Hall 25: Peruvian Anthropology and the Smithsonian's First Hall of Physical Anthropology, 1900–65

In 1965, visitors to the first Hall of Physical Anthropology in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History found themselves in a space of unexpectedly Andean science and ancestry. At the exhibit’s entrance they were greeted by a “Skull Wall” whose 160 crania of “Peruvian Indians” purported to visualize how the “world’s human population has literally ‘exploded’ in historic times.” Artificially “deformed” pre-Hispanic Andean crania illustrated the cultural modification of the human body, as well as the mutability of human “types,” the word the exhibit adopted in place of “race.” Most dramatically, visitors met a seated and mummified Andean woman and a massive painting depicting an Inca trepanation—a surgery to address crania trauma—at Machu Picchu. Throughout, Andean subjects were everywhere and nowhere at once, representing Physical Anthropology’s larger claims while separating them from any history of their collection. As an archaeology of Hall 25, this paper details that history, outlining the century-long trajectories of anthropology and racial sciences that produced it. It follows the mummy back to the Peruvian national museum projects that embodied national science and sovereignty in claimed “Inca” ancestors. It follows the skulls back to Samuel George Morton and the Americanist anthropology that took “ancient Peruvians” as their historically racialized set. And it follows the trepanations back to a Peruvian anthropology that tried to insist upon healing as a more important object of knowledge than race. In doing so, this paper considers how North American field formations concealed long trails of Indigenous and Latin American knowledges whose often-imperial collection sharpened the formation of local scientific identities and practices. Last, it addresses the remains of this exhibit, disassembled in the early 1980s but otherwise still in the Smithsonian today. How does approaching it from a context of Peruvian history destabilize expectations of its future geography?