“Dear sir,
A long time has passed I, then a stranger on this side of the Atlantic, received so much kindness from you which I promised to return to you by compensating to you the geological and observations which I hoped to send West.”
At the time of George Engelmann’s letter to Dr. Samuel George Morton, dated July 28, 1837, the two had known each other for but five years (likely introduced by their mutual friend Thomas Nuttall). Engelmann was a respected botanist and doctor, speaking excitedly in his accent about the botanical wildlife of the American West to any who would listen. Morton was, at the time, a published author and burgeoning crania collector. Their professional friendship would span the remaining decades of Morton’s life and be immortalized in various preserved letters and 12 human skulls that reside in the Morton Crania Collection. Scanning Engelmann’s Wiki and other preliminary sources carries no mention of his contribution to one of the most notorious and revered anatomical collections. Diving into the Open Research Scan Archive (ORSA) owned and maintained by the University of Pennsylvania, however, does one stumble upon Engelmann’s contribution, as well as many others including John James Audubon, Clarence Bloomfield Moore, and Dr. Joseph Leidy.
“The original Morton collection is composed of approximately 1200 human crania (most without mandibles) and which were sent to Morton by others who collected them from both archaeological and recent contexts (1820’s to 1851),” the ORSA website reads. While some of the archival material records the circumstances under which these individuals were able to obtain human skulls, the record falls short of explaining why and how.
“But it’s not supposed to,” one might counter, correctly explaining the nature of anatomical collection and its intention. For while anatomical collections grew alongside power and inequity, one might ascertain that its proponents were not altogether interested in confronting or challenging that. The purpose of the collection was to prove the existence of separate species, according to Morton, thus any sort of context surrounding the skulls whereabouts and the collector’s presence was obsolete.
Visualizing the archival data in a new way offers an opportunity to examine the gaps in the archive. How does placing points onto a map offer ways to show relationships between data? Looking at who collected where in what country or region raises further research questions about the particular events going on in that region or city influenced collectors. It raises questions on authority and influence and suggests a whole unrecorded network of aid that made such vast collections possible. It also asks: what would an online repository of the skulls look like if it was dependent on cranial scans? What does a human centered archive look like with this material, if at all?
The vast amount of collecting largely accompanied colonial efforts. Transposing hard data to tools like Google Maps is an insightful way to show the passage of time – particularly in the naming of locations where crania were obtained. Going from “Sandwich Islands” to “Hawai’i” not only shows the temporal scale of Morton’s collection but allows us to critically engage the disruptors. Placing these individuals on a map perhaps make visceral the obvious connections between colonialism, violence, and the individual collecting that makes up so many Western anatomical collections. Viewing the plots on a map, vast as it is, allow us to gain new recognition with the individual complicity in such violence and offers us a way to look beyond the name on the collection. While it is not necessarily a final product, it is a bridge to deeper projects that allow us to visualize the collection’s context.
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