Skulls were the ultimate hard ‘facts' upon which Enlightenment natural historians built a racist pseudo-science—a hierarchy of races in which Caucasians appeared at the top and black people at the bottom.  In this talk I shall examine the practice of collecting the skulls of indigenous peoples as a consequence of an inherent feature of Linnean and post-Linnean Natural History—the drive to gain scientific power by building a universal classification of phenomena organised by agreed procedures of mensuration.   I shall investigate how European headhunting went hand-in-hand with British colonialism, outline the racial theories constructed upon this ‘evidence’ and critique the biased methods by which the skulls were interpreted as revealing indigenous people’s inferiority.   I shall focus on the headhunting network that centred on Sir Joseph Banks and linked two of the foremost instructors in Natural History — the Gottingen professor J. F. Blumenbach, whose lectures and manuals educated generations of Natural Historians, and the London anatomist John Hunter, whose lectures and demonstrations placed native peoples nearer to the apes than Europeans. 

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se