The Logic of Skull Writing

Abstract

In this essay I discuss the significance of theories and classifications that appear in the material and graphic form of race and place name inscriptions on human skulls. I argue that human skulls themselves provided a site for the inscription of raciological thought, a privileged location for abbreviating broader conceptions of differences and distributions of ‘human races’. I will draw on the history of race science in 19th-century Europe to explore how and why certain race and place names were inscribed onto skulls, and the effect of this form of inscription on the shaping of theories in the racial sciences during this period. The article especially considers the work of the French anthropologists Armand de Quatrefages and Ernest-Théodore Hamy, who systematically wrote inscriptions on the skulls they were studying in the context of Crania Ethnica, arguably the most ambitious project of global racial craniology undertaken in the late 19th century.