Congratulations to Chris Heaney, whose book Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology was awarded the Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference on Latin American History for books published in 2023! The Bolton-Johnson Prize is awarded for the best book in English on any significant aspect of Latin American History that is published anywhere during the imprint year previous to the year of the award.
Committee: Ben Cowan, Tatiana Seijas (chair), Tamara Walker
Winner: Heaney, Christopher. Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
From the committee:
Empires of the Dead takes us on a historical journey with a remarkable geographical scope and ambitious periodization, from Cuzco to Madrid to Washington DC and through five hundred years. With graceful prose, imaginative argumentation, and an astonishing archival foundation, Heaney brings to life actors ranging from Inca healers to Peruvian doctors to US anthropologists to articulate a history that examines Native knowledge production, the legacies of colonialism, and the invention of academic disciplines. We now understand that Andeans produced knowledge about human bodies that subsequent generations repurposed for their own ends, specifically trepanation (cranial surgery), once a practice that extended the life of Andean people, and mummification, which, Heaney shows, extended “their social and sacred being.” In turn, US anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries repurposed Andean people’s remains to advance their understandings of so-called human evolution and race, while Peruvian anthropologists sought to make anti-imperialist claims. Today, Andean peoples’ ancestors are on display in museums, wrenched from their homelands and communities of the dead. As we hover between the five-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Europeans in America, and the quarter-century mark after the passing of NAGPRA in the US, Empires of the Dead is a timely reminder of the importance of our own discipline of history. Heaney offers us an example of how to combine the methodologies of ethnohistory, the history of science and technology, and social history to write a lively, engaging, and path-breaking monograph.