Christopher Heaney
Biographic Data
| ID | 587591 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Heaney |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Heaney |
| SIGNATURE | HEANEY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8684-560X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Sins of the Shovel: Looting, Murder and the Evolution of American Archaeology
Laura Leon Llerena. Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes
Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences: Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific
Los "antiguos peruanos" de la antropología americana: La arqueología de los Andes del siglo XIX como nexo de investigación global
Between 1820 and 1920, American anthropologists acquired more human remains of Andean origin than those of any other individual population worldwide. This article explains why in 1965 in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, anthropologists represented the growth of all humanity using 160 Andean skulls. Using archival sources, it argues that the excavation and interpretation of Andean ancestors in Peru prior to 1900 wa…
Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology
Empires of the Dead is a history of the collection of Inca, Andean, and ancient Peruvian mummies and skulls, from 1532 to the present. That history started with Spain’s invasion of the Inca empire of Tawantinsuyu in 1532, which revealed that South America was home to the world’s oldest cultures of artificial mummification. Those cultures’ climax were the Inca rulers and sacred Andean ancestors who commanded rains, lightning, and their descendants…
The Inca: Lost Civilizations
At the start of The Inca, archaeologist Kevin Lane questions whether his subject should be included in a book series on lost civilizations given that the “descendents of the original communities are still with us today, separated by only a meagre five hundred . . . years from their ancestors” (p. 16). It is a smart nod. This is not simply because, as historians know, Inca nobles and subjects were hardly lost—their descendants reinvented their rig…
In Praise of the Ancestors: Names, Identity, and Memory in Africa and the Americas
What's in a name? In this concise and well-arranged comparative history, Susan Elizabeth Ramírez offers an arresting answer regarding the nature of historical consciousness in societies without writing. It hinges on the observation that the ruler of the Inca empire of Tawantinsuyu was called “the Cuzco” when the Spaniards invaded, and that the previous ruler (Huayna Capac) was “the old Cuzco.” Ramírez argues that Cuzco, rather than simply the Inc…
Skull Walls
From 1820 through 1920, American anthropologists acquired more human remains of Andean origin than those of any other individual population worldwide. Samuel George Morton, the Smithsonian, Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the American Museum of Natural History all made "ancient Peruvians" core to their collections, racializing the Americas' past and present by using "ancient Peruvians" as a historic set against which li…
Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru
Mark Rice's excellent Making Machu Picchu shows how strange this Inca estate's rise has been: a national site 350 years older than the nation-state, first promoted by an American historian named Hiram Bingham, that has become an uninhabited and state-managed engine of commerce and identity—the “synthesis of all things Peruvian,” President Alan García told the nation in 2011. Bingham or Machu Picchu's Inca history has little to do with it, Rice ar…
Santa Bárbara's Legacy: An Environmental History of Huancavelica, Peru
It is hard to think of somewhere more emblematic of how colonial commodity frontiers moved through the Americas, leaving social and ecological exhaustion in their wake, than Huancavelica. In 1563, a Spanish encomendero named Amador de Cabrera induced Indians northeast of Huamanga to reveal a local deposit of cinnabar, or llimpi—a scarlet ore that Andean elites collected as a ritual cosmetic but that when fired produces liquid mercury. Mercury is …
How to Make an Inca Mummy: Andean Embalming, Peruvian Science, and the Collection of Empire
As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe’s encounter with two “ancient” bodily knowledges. The first is well known: the embalmed Egyptian dead who were ground into a materia medica named mumia and later were collected as “mummies” themselves. Yet mummies owe their global possibility—of ancient sciences of embalming and environmental manipulation apprehensible worldwide—to the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with the Incas’ preserved…
Holes in the Head: The Art and Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru
Trepanation is a cranial surgery whose extraordinary global antiquity unfurled after its 1865 identification in a Pre-Columbian skull from Peru. For those who have never heard of it, this book will be mind-opening. For those who have, bioanthropologist John W. Verano’s long-awaited and assiduously researched contribution transforms its discussion from backhandedly ethnocentric surprise—“Indigenous Andeans operated on each other’s skulls for medic…
A Peru of Their Own: English Grave-Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early America
Grave-opening was a shared European practice of possession and knowledge production in the early Americas, identifying what indigenous peoples believed of the afterlife and what items they valued. If mortuary practices such as interring wealth with the dead were deemed idolatrous, then the disruption and looting of graves and the people who made them was permissible. Nowhere was grave-opening more profitable than in sixteenth-century Peru, where …
Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu
"In 1911, a young Peruvian boy led an American explorer and Yale historian named Hiram Bingham into the ancient Incan citadel of Machu Picchu. Hidden amidst the breathtaking heights of the Andes, this settlement of temples, tombs and palaces was the Incas' greatest achievement. Tall, handsome, and sure of his destiny, Bingham believed that Machu Picchu was the Incas' final refuge, where they fled the Spanish Conquistadors. Bingham made Machu Picc…
How to Make an Inca Mummy: Andean Embalming, Peruvian Science, and the Collection of Empire
As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe’s encounter with two “ancient” bodily knowledges. The first is well known: the embalmed Egyptian dead who were ground into a materia medica named mumia and later were collected as “mummies” themselves. Yet mummies owe their global possibility—of ancient sciences of embalming and environmental manipulation apprehensible worldwide—to the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with the Incas’ preserved…
Holes in the Head: The Art and Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru
Trepanation is a cranial surgery whose extraordinary global antiquity unfurled after its 1865 identification in a Pre-Columbian skull from Peru. For those who have never heard of it, this book will be mind-opening. For those who have, bioanthropologist John W. Verano’s long-awaited and assiduously researched contribution transforms its discussion from backhandedly ethnocentric surprise—“Indigenous Andeans operated on each other’s skulls for medic…
A Peru of Their Own: English Grave-Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early America
Grave-opening was a shared European practice of possession and knowledge production in the early Americas, identifying what indigenous peoples believed of the afterlife and what items they valued. If mortuary practices such as interring wealth with the dead were deemed idolatrous, then the disruption and looting of graves and the people who made them was permissible. Nowhere was grave-opening more profitable than in sixteenth-century Peru, where …
Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu
"In 1911, a young Peruvian boy led an American explorer and Yale historian named Hiram Bingham into the ancient Incan citadel of Machu Picchu. Hidden amidst the breathtaking heights of the Andes, this settlement of temples, tombs and palaces was the Incas' greatest achievement. Tall, handsome, and sure of his destiny, Bingham believed that Machu Picchu was the Incas' final refuge, where they fled the Spanish Conquistadors. Bingham made Machu Picc…
A Peru of Their Own: English Grave-Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early America
Grave-opening was a shared European practice of possession and knowledge production in the early Americas, identifying what indigenous peoples believed of the afterlife and what items they valued. If mortuary practices such as interring wealth with the dead were deemed idolatrous, then the disruption and looting of graves and the people who made them was permissible. Nowhere was grave-opening more profitable than in sixteenth-century Peru, where …
Holes in the Head: The Art and Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru
Trepanation is a cranial surgery whose extraordinary global antiquity unfurled after its 1865 identification in a Pre-Columbian skull from Peru. For those who have never heard of it, this book will be mind-opening. For those who have, bioanthropologist John W. Verano’s long-awaited and assiduously researched contribution transforms its discussion from backhandedly ethnocentric surprise—“Indigenous Andeans operated on each other’s skulls for medic…
How to Make an Inca Mummy: Andean Embalming, Peruvian Science, and the Collection of Empire
As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe’s encounter with two “ancient” bodily knowledges. The first is well known: the embalmed Egyptian dead who were ground into a materia medica named mumia and later were collected as “mummies” themselves. Yet mummies owe their global possibility—of ancient sciences of embalming and environmental manipulation apprehensible worldwide—to the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with the Incas’ preserved…
Santa Bárbara's Legacy: An Environmental History of Huancavelica, Peru
It is hard to think of somewhere more emblematic of how colonial commodity frontiers moved through the Americas, leaving social and ecological exhaustion in their wake, than Huancavelica. In 1563, a Spanish encomendero named Amador de Cabrera induced Indians northeast of Huamanga to reveal a local deposit of cinnabar, or llimpi—a scarlet ore that Andean elites collected as a ritual cosmetic but that when fired produces liquid mercury. Mercury is …
Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru
Mark Rice's excellent Making Machu Picchu shows how strange this Inca estate's rise has been: a national site 350 years older than the nation-state, first promoted by an American historian named Hiram Bingham, that has become an uninhabited and state-managed engine of commerce and identity—the “synthesis of all things Peruvian,” President Alan García told the nation in 2011. Bingham or Machu Picchu's Inca history has little to do with it, Rice ar…
Skull Walls
From 1820 through 1920, American anthropologists acquired more human remains of Andean origin than those of any other individual population worldwide. Samuel George Morton, the Smithsonian, Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the American Museum of Natural History all made "ancient Peruvians" core to their collections, racializing the Americas' past and present by using "ancient Peruvians" as a historic set against which li…
Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology
Empires of the Dead is a history of the collection of Inca, Andean, and ancient Peruvian mummies and skulls, from 1532 to the present. That history started with Spain’s invasion of the Inca empire of Tawantinsuyu in 1532, which revealed that South America was home to the world’s oldest cultures of artificial mummification. Those cultures’ climax were the Inca rulers and sacred Andean ancestors who commanded rains, lightning, and their descendants…
The Inca: Lost Civilizations
At the start of The Inca, archaeologist Kevin Lane questions whether his subject should be included in a book series on lost civilizations given that the “descendents of the original communities are still with us today, separated by only a meagre five hundred . . . years from their ancestors” (p. 16). It is a smart nod. This is not simply because, as historians know, Inca nobles and subjects were hardly lost—their descendants reinvented their rig…
In Praise of the Ancestors: Names, Identity, and Memory in Africa and the Americas
What's in a name? In this concise and well-arranged comparative history, Susan Elizabeth Ramírez offers an arresting answer regarding the nature of historical consciousness in societies without writing. It hinges on the observation that the ruler of the Inca empire of Tawantinsuyu was called “the Cuzco” when the Spaniards invaded, and that the previous ruler (Huayna Capac) was “the old Cuzco.” Ramírez argues that Cuzco, rather than simply the Inc…
Los "antiguos peruanos" de la antropología americana: La arqueología de los Andes del siglo XIX como nexo de investigación global
Between 1820 and 1920, American anthropologists acquired more human remains of Andean origin than those of any other individual population worldwide. This article explains why in 1965 in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, anthropologists represented the growth of all humanity using 160 Andean skulls. Using archival sources, it argues that the excavation and interpretation of Andean ancestors in Peru prior to 1900 wa…
Laura Leon Llerena. Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes
Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences: Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific
Sins of the Shovel: Looting, Murder and the Evolution of American Archaeology
History (11 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Indigenous (8 works) · Latin American history and culture (8 works) · Ancient history (7 works) · Art (7 works) · Colonialism (7 works) · Geography (7 works) · Ethnology (5 works) · History (5 works)