruvian institutions sometimes reclaiming some of those functions for themselves―all underscoring ongoing international debates over what should be done with the dead." -- David Hurst Thomas, author of Skull Wars