Anthropology and Photography at the American Museum of Natural History

The black and white image on the lantern slide is of a low quality and cropped oddly, but identifying the subject was still the easier of my tasks. The head is in profile, with a very prominent nose and a large, archaic-looking eye. The subject wears a beaded choker necklace and braided hairstyle, with a band extending down one shoulder. Her hat is all but invisible because of the quality of the image. There are strangely-shaped shadows on either side, which I could not identify because of the cropping. At first, I was unsure whether the face was male or female, but guessed that it was Near Eastern. The entire image was carved in relief, with no indication of scale.

The lantern slide was originally an illustration in a book. The image has a thin black border and a caption in German: “Kopf einer hethitischen Gotten, Basaltrelief aus Sendschirli, um 1500 v. Chr.” In English, this means “head of a Hittite Goddess, bas-relief from Sendschirli, about 1500 BCE.” (translation by Janet Martin) Sendschirli is the German spelling of the site’s name. Names for archaeological sites can be difficult to translate, since they are often simply transliterated into the language of whatever scholar is writing about the site. I eventually used Wikipedia’s translation function to determine that the modern English name for Sendschirli is Zincirli Höyük.
The ancient name for Zincirli Höyük was Sam’al. It was originally a Bronze Age (roughly second millennium BCE) Hittite city, but after the fall of the Hittite Empire it was inhabited by other groups as late at the seventh century BCE. It was originally excavated from 1888 to 1902 by the German Oriental Society. In 2006, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute began a long-term excavation at the site, the first since the German excavation. (Oriental Institute of Chicago)

There has been very little published on the site, at least in English. However, I was able to find a better image of my relief. (Bittel) This photograph, also in black and white, shows the entire figure in slightly more detail than the lantern slide. It is clear from this image that the figure is holding a mirror (the edge of which is visible but unidentifiable on the lantern slide) and wearing a long skirt, and that she is part of a procession of other deities. The mirror is probably an attribute that could identify a specific goddess, but I did not delve into this very deeply. The stone panel was part of the outer citadel gates of Sam’al. At some point, it was moved to either the Istanbul Archeology Museum or the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, but because of the cropping I cannot tell whether it was photographed for the book at the site or a museum. (Bittel) It would be virtually impossible to locate the book the image on the lantern slide was published in—it is at least sixty years old (probably out of print) and in German. The caption is too generic even to pinpoint a subject. The book could have dealt with art history, archaeology, religion, eugenics, or something else.

The Hittite Goddess relief in a museum, along with other carvings from the same site. (Kurt Bittel)

My other question about the image is how it ended up at AMNH. It was in a box, one of four boxes of slides donated to the museum by Dr. Franz Weidenreich, a German-born anatomist and physical anthropologist who did research at AMNH in the 1940’s. The box my slide was in was labeled:
LS 350 (box 4 0f 4)
Wiedenreich
(oversize slides)
Racial types
Misc
34 slides (box 4 of 4) # 151-184

The box mostly contained archaeological images from the Mediterranean, including at least one duplicate image. There were also several photos of live people, a skull, and a Victorian cartoon. Two of the other boxes (boxes two and three) were mainly images related to hominid fossils, and the last box (box one) is mostly ethnology photos like the ones from early fieldwork expeditions (the box has a note suggesting Boaz created the original images).

The name Wiedenreich was on all of the boxes, so I started by searching the internet for anyone by that name. This quickly led me to Franz Weidenreich (there has never been anyone named Wiedenreich as far as I can tell, so it must be a misspelling). Weidenreich was born in Germany in 1873. He attended several universities in Germany before earning a medical degree in 1899. He taught anatomy in Alsace-Lorraine until World War I, when the territory became French and he had to leave because of his German nationality. In the 1920’s and early 1930’s he lectured on physical anthropology in Germany, but had to leave in 1934 because he was Jewish. He was a guest professor of anatomy and anthropology at the University of Chicago for a year, before leaving to research hominid fossils in China, particularly Gigantopithecus and Peking Man. In 1941, the Sino-Japanese War forced him to leave China. He came to New York as a guest of AMNH, where he became a research fellow in 1946 and died in 1948. He published over 200 works, mostly in German. He is best-known for his work on early hominid fossils in China. He evidently left his lantern slides to AMNH after he died. (W. K. Gregory)

This information explained the contents of two of the boxes of slides, but not my image. Every biography of Weidenreich focuses on his research in China, which dealt with fossils that were at least 9000 years old—distant in both time and place from a Bronze Age relief in Turkey. Admittedly, he worked as a scholar for over three decades before going to China, but before that he was an anatomist and physical anthropologist, not an archaeologist.

At first, I thought that Weidenreich must have used the image for lectures on eugenics, for several reasons. First, I know that this was a common interest among anthropologists and other scholars until after World War II, so Weidenreich worked in an era when this would not be an unusual interest. The fact that Weidenreich was Jewish would not necessarily have made him an opponent of eugenics before the Holocaust. Besides, the box was labeled “racial types.” Nearly all the images in the boxes were of faces or skulls. This particular image features a very prominent nose. Finally, his obituary refers to Weidenreich’s research on “race, ancient and modern.” (W. K. Gregory)

I no longer believe that Weidenreich had this slide because he was a proponent of eugenics. The obituary that mentioned Weidenreich’s research on race did not go into any detail. While I was reading AMNH’s file on him, however, I found a passing reference to some lectures he gave in the 1920’s. Apparently, Weidenreich spoke out publicly against eugenics in an attempt to undermine the Nazis. (Dictionary of American Biography) Could the lantern slide be from those lectures?

Franz Weidenreich at AMNH with human and ape skulls
(Boaz, Noel T. and Russell L. Ciochon. “Scavenging of ‘Peking Man’: New Evidence shows that a venerable cave was neither hearth nor home.” http://www.uiowa.edu/~bioanth/courses/Peking1.htm)

It would be hard (if not impossible) to prove for sure that one particular slide was used in a particular lecture. The lecture in question would have been in German, as would any paper he published at the time. However, there are a few reasons why this theory seems plausible to me. First, as a Jew, Weidenreich obviously had a very strong reason to try to undermine the Nazis. Second, the slide itself is a different size from most slides in the AMNH archives. It does not actually fit into the transparent sleeves AMNH keeps most of its lantern slides in. To me, this suggests that the slide was not manufactured by AMNH, and may be from a different country.
Finally, I found an article Weidenreich wrote in 1945 that seems to prove at least that he was an outspoken opponent of eugenics. The article criticizes the use of skull measurements as a means of classifying racial groups. Specifically, this system classified skulls based on their relative length and breadth, and its proponents claimed that longer (doliocephalic) skulls were racially superior to shorter (brachycephalic) ones. Weidenreich describes the development of this system of classification as “a tragic anthropological error committed in good faith a hundred years ago.”(Weidenreich, 1945) He goes on to analyze the system of taking cranial measurements in depth, concluding that the anatomy of the skull is far too complex to summarize with an index that employs only two measurements. Instead, Weidenreich asserts that shorter skulls are common throughout most of the world, and are an adaptation to bipedalism. (Weidenreich, 1945)

In another article, Weidenreich analyzes a group of fossil skulls found in China. One of his conclusions is particularly relevant to my theory that he wished to discredit traditional racial biases: “The widespread belief that racial mixture constitutes the product of modern civilization and that the physical appearance of human groups become more uniform the further they are traced back turns out to be in contrast to the existing facts. It rather seems that the tendency to produce and cultivate more uniform types is a secondary acquisition fostered by progressing exclusiveness and isolation.” (Weidenreich, 1939) In other words, he believed that humans are naturally diverse, and that racial purity is a myth, and he used his expertise in human anatomy and evolution to support his views.

I still do not know why Weidenreich had this particular image. It was probably not because of the prominent nose as I originally suspected. Weidenreich’s writings about eugenics deal with the use of skull measurements as a predictor of race and intelligence. The Hittite goddess appears to have a large head relative to her body. Perhaps Weidenreich’s point was related to that. Presumably the proportions of the head undermine some eugenics theory that Weidenreich disagreed with.
I think it is unlikely that this image was used by another scholar after Weidenreich’s death. Lantern slides were already an old technology by 1948, although their use continued for a few more years. Furthermore, my searches for the terms “Hittite” and “Zincirli” in the AMNH Research Library database returned no results. It is still possible that this slide was used in other lectures, but it would be difficult to prove, if not impossible.

I still have some lingering questions about my image. If Weidenreich did use it in lectures he gave in the 1920’s, how did it get to AMNH in the late 1940’s? Could he really have taken his lantern slides with him when he was fleeing the Nazis? It is possible—he was not smuggled out of Germany, but simply took a job at a university in the US, so perhaps he could take more with him than most people. Ultimately, I can only be certain of a few things. First, Weidenreich was not known for his expertise on the Hittites—he was an anatomist and is best known today for his work on hominid fossils in China. Second, he must have used this slide in a lecture or he would not have had it. Furthermore, the lecture must have something to do with race, because the box was labeled “racial types.” Third, he published papers criticizing eugenics, so it is reasonable to think he would have lectured on the same subject. There may be other explanations as to why he had the slide, but this is the one that makes the most sense to me.

Rachel Martin, NYU Museum Studies

Bibliography

Kurt Bittel, Die Hethiter, Beck, München 1976, ISBN 3406030246.

Bora Bilgin, 2003, 2006. Ekrem Akurgal, The Hattian and Hittite Civilizations, KTB, Ankara, 2001.

Tayfun Bilgin, 2006. Images reprinted on “Monuments of the Hittites: Zincirli” by Tayfun Bilgin. http://www.hittitemonuments.com/zincirli/ last accessed March 30, 2009

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. “Turkey: the Zincirli Expedition.” Updated February 2, 2007. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/zin/. Last accessed March 30, 2009.

“Franz Weidenreich, 1873-1948,” W. K. Gregory American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1949), pp. 85-90 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association.

“Franz Weidenreich,” Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 4, 1974. From the American Museum of Natural History file on Franz Weidenreich.

“The Brachycephalization of Recent Mankind” Franz Weidenreich Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1945), pp. 1-54 Published by: University of New Mexico .