Walking the Ancestors Home: On the Road to an Ethical Human Biology

I first worked at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in 1968. It was a project I designed on the dental pathology and masticatory musculature of 50 Hawiku and Suruque skulls, under the kind supervision of biological anthropologist Donald Ortner. I was 15 years old and attending Larry Angel’s and Lucille St. Hoyme’s summer paleopathology seminar at the museum. One could still smell smoke and mold wafting from riot-torn 7th Street after Martin Luther King’s murder only a couple of months before. I was the only African American and the youngest person in the seminar, a situation to which I had already become accustomed as a member of the Maryland Archaeological Society.Footnote1 A dozen years later I returned on a graduate fellowship to study the Hrdlička papers, only the second person to do so, and to write a critical social history of biological anthropology from the vantage of the Smithsonian.Footnote2 I thought it wise to examine the history of this thing I planned to become part of if I was to chart my own course through it.