Authorised Histories: Human Remains and the Economies of Credibility in the Science of Race

In this article, I approach the issues of missing data and testimony in the context of the history of race science, craniology, and collections of human remains housed in museums. In the context of comparative race science, human skulls were intended to be examined in association with short histories and biographical data about their pasts. I investigate how and why such documentation and historicising work formed part of a knowledge economy in the nineteenth century that, at the microscopic scale of the archival documents linked to the collections, was intended to verify the authority of human remains as testimonial evidence of distinct human races.