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In a recent article, Timothy Neale and Emma Kowal persuasively suggest that current decolonisation initiatives in post-settler societies can usefully be understood as situated within a spectrum between what they describe as ‘epistemic’ and ‘reparative’ attributes and qualities in how they go about the business of coming to terms with the still pervasive and still to be overcome psychic and material legacies of settler colonialism.

Samuel Morton’s researches were in fact the mature expression of a racial turn that began no within a decade after Camper’s death in 1789. It owed much to the adoption of his ‘facial angle’ by early practitioners of the unorthodox cerebral science of phrenology.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, anatomists who shared Blumenbach’s curiosity about human variation were supplementing his procedure with a geometric technique devised by his Dutch colleague, Peter Camper. A talented artist as well as comparative anatomist, Camper had found that the shape of human heads and skulls could be accurately drawn by imagining a base line running from the front of the incisor teeth to the most prominent part of the forehead.

The history of anthropological interest in human cranial morphology can be told in terms of two concurrent, often complementary - but sometimes conflictual - traditions of identifying and interpreting what were presumed to be varietal characteristics in human populations.