Article ID: CBB984096390

Skull Triangles: Flinders Petrie, Race Theory and Biometrics (2016)

unapi

In 1902 the Egyptian archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie published a graph of triangles indicating skull size, shape and ‘racial ability’. In the same year a paper on Naqada crania that had been excavated by Petrie’s team in 1894–5 was published in the anthropometric journal Biometrika, which played an important part in the methodology of cranial measuring in biometrics and helped establish Karl Pearson’s biometric laboratory at University College London. Cicely D. Fawcett’s and Alice Lee’s paper on the variation and correlation of the human skull used the Naqada crania to argue for a controlled system of measurement of skull size and shape to establish homogeneous racial groups, patterns of migration and evolutionary development. Their work was more cautious in tone and judgement than Petrie’s pronouncements on the racial origins of the early Egyptians but both the graph and the paper illustrated shared ideas about skull size, shape, statistical analysis and the ability and need to define ‘race’. This paper explores how Petrie shared his archaeological work with a broad number of people and disciplines, including statistics and biometrics, and the context for measuring and analysing skulls at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Authors & Contributors
McMahon, Richard
Clever, Iris
Vigil-Fowler, Margaret
Philip L. Kohl
Sukumar P. Desai
Livio Sansone
Concepts
Anthropology
Racism
Science and race
Archaeology
Professions and professionalization
Science and politics
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
Places
Germany
United States
South America
Middle and Near East
Mesoamerica
Yugoslavia
Institutions
Columbia University
Cambridge University
American Museum of Natural History, New York
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