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Skull Triangles: Flinders Petrie, Race Theory and Biometrics

(2016) Skull Triangles: Flinders Petrie, Race Theory and Biometrics. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology , 26 (1) 10.5334/bha-556. Green open access

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Abstract

In 1902 the Egyptian archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie published a graph of triangles indicating skull size, shape and ‘racial ability’. In the same year a paper on Naqada crania that had been excavated by Petrie’s team in 1894–5 was published in the anthropometric journal Biometrika, which played an important part in the methodology of cranial measuring in biometrics and helped establish Karl Pearson’s biometric laboratory at University College London. Cicely D. Fawcett’s and Alice Lee’s paper on the variation and correlation of the human skull used the Naqada crania to argue for a controlled system of measurement of skull size and shape to establish homogeneous racial groups, patterns of migration and evolutionary development. Their work was more cautious in tone and judgement than Petrie’s pronouncements on the racial origins of the early Egyptians but both the graph and the paper illustrated shared ideas about skull size, shape, statistical analysis and the ability and need to define ‘race’. This paper explores how Petrie shared his archaeological work with a broad number of people and disciplines, including statistics and biometrics, and the context for measuring and analysing skulls at the turn of the twentieth century.

Type: Article
Title: Skull Triangles: Flinders Petrie, Race Theory and Biometrics
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.5334/bha-556
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bha-556
Language: English
Additional information: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (unless stated otherwise), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reporduction in any medium, providing the original work it properly cited. Copyright is retained by the author(s).
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1496844
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