The potential of biohistory: Re-discovering Adelbert von Chamisso's skull of an Aleut collected during the ”Rurik” Expedition 1815-1818 in Alaska

Abstract

The exiled French nobleman Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838) is mostly known as a poet of the Romantic era in Germany, but less so as a keen and accurate naturalist. Nevertheless, he was a much respected zoologist and botanist at his time. On board the Russian brig Rurik between 1815 and 1818 he explored some of the Pacific coasts and islands, from where he brought back not only rich collections of animals and plants, but also three human skulls. While those human remains depicted by the artist of the expedition, Ludwig Choris (1795–1828), were subsequently described by the anthropologist Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) in Paris in some detail, three skulls originally given by Chamisso to the Anatomical Museum in Berlin fell into oblivion. From these three skulls collected in the Bering Strait and on the Aleutian Islands we were able to locate one of an Aleut from Unalaska, the second largest of the Aleutian Islands, to be still extant in the collection of the Anatomical Institute at the Charité in Berlin. For this skull we here document the anthropological data retrievable, add some remarks on the burial rites of the Aleuts at Chamisso's time, and reconstruct its odyssey through various collections over nearly two centuries. The skull stems from a senile Mongoloid male, most likely of Siberian origin (Buriat population), who was probably older than 60 years of age at time of death; its morphology is indicative of a Neo-Aleut population that colonized the Aleutian archipelago since the past 1,000 years. Our work shows that retrieving biohistorical data from museum collections has the potential to contribute toward reconstructing and to better understand in this case the native human population history. As prerequisite of any repatriation this is also of essential importance in context of the current restitution debate of anthropological objects as constituent elements of cultural identity and heritage of indigenous people. (© 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

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