Chip Colwell is editor in chief of SAPIENS, a magazine that writes about anthropology for the wider world. Before stepping into that role, he was senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Consequently, a significant portion of Colwell's career has been dedicated to making anthropology and archaeology matter for wide audiences consisting of much more than academics. This is a delicate balancing act. We want to share our work with the wider world, but we also want to avoid sacrificing the nuance, specificity, and rigor of our respective research agendas. Between these two realms lies a yawning gap that many archaeologists never even consider approaching. Instead, they take shelter in the comfort of their own research programs, replete with cultures of specialized jargon that all but guarantee their impenetrability for nonspecialists (sometimes even for fellow archaeologists!). Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits successfully transcends this gap, obliterating the lines between academic and popular writing. More than this, it does so in regard to an absolutely critical topic that archaeologists, museum professionals, students, and members of the general public—especially those of us living in settler states—will undoubtedly benefit from reflecting upon.
Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits is about repatriation in the United States, but it confronts more than just that. To tell this story, Colwell masterfully weaves together multiple histories, perspectives, and scales. Repatriation in the United States concerns histories of Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism, looting and collection, museums, the discipline of anthropology, and so much more. A fulsome understanding requires knowledge of multiple peoples and social collectives ensnared in these histories—and these perspectives are far from black and white: an Indigenous activist barging into a politician's office in disgust of the way Indigenous human remains are treated when disturbed by a construction project; a non-Indigenous person employed by a tribe to retrieve human remains and reinter them; an Indigenous family nudged to sell items of cultural patrimony due to the hardships of settler colonialism. Colwell explores these perspectives and brings them into productive dialogue with his narrative. He does so by nimbly moving between scales—using his own firsthand experiences as an archaeologist and museum curator to lead the reader through a big and multifaceted history through which repatriation, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and Indigenous and collaborative, community-based research emerged.
The book is organized into four main parts (consisting of six chapters each), each of which focuses on an important repatriation case study: Zuni Ahayu:da, Sand Creek scalps, Tlingit ceremonial regalia, and Calusa skulls. The Zuni case charts the important role that Zuni peoples played in repatriation before NAGPRA, but it also provides a clear example of where the universalized preservation ethic of museums does violence to local worlds and the important beings that reside in them (namely Ahayu:da). The violence and racism of the Sand Creek example will shock the reader, but Colwell shows how repatriation can help begin healing the wounds left behind by such injustices. The Tlingit example brings to light issues of cultural patrimony, scrutinizing cases where individuals or family groups were influenced to sell ceremonial objects and regalia owned by all members of a community. Finally, the Calusa case study brings to light the thorny issue of “culturally unaffiliated” remains, posing questions about who can claim remains that lack a clear affiliation with a present-day Indigenous nation or tribe.
There is very little to find fault with in this book, although I would have welcomed reading just a bit more about the relationship between repatriation and federal recognition, especially in cases involving both federally recognized and nonfederally recognized tribes and nations. Having noted this, there is only so much ground one can cover in a single book.
Overall, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits is a well-written book that unravels a complicated set of issues. It speaks to the struggles of repatriation for many different people connected to museums and to the history of settler colonialism, more broadly. It confronts the ugliness of our discipline, but it also brings hope for a shared future in which museums and the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology will speak with, for, and to a much wider segment of society (see At a Crossroads: Archaeology and First Peoples of Canada, edited by George F. Nicholas and Thomas P. Andrews, 1997). Read Colwell's book, and assign it in your classes.
