The History of Collecting and Collections

The History of Collecting and Collections

Unit authors: Carlina de la Cova, Professor of Anthropology, University of South Carolina; April K Sievert, Emerita Faculty of Anthropology, Indiana University

Description

The goal of this unit is to provide a history of collecting within the realm of anthropology. Collecting materials from Indigenous or other people to fill museums and learn about the human body were colonial traditions that took stock of the diverse and exotic peoples and things encountered during the colonial process. This unit looks at the development of collections in historic contexts, and provides resources to unpack this complex history to see where collecting rationales originated. Differences in worldviews promote collecting for different reasons. While Indigenous worldviews might include keeping or placing cultural or biological materials in order to remember ancestors, Western and scientific worldviews supported collection for study and education. Materialist worldviews underlie collections created to enhance wealth. Cultural competition among colonial powers advocated collecting to enhance national wealth and prestige—to fill museums. Some collections derived from war, disaster, genocide, and the taking of things from graves. These different reasons for collecting resulted in thousands of public and private collections across the globe.

This unit could easily be used in an upper division undergraduate or any graduate level course to introduce students to the origins and complex ethical issues associated with the process of collecting.

Learning Goals

  • Evaluate some of the ethical implications in regard to working with current anatomical collections
  • Appreciate how the scientific propensity to classify reified racial categories based on perceived biological difference
  • Become aware of the problems inherent in a view that treats cultural objects as private possessions.
  • Appreciate archaeological materials as materials held in trust based on land relationships.

Types of Collections

Art, Anthropology and Archaeology collections

Art collectors might want to collect cultural materials for monetary gain on one hand, or to educate about world culture. Anthropology collections include materials taken from global contexts to use in studying people’s cultures, and archaeology supported collecting from past contexts in order to understand what came before. Many anthropologists and collectors thought that they needed to save the remnants of Indigenous people before they vanished.

Biological collections

Biological anthropology, unlike the other sub-disciplines of anthropology, originated in medicine and anatomy. Thus, early biological anthropologists were either anatomists or physicians, or trained as such. Many amassed anatomical collections that comprised complete skeletons, skulls, or pathological elements of individuals that were viewed as exotic, outside of the Western defined norm, or extraordinarily pathological. The collecting of human remains grew in popularity during the 18th century, especially amongst surgeons and anatomists, who were eager to build anatomical closets that included rare pathologies and exotic individuals. Many, such as the Scots Surgeon John Hunter, considered the father of modern surgery, resorted to grave robbing strangers and former patients to obtain desired diseased elements. As the 18th century transitioned to the 19th, many of these anatomical practices were transferred from Britain to the United States. Grave robbing and nonconsensual dissection of the socially and culturally marginalized, including African Americans, Native Americans, indigents, and the mentally ill became commonplace. This practice would continue into the 20th century and would be supported by anatomical legislation, such as the Anatomy Act of 1932, which legalized nonconsensual dissection of the poor and unclaimed dead. The development of forensic science revealed a need for acquiring American anatomical collections to use for comparative purposes. Early biological anthropologists were keen to amass diverse skulls and to address “race”.

Reading Lists

Background

de la Cova, Carlina. 2019. Marginalized bodies and the construction of the Robert J. Terry anatomical collection: a promised land lost. In Bioarchaeology of marginalized people, edited by Madeleine L. Mant, Alyson Jaagumagi Holland, Cambridge MA, Academic Press. pp.

Kelly, Alan D., Angela J. Neller, and Carleton Shield Chief Gover. 2022. Some Indigenous perspectives on artifact collecting and archaeologist-collector collaboration. Advances in Archaeological Practice 10(1):10–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2021.39

Muller J.L., K, E. Pearlstein, Carlina de la Cova. 2016. Dissection and Documented Skeletal Collections. In: Nystrom, K. (Ed.), The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the United States. Springer, New York, pp. 185-201.

Nystrom K. 2014. The bioarchaeology of structural violence and dissection in the 19th-century United States. American Anthropologist 116:765-779

Redman, Samuel. 2016. When museums rushed to fill their rooms with bones. Smithsonian Magazine.

Watkins R. J., and J. L. Muller. 2015. Repositioning the Cobb Human Archive: the merger of a skeletal collection and its texts. American Journal of Human Biology 27(1):41-50. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.22650

Winkelmann A. and F. H. Güldner. 2004. Cadavers as teachers: the dissecting room experience in Thailand. British Medical Journal. 329:1455–1457. doi: 10.1136/bmj.329.7480.1455

 

Suggested book readings

The instructor is free to choose one or more of these books. For a graduate level course, more than one book could be selected, in addition to the above readings. 

 

Colwell, C. 2017. Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. d 

Fabian, A. 2010. The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Redman, S. J. 2016. Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 

Sleeper-Smith, Susan 2009. Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. 

Thomas, D. H. 2001. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books.  

Activity and Assessment Ideas

Ask students to read the following short piece about Indigenous Indigenous artifacts from the Open Library Book: Our Stories: First Peoples in Canada. Then ask each student or pairs of students to discover an incident reported in either academic or more popular media about a cultural object (or objects) from a museum collection presented or used in a way that reinforced obsolete, hierarchical, or racist views about people. This exercise helps students perceive the implicit biases in museum collections and historical displays.

Ask each student to go to the website of a museum. Choose anthropological, natural history, history, art, or tribal museum, and explore the collections online to the extent possible, looking for where the museum’s collections came from and how. Each student then introduces their museum to the rest of the class. Discuss this question: In what kinds of museums are you most likely to find collections of American Indigenous materials? What kinds of people donated Indigenous materials to museums?  

It is nearly impossible to estimate how much Indigenous material from the United States exists in private collections across the nation. Sometimes, these materials are identified as part of estates, and may include both cultural objects and human remains. The collection amassed by an Indiana man provides a case in point. Read about the Don Miller case in Sapiens, in an article that tells the story of an Indiana resident who amassed a huge collection and finally turned himself in to the FBI as his health failed. For discussion: What was the rationale or worldview that prompted Don Miller to collect these materials and bring them into his residential compound in Indiana? What ultimately happened to these materials? 

In the 1960s, the U.S. Congress passed legislation to protect or collect information from archaeological sites that would be impacted by development (such as by highway or dam construction). Archaeologists excavated thousands of burials and millions of artifacts from sites, resulting in enormous collections of things and people in museums. Areas with more extensive development along with high Indigenous population density included the American Midwest, and yielded some of the largest numbers of artifacts taken from sites. So, archaeological materials originate in theland. Meaning comes from provenience—the location and association that artifacts have in their original archaeological context. In the U. S. land can be owned. The special relationship that artifacts have with land has been codified for federal properties, and federal guidelines for archaeological materials make it clear that curators of federal artifacts hold these materials in trust by virtue of the relationship with that land. Virtually any archaeological materials, provided origin is known remain tied to that land. Ask students to read throughNational Park Service curation regulations governing archaeological materials and look for the wording that links materials to land. Other materials lie on what is now private or municipal land. In many cases, Indigenous people never ceded these lands, retain ties to aboriginal homelands, and realize that any artifacts placed prior to the settlement by Europeans were made by them. Discuss this question: how can non-Indigenous institutions justify ownership of Indigenous materials taken from the land? 

In 2016, the Smithsonian Magazine published an article about an Indigenous man who was shot in 1864 in North Dakota, but whose body ended up in Washington D.C. Ask students to read this article and try to reconstruct the military doctor’s rationale for examining the individual and then sending him to the Nation’s capital. What did these actions accomplish? How might they have been rationalized by the Army Medical Museum? by the Smithsonian Institution? 

Discussions

Instructors are free to develop their own questions or discussion topics. Some have been provided below: 

  • What drove anatomists to collect anatomical elements? Was this often done legally or in an ethically appropriate manner by today’s standards? 
  • Why did early biological anthropologists collect skulls? What were they trying to prove? Is this research considered scientific today? Is it considered ethical? 
  • Whose remains were often targeted by 19th and early 20th century anatomists and biological anthropologists? Why? What were their chief motivations? 
  • In regard to American anatomical collections, how were they amassed? What legislation was involved? Is this legislation ethical today? 
  • How does dissection differ in the East versus the West? How are the dissected viewed in the East? How do dissection laws in the West view paupers?  
  • Given that some of these collections are still used by biological anthropologists, how can future scholars work with these samples in an ethically and inclusively appropriate way? 

Picture Credits/Links; References; Acknowledgments

Dance, Amber. The FBI’s Repatriation of Stolen Heritage.Sapiens. 24 June 2020. 

Our Stories: First Peoples of Canada, Centennial College. Open Library. 

Redman, Samuel. 2016. When museums rushed to fill their rooms with bones.Smithsonian Magazine.