Bioarchaeological Approaches to Investigating Supply, Demand and Authenticity in the Colonial-era Human Remains Trade

Summary

During the Colonial era, numerous "trophy skulls" from various Indo-Pacific cultures entered Western museum and private collections, and continue to be sought as "authentic" collector’s items. However, very little bioarchaeological research exists investigating their provenience, intra-cultural variation in decoration and manufacture, and how examples created for Indigenous ritual use differed from those created for sale to Colonial explorers at the beginning of ‘curio’ trade, let alone what characterizes a modern forgery. Using c. late 1800s-early 1900s Dayak and Asmat "trophy skulls" as a case study of the global trade in the ¨exotic¨ dead, this presentation will discuss preliminary results from in-progress research on numerous museum collections. The systematic database created will allow for a much more detailed examination of variation in source, manufacture and use. Combining morphological, biodistance (metric and non-metric), and biogeochemical (strontium and lead isotope ratio) data analysed at the individual and population level, key findings to date will be discussed in the context of how a multi-faceted bioarchaeological approach can improve our ability to understand the Colonial-era roots of modern markets.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18821