Tracing Racial Illustrations in Historic Cranial Collections, 1790-1850: Camper, Blumenbach, and Morton

In comparative racial craniology, the foundation of physical anthropology, authoritative knowledge about racialized bodily difference was produced through intertwined projects of quantifying and visualizing cranial morphology. While craniological quantification has received significant critical attention, visualization has received comparatively less. However, the woodcuts, engravings, and lithographs portraying “racial” skulls prior to the common use of photography in the 1880s were essential in defining and disseminating typological racial templates. Here, I focus on the human cranial collections of Petrus Camper (1722-1799) in Groningen, the Netherlands, of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) in Göttingen, Germany, and of Samuel George Morton (1799-1852) in Philadelphia, U.S.A., and their associated publications. These three were arguably the most influential craniologists prior to 1850. Comparison of their works is instructive, as each explicitly attempted to improve upon prior methods of visualization, each used different methods for composing illustrations, and each claimed to accurately depict skulls. Comparisons possible by analyzing metrically precise 3D digital models of skulls depicted in these illustrations against the illustrations themselves reveal dramatically different visual practices in an apparently similar genre of craniological atlas. Remarkably, the most “mechanically objective” illustrations were Camper’s, which were chronologically the first. Blumenbach’s illustrations display an idealized, Romantic aesthetic, while Morton’s illustrations are so metrically distorted he could not have produced them with the device he claimed to have used. Taking the materiality of cranial collections seriously as an historical archive can disclose heretofore obscured distortions and transformations in the scientific construction of bodily difference.