Walking the Ancestors Home: On the Road to an Ethical Human Biology

Abstract

I first worked at the smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in 1968. It was a project I designed on the dental pathology and masticatory musculature of 50 Hawiku and suruque skulls, under the kind supervision of biological anthropologist Donald Ortner. I was 15 years old and attending Larry angel’s and Lucille st. Hoyme’s summer paleopathology seminar at the museum. One could still smell smoke and mold wafting from riot-torn 7th street after Martin Luther King’s murder only a couple of months before. I was the only african american and the youngest person in the seminar, a situation to which I had already become accustomed as a member of the Maryland archaeological society.1