Keystone Hominins: the Material Culture of Piltdown Man

Few scientific forgeries have captured the scientific and public imaginations as completely as that of the 1912 Piltdown Man hoax.  While examples of blatant fraud can be found in many scientific disciplines over several centuries, out-and-out forgeries and hoaxes prove to be relatively rare and comparatively short-lived.  The Piltdown Man is, perhaps, one of the most-studied but least-resolved episodes in twentieth-century paleoanthropology.[1]

Aimé Rutot’s reconstruction of the Piltdown, Eoanthropus dawsonii.  Card from Keystone View Company, 1920s.  Still tracking down the museum that ran this exhibit...

Piltdown’s celebrity status was cemented almost immediately upon its discovery.  More than just a headline and curiosity, the fossil quickly found its way into museum exhibits through casts and reconstructions and the scientific literature surrounding the fossil flourished.  While sketches and inked reconstructions of the fossil abounded, by the 1920s, Aimé Rutot’s reconstruction of the Piltdown hominin – holding the artifact colloquially called the “cricket bat” – was de rigour for early twentieth-century Early Man museum exhibits.[2] 

Rutot’s reconstruction pushed public awareness of the fossil even farther when Keystone View Company included Piltdown as one of the stereo cards in their Biology Unit as a teaching tool. 

Using a stereopticon to view the Keystone Piltdown card and ponder Rutot's reconstruction.

The stereoscope was an important tool for laboratory and scientific work in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a variety of scientific disciplines, including paleoanthropology.  The stereoscope expanded what a researchers was able to “see,” and “how” they were able to see it, in the same way that telescopes and microscopes expanded the visual possibilities for other sciences centuries before.  A stereoscopic plate contains two slightly offset views of the same image and these images line up with the viewer’s left and right eyes.  Thanks to power of binocular vision, the brain “combines” these two images into one, creating the illusion of three-dimensional depth. (For more about the stereoscope and early paleoanthropology research, check out 3D Neanderthals at Public Domain Review[3].)

This specific card, however – Evolution, Early Man: Piltdown – puts the Piltdown fossil squarely in the public’s eye on two levels.  Not only does Rutot’s reconstruction put a face on the fossil, the Keystone stereo cards reinforced the accessible nature of a stereo image – there wasn’t any scientific expertise needed to use the instrument or to interpret the image present.  (The stereoscope – and stereopticon – was, more often than not, regarded by earlier Victorian audiences as a “philosophical toy” – much like a kaleidoscope or a zoetrope.  “The stereoscope is now seen in every drawing room; philosophers talk learnedly about it, ladies are delighted with its magic representations, and children play with it,” noted Robert Hunt a British photo-chemist.[4])

The bits of Piltdown’s own material culture – like the stereo card – speak to the celebrity and staying power of the fossil over the last century.

And a big thanks to @Chris_Manias for feedback about the Piltdown exhibit!

Further Reading:

[1] The wealth of literature that surrounds Piltdown is astonishing.  For a quick read, check out Lydia Pyne, “Piltdown Man: Untangling One of the Most Infamous Hoaxes in Scientific History—Blog,” The Appendix

[2] Raf De Bont, “The Creation of Prehistoric Man: Aimé Rutot and the Eolith Controversy, 1900–1920,” Isis 94, no. 4 (December 2003): 604–30, doi:10.1086/386384.

[3] Lydia Pyne, “Neanderthals in 3D:L’Homme de La Chapelle,” The Public Domain Review, February 11, 2015, /2015/02/11/neanderthals-in-3d-lhomme-de-la-chapelle/.

[4] Robert Silverman, “The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19th Century,” Technology and Culture 34, no. 4 (October 1993): 729–56.

Piltdown: Writing the Life & Afterlife of a Fossil

“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.” — Mark Twain, Autobiography, 1924

“Eoanthropus is a name with no one to possess it.” — Gerrit Smith Miller correspondence, Smithsonian Institute, 1929.

Mark Twain had it right. Biography is nothing if not a tricky genre, where the clothes and buttons of a person’s life are cut, tailored, and assembled into a biographer’s narrative.  Writing the biography of objects is even more complicated.  A person’s life can be examined through primary sources; the stories of objects can only be told through sources secondary to those objects.

But these other sources provide different fields of view for the biographies of celebrity objects, especially fossils.  Celebrity fossils – by construction – live outside of a strictly scientific environment, creating a public life through reconstructions, casts,  museum exhibits, and media headlines.

It’s hard to imagine a fossil that has a more public biography than the Piltdown fossil.  It’s a fossil caught up in the mystery and intrigue of its hoax – as part of its identity – that it’s easy to over overlook other aspects of the fossil’s life.

The life of the Piltdown fossil, however, is more than just the initial moment of its discovery, the controversies about its legitimacy, and its contributions to scientific debates.  The fossil’s “afterlife” tells us about the business of how paleoanthropology “does science” and how that changes over time.  (The gallery of newspaper clipping, museum exhibits, and reconstructions explores some of the ways that Piltdown enters, and stays, in the public view.)

This biography – this “life as object” – moves the Piltdown fossil from its problematic taxonomic classification Eoanthropus dawsonii  into a twenty-first century cultural icon. 

Anthropological History Through Bronzes and Comics

The history of anthropology comes in all shapes and texts. 

Malvina Hoffman, sketching subjects on her expedition for the Field Museum.  From Treasure Chest, 1970.  (scan by L. Pyne)

Museum collections, field notes, academic journals, and archival correspondence are easy to count as traditional sources for piecing together the history of the discipline.  But a most unexpected text that captures the intersection of art, science, and anthropology comes from a 1970 issue of the children’s comic book, Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact.

In the 1930s, the Chicago Field Museum established a series of new anthropology and archaeology exhibits.  In addition to opening the Hall of the Stone Age of the Old World in 1933, the Field Museum commissioned a different kind of exhibit – a set of bronzes illustrating The Races of Man.  The museum hired celebrated sculptor Malvina Hoffman to travel the world in order to sculpt a “type” of each “race.” 

Photograph of Hall of Races of Man exhibit, Chicago Field Museum, 1930s.  (Wikimedia Commons)

 The museum saw this exhibit as a way of combining art and science and The Races of Man was pitched as an exhibit that would resonate with public audiences.  For her sculptures, Hoffman traveled everywhere from the American Southwest to Central Asia to the Pacific Islands to South Africa and her trip garnered quite a bit of media interest.  Not only did Hoffman have impressive art credentials – having studied under Auguste Rodin in Paris – she was no stranger to the society pages where her bohemian parties drew mention from time to time.

Malvina Hoffman, Henry Field, Mary Pickford at exhibit of bronzes, 1933. (Wikimedia Commons)

 Her bronze sculptures generated enormous interest in the Field Museum and the exhibit received very positive reviews from both the scientific community of the 1930s as well as distinctive note in popular circles.  Famed anatomist Sir Arthur Keith praised Hoffman’s sculpture – himself a scientific consultant for the project – and celebrity actress Mary Pickford was photographed with the bronzes in 1933, when the sculptures were in New York City. 

The exhibit opened 6 June 1933 with 104 sculptures of 102 “races.” 

(The anthropological, problematic notions of “race” and “category” that motivated the commission of Hoffman’s bronzes are a bit beyond the scope of this post.  There is a plethora of brilliant literature that engages with these questions such as Constructing Race: The Science of Bodies and Cultures in American Anthropology by Tracy Teslow or Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to Postwar Public by Michelle Brattain.  The Races of Man exhibit has since been disaggregated and many of the bronzes are in storage.)

***

Cover of Hoffman's memoir, Heads and Tales

Cover page of Hoffman's memoir, Heads and Tales

From "Artist in Bronze and Stone", Treasure Chest, 1970.  (scan by L. Pyne)

Museum displays are a series of tradeoffs.  They are a balance of art and science; story and narrative; information and experience.  And they’re even a tradeoff in artistic medium.  In her memoir, Heads and Tales, Hoffman describes her decision to create the exhibit in bronze (rather than a more traditional museum medium plaster) and why she felt that something as static as bronze conveyed more to her audience.    

The very name over the entrance to most of the halls – “Anthropology” – evokes in our minds dummies of sawdust of painted plaster with staring glass eyes and dusty false hair which has become partially unglued because – “there is never enough money for upkeep.”

You…also have to understand that the president and the trustees of the Field Museum in Chicago are a very alert and courageous group of men.  To keep abreast of the times, they decided, after investigating the reasons why the anthropology halls in all countries were generally empty and the snake and monkey houses were always crowded, to step out of tradition and take a long chance. 

They [the trustees of the Field Museum] felt that “The Races of Man” should look alive, and be actual figures and heads that any one could recognize and feel to be authentic.[1]

***

Her artistic decisions – bringing the sculptures “to life” – meant that the sculptures had decades-long staying power as evidenced by a 1970 issue of Treasure Chest a popular mid-century children’s comic book.  In “Artist in Bronze and Stone: The Life of Malvina Hoffman” author Rita G. Brady sketched a miniature biography of Malvina Hoffman and how her life, her art, and her experiences creating the Field Museum bronzes.  

Offering a children’s version of the history of the exhibit thirty-plus years after its installment provides a unique historical context for public engagement and anthropological encounter through the Field Museum. 

Cover art Malvina Hoffman's biography in Treasure Chest, 1970.  Modeled after famous photo of Hoffman sculpting figures for Bush House, London. (scan by L. Pyne)

Final page of biographical sketch, Treasure Chest, 1970. (scan by L. Pyne)

[1] Malvina Hoffman, Heads and Tales, Later Printing edition (Scribner’s, 1936), pp. 3.

Making a Collection an Iconic Object: Klasies River Mouth

A Blurb For AAA 2014's Archiving Anthropos Roundtable (4 December 2014)

Excerpt(ish) from "Life Histories and Dynamic Objects: The Klasies River Mouth Collection" in Curator 57 (2): 189-198

Boxed collections from Klasies River Mouth, housed in the Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town. (Photo: L. Pyne)

Klasies River Mouth is iconic in Pleistocene archaeology.  Excavations began at the South African site in 1967-1968 and for more than forty years, the site's collection of artifacts function as a cultural yardstick; a metric of sorts for researchers to measure the robustness of explanations and to weigh validity of methodologies.  For a variety of reasons -- archaeological, historical, and cultural -- the Klasies collection underlays a great deal of Middle Stone Age archaeology in South Africa. 

But this begs the question:  How does a collection gain such cachet?  And how does the "life history" of such a collection -- a meta-artifact of its own -- contribute to the collection's iconic status?

A collection can serve as a temporal placeholder for different epistemologies, paradigms, methods, and manner of explanations.  The history of a collection can show particular cultural cachets as a dynamic, vibrant object, long after the collection is first curated.  In the late twentieth-century history of archaeology, the Klasies River Mouth is an example of an entity with an interesting and rich life history that provides us with insights about the original excavation and curating processes, but also about the changing paradigms of archaeological thought and theory. 

For more? Check out "Archiving Anthropos" in print here or at the AAA Roundtable 4 December!