Specimens

 

To date, almost all the modern human crania are from the Samuel George Morton Collection, housed and curated at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 


The original Morton collection is composed of approximately 1200 human crania (most without mandibles) and which were sent to Morton by others who collected them from both archaeological and recent contexts (1820’s to 1851). After Morton’s death, his student, J. Aitken Meigs, continued with the collection which totals approximately 1800 crania. Although much controversy surrounds the conclusions that were part of Morton’s work especially his use of cranial capacity as a measure of relative superiority of living human races, he took meticulous and copious notes on the geographic and population derivation of the crania, as supplied to him by those who provided him the crania.

 

Publications

  • Gould SJ. (1978) Morton’s ranking of races by cranial capacity: unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm. Science; 200: 503–509. pmid:347573
  • Lewis JE, DeGusta D, Meyer MR, Monge JM, Mann AE, Holloway RL. (2011) The mismeasure of science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on skulls and bias. PLOS Biology. June 7. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071.
  • Kaplan JM, Pigliucci M, Banta JA. (2015) Gould on Morton, Redux: What can the debate reveal about the limits of data? Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci C; 52: 22–31.
  • Mitchell, PW. (2018) The fault in his seeds: Lost notes to the case of bias in Samuel George Morton’s cranial race science. PLoS Biology. October 4. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2007008.
  • Weisberg M. (2014) Remeasuring man. Evolution and Development 16: 166–178.
  • Weisberg M. and Paul D. (2016) Morton, Gould, and bias: A comment on "The Mismeasure of Science". PLoS Biology. April 19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002444.