Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology

by Christopher Heaney

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Archaeology

384 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2023

Reviews

[Maura Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Museums around the world face a reckoning: how should they deal with their collections of human remains? Largely amassed by archeologists and anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries, these remains now speak to an array of practices no longer considered either scientific or ethical: grave-robbing, phrenology, and putting the dead on display. Museum exhibits once built around mummified bodies and skulls—as well as many other cultural artifacts also taken without permission or fair compensation—are now being reconsidered and revamped, promoting a discussion of how to redress the wrongs of the past and educate into the future.

The largest percentage of human remains in museum collections have come from Peru, often harvested by explorers with the permission and assistance of local guides. In Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology, historian Christopher Heaney explains how those remains came to reside in foreign lands. Tracing five hundred years of foreign encounters with Inca mummies, Heaney considers what those preserved bodies have represented and the power they have held over the centuries.

These bodies induced great anxiety in Euro-American observers: skulls showing evidence of sophisticated proto-neurosurgery and carefully preserved remains both indicated that Andean civilizations possessed technological skills equal to or surpassing those of the foreigners’ own ancestors. Unwilling to accept facts that would upend their understanding of racial hierarchies, American and European scholars created an entire field of research—anthropology—devoted to proving the veracity of their beliefs. Peruvian scholars who attempted to contest these views, most notably Julio César Tello, found themselves engaged in protracted academic battles.

Empires of the Dead is timely reading for anyone interested in the current debates about ethics in museum work and how to approach objects that have not been given freely. Heaney does a remarkable job of covering large swaths of history (I realized that my knowledge of premodern Peru is quite slim) and the intellectual debates that Peruvian remains have sparked across place and time.

[Nate Schweber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vivid characters and their worldviews clash in “Empires of the Dead,” Christopher Heaney’s epic history of Peru and its foundational place in modern anthropology. In the 1500s Atahualpa, the last ruler of the Inca Empire, faced Pizarro, the conquistador who in Heaney’s telling had no great victory. Come the 1900s, their dynamic repeated in the scientific pitting of eugenicist Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian against the brilliant, complicated, and pioneering Peruvian anthropologist Julio Cesar Tello (whose birthday, April 11, is now celebrated as Anthropologists Day in his home country). Always at stake were thousands of Andean dead and, by extension, their millions of descendants. Did “the unbreathing” tell a story that European brutality was natural and inevitable? Or did these “agential beings,” revered for controlling the rains, actually reveal that ancient South Americans were so advanced they performed brain surgeries with success ratios that European doctors took centuries to match? Author Heaney (full disclosure: a friend & former colleague) returns to Peru and the theme of anthropological ethics that he first explored in his adventurous 2010 Hiram Bingham biography, “Cradle of Gold.” With impressive historical command, Heaney argues that these “mummies’” greatest contribution to our time should be empathy.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite an accomplishment ... incredible research and thoughtful argumentation, accomplished with a great deal of grace. The author is an old friend, and I'm very glad I read this -- it was definitely more academic than most of what I read, and I lacked a great deal of the underlying knowledge about anthropology that would have helped me contextualize the story, but I still was able to follow the compelling narratives presented in the book.
I learned so much about Andean culture and the history of anthropology and Peru. Excellent.

[Algirdas Kraunaitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened as an audiobook - might be better as a reading, rather than listening, experience (the narration was fine, but it is history/information dense sometimes). Parts/chapters about how Peruvian/Inca research developed american anthropology (and all the racism that brought in) are of particular interest.

[Alejandro Neyra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating history on Peruvian archeology and more...

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book by one of the world's leading historians of anthropology and archaeology. Empires of the Dead is a panoramic and dazzling portrait of the afterlives of Peruvian mummies. Heaney writes brilliantly and with great sensitivity and empathy about both the sacral and spiritual significance of these mummies within Andean culture, and the ways that they became refigured as scientific objects in the 19th and 20th centuries. It's truly a remarkable achievement, spanning several centuries and continents with a narrative that is both fun to read and deeply researched.

I was so glad to have a chance to read an advance copy. I strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in the history of archaeology, anthropology, or the indigenous cultures of the Andes.