The vanishing Black Indian: Revisiting craniometry and historic collections

The disposability and inclusion of Brown bodies

While there has been increased awareness of the ethics of curation, research, and teaching with human skeletal remains, there has been little recognition of the millions of skeletal remains from South Asia that were harvested illegally and/or unethically for educational institutions globally for over a century. This article gives a contextualization of the unique history and nature of anatomical teaching collections, and why they are an important locus for a decolonized and antiracist biological anthropology. I present the historical background of how the exportation and commodification of Indian bodies came to dominate the global bone trade. I also discuss how historical necropolitics explicitly erased the identity and objectified South Asian people made into study skeletons, and the way our current practices continue to uphold colonial violence. Finally, I discuss what we might do with these historical collections and the ways that inclusion of Brown voices is critical to ethical practice.

Books, bones and bodies: The relevance of the history of anatomy in Nazi Germany for medical education today

The history of anatomy in Nazi Germany highlights the consequences to humanity when the destructive potentials immanent to all science and medicine are enabled by an anti-democratic, totalitarian regime. Anatomy presents an example of ethical transgressions by scientists and health care professionals that were amplified in the criminal political climate of the Nazi regime. This can happen anywhere, as science is never apolitical. This article gives a short account of anatomy in Nazi Germany, which is followed by an outline of the tangible and intangible legacies from this history, to then discuss implications for anatomy education today. While Jewish and politically dissident anatomists were forced out of their positions and country by the Nazi regime, the majority of the remaining anatomists joined the Nazi party and used bodies of Nazi victims for education and research. Some anatomists even performed deadly human experiments. Patterns and legacies that emerge from this history can be traced into the present and concern research ethics in general and anatomical body procurement specifically. They shed light on current practices and controversies in the anatomical sciences, including anthropology. It will be argued here that the history of anatomy in Nazi Germany can inform current anatomy education in a concept of anatomy as the first "clinical discipline." By integrating insights from the history of anatomy into the learning process, anatomy education can model an approach to medicine that includes a full appreciation of the shared humanity of medical practitioners and patients.

Ethics of Archaeology

Ethics has abandoned its niche status to become a shared concern across archaeology. The appraisal of the sociopolitical context of archaeological practice since the 1980s has forced the discipline to take issue with the expanding array of ethical questions raised by work with living people. Thus, the original foci on the archaeological record, conservation, and scientific standards, which are behind most deontological codes, have been largely transcended and even challenged. In this line, this review emphasizes philosophical and political aspects over practical ones and examines some pressing ethical concerns that are related to archaeology's greater involvement with contemporary communities, political controversies, and social demands; discussion includes ethical responses to the indigenous critique, the benefits and risks of applied archaeology, the responsibilities of archaeologists in conflict and postconflict situations, vernacular digging and collecting practices, development-led archaeology, heritage, and the ethics of things.

Revisiting historical Khoe-San skeletal remains in European collections: A search for identity through craniometric analysis

As the identity of a large number of Khoe-San skeletal material in European collections recently came into question during its documentation, a re-evaluation of the remains by employing a non-invasive method such as craniometrics was done to investigate the biological affinity. For this purpose, gene flow and population diversity present within the group, as well as between the study sample (N=63) and other modern and historic population groups from southern, central and east Africa were explored. Available comparative groups included the historic Khoe-San from Riet River (N=31), the Sotho-Tswana from southern Africa (N=61), the Basuku from central Africa (N=66) and the Bahutu (N=53) and Teita (N=24) from east Africa. Ten craniometric variables were selected and used to perform population structure analysis based on model bound quantitative genetics and multiple discriminant function analysis (MDA). Quantitative genetic distances revealed that the Khoe-San sample was closest to the Riet River group. Residual variance analysis performed on two-sample subsets of the Khoe-San group (Cape KS and Various KS) showed a higher level of heterogeneity in the Cape KS than seen in the Khoe-San from various other areas in southern Africa. MDA revealed that Khoe-San intra-sample variance is relatively high, with 44% of the sample (sexes pooled) classified into the Riet River group. The remaining individuals were classified (in decreasing order) into Bahutu (24%), Basuku (24%) and Sotho-Tswana (8%). Although the Khoe-San specimens are closest to the Riet River group, they are clearly not homogenous. Their high level of phenotypic diversity most likely originated from a complex population history involving many group interactions driven by social and political marginalization.