Thinking About Craniometry- a Tale of Two Traditions

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. One invested trust in the use of geometrical techniques; the other privileged ocular expertise over instrumentation; while both, to varying degrees, made explanatory recourse to the concept of ideal types.

Both traditions had their origin in Enlightenment naturalism, and were to claim intellectual descent from one of Europe’s most influential naturalists: the Göttingen comparative anatomist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). Blumenbach formulated and conceptually refined over the course of his long career, an explanation of human diversity blending a vitalist account of life and its reproduction in living organisms with an easy environmental determinism. His thinking reflected the influence of the French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), whose voluminous and widely celebrated writings on natural history were animated by the conviction that all species of living being animal and plant species were susceptible to branching into varietal types, exhibiting differences in bodily form and behavioural repertoires, as a consequence of environmentally induced ‘degeneration’ from one original, divinely created ancestral pair. In the case of humankind, degenerative embranchment had progressively occurred as largely endogamous populations migrated, settled and reproduced in different parts of the world with unlike climates and food sources. Blumenbach’s contribution to this account of human natural history was to hypothesise that the emergence of varietal typicalities suggested the existence within the human bodily economy of vital faculties of reception and reaction to external stimuli, which while sustaining health and successful sexual reproduction were also capable of causing the modification of bodily structures, physiological processes and psychology (Blumenbach 1795).

Blumenbach further believed that the most promising practical means of documenting the nature and history of variation in our species was by comparing the skulls of individuals whose ancestry comprised reproductive partners indigenous to their part of the world. He did so assuming, as did several generations of scientific and intellectual contemporaries who shared his curiosity about physical diversity and (erroneously supposed) varietally distinctive attributes and qualities of mind, that the bones comprising the face and skull were structures highly susceptible to modification by natural forces and human agency. The most obvious and convincing truth of this in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century eyes was the traditional cultural practice within several societies beyond Europe of binding the heads of children.

As Blumenbach saw it, the challenge for comparative anatomists in particular was to use their privileged knowledge of and access to human bodily remains to comparatively investigate human skull shape, in order to determine, in the words of his older colleague and sometime mentor, Peter Camper (1722-1789), ‘…what is merely accidental; what is personal and to be ascribed to the diversities observable in individuals, from that which is national and characteristic of a particular people.’ (Camper 1794, p. 571). The rewards, however, were significant. Reconstructing the ‘degenerative’ embranchment of our species was seen to promise the recovery of knowledge of our deep past beyond that in Scripture and other documents of great antiquity. It also suggested the possibility of gaining greater understanding of the causes of health and disease by comparing the effects of degeneration in different largely endogamous populations - a belief, incidentally, publicly championed by prominent scientific opponents of repatriation in response to Indigenous campaigning for the return of the bodily remains of their Ancestors during the 1980s and 1990s.