Healing Incas: Peruvian Surgery and the Recovery of Scientific Ancestors

About The Event: 

Before the late nineteenth century, the most successful cranial surgeons in world history were the Inca and Andean trepanners of pre-Hispanic Peru. Based on Dr. Christopher Heaney's recent Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2023), this lecture reconstructs how 19th and 20th century surgeons, historians, and archaeologists in Peru and the United States debated and re-constructed the fact of Andean trepanation, challenging the scientific racism of the day. It also explores how this "discovery" of trepanation emerged from the looting of Andean mummies and skulls that filled museums around the world, but has shaped Andean descendants' own efforts to re-encounter and recover their "scientific ancestors."

About The Author: 

Christopher Heaney is a historian and writer at Penn State. He is the author of Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2023), and Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). He has written about museums, race, the Incas, and the struggle for ancestral remains in the Americas for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

**Please join us immediately following the talk for a book signing featuring Dr. Heaney’s latest book, Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2023). 

Image Credits:

Alton Tobey, “Inca trephination mural,” 1965, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image No. 75-2104.

Robert Thom, “Trephining in Ancient Peru,” for Parke, Davis, and Company, c. 1952. From the collection of Michigan Medicine, University of Michigan, Gift of Pfizer, Inc., UMHS.3