Open access violence: Legacies of white supremacist data making at the Penn Museum, from the Morton Cranial Collection to the MOVE remains

Abstract

This article examines how openly sharing data online can continue the dehumanizing work of 19th century “collectors” who stole the bodies of colonized peoples. It addresses the ongoing controversies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (“Penn Museum“), regarding the interlinked weaponization of over one thousand crania used by racial scientist Samuel George Morton, and the remains of two Black children murdered by the police in the 1985 MOVE bombing, and asks, how can descendant communities regain their kin and take control of the data the museum has extracted from them? And how can scholars and other heritage workers within colonial institutions support them?

Full text

ARTICLE
Open access violence: Legacies of white supremacist data
making at the Penn Museum, from the Morton Cranial
Collection to the MOVE remains
Lyra D. Monteiro
Department of History Graduate Program in American Studies Affiliate Faculty, Africana Studies
Rutgers University, Newark, United States
Email: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Abstract
This article examines how openly sharing data online can continue the dehumanizing work of 19th
century “collectors”who stole the bodies of colonized peoples. It addresses the ongoing controversies
at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (“Penn Museum“),
regarding the interlinked weaponization of over one thousand crania used by racial scientist Samuel
George Morton, and the remains of two Black children murdered by the police in the 1985 MOVE
bombing, and asks, how can descendant communities regain their kin and take control of the data the
museum has extracted from them? And how can scholars and other heritage workers within colonial
institutions support them?
Keywords: repatriation; archaeological ethics; museum ethics; bioanthropology; descendant
communities; MOVE bombing; data ethics; medical racism; racial science
Introduction
In late April 2021, the news broke that the bones of a Black child murdered by the
Philadelphia police in the 1985 MOVE bombing were used as props in a free online Princeton
University course, filmed at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archae-
ology and Anthropology (hereinafter Penn Museum).
1
The previous week, the Penn Museum
issued a public apology for their “unethical possession”of over 1,300 crania from which
white racial scientist –and University of Pennsylvania graduate –Samuel George Morton
extracted data to prove the inherent superiority of the white race.
2
This article addresses the
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society. This is an
Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
1
Two articles were published in quick succession: Maya Kassuto, “Remains of Children Killed in MOVE Bombing
Sat in a Box at Penn Museum for Decades,”Billy Penn, 21 April 2021, https://billypenn.com/2021/04/21/move-
bombing-penn-museum-bones-remains-princeton-africa, accessed September 25, 2023; Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad,
“Penn Museum Owes Reparations for Previously Holding Remains of a MOVE Bombing Victim,”Philadelphia Inquirer,
21 April 2021, https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/penn-museum-reparations-repatriation-move-
bombing-20210421.html, accessed September 25, 2023.
2
Penn Museum, “Museum Announces the Repatriation of the Morton Cranial Collection,”press release, 12 April
2021, https://www.penn.museum/documents/pressroom/MortonCollectionRepatriation-Press%20release.pdf,
accessed September 25, 2023.
International Journal of Cultural Property (2023), 30: 105–137
doi:10.1017/S0940739123000127
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

unfolding situation, catalyzed by these weeks in April 2021 but starting decades and
centuries earlier. As I finalize my edits on this article in June 2023, the implications of an
extensive report on the treatment of the MOVE remains, released by the city of Philadelphia
a year ago,
3
have yet to be fully addressed, and most of the demands of the MOVE
organization have not been met.
4
In the time since I originally researched and wrote this article, I have become personally
involved in descendant community organizing around the Morton Cranial Collection, as a
court granted the Penn Museum’s request to be allowed to bury the remains of what they
claim to be 20 “Black Philadelphians,”instead of relinquishing control over their remains to
those who can best care for them.
5
My involvement has been not only as a scholar who works
in this area but also as a person who is acutely aware that my own Indian ancestors have sat
on shelves in the Penn Museum’s basement alongside the skulls that Penn now seeks to bury
and were likewise used by Morton and his successors to prove the superiority of the
Caucasian race, as he termed it. This shared legacy and fate of people from all over the
world ties together complex and overlapping descendant communities of care, and the work
of finding ceremony and rest for these ancestors will last for decades.
6
These are painful stories to explore –ones that constitute targeted, ongoing terrorism
against specific people and against racialized groups of people. I am sharing these stories
because I do believe that the dead rise when they are ready –ready to force the conversation
about the crimes committed against them, ready to demand the remembrance and rest that
they are due. Long after they lost their lives within contexts of white supremacist violence,
they live on, precisely because their bodies are not in the right place. It matters that the
people who are responsible for stealing, retaining, and abusing ancestral remains were –
and, in some cases, remain –highly regarded by their colleagues. The Penn Museum
describes Samuel George Morton as “the pre-eminent American scientist of his time,”
7
and Alan Mann, who insistently misidentified and then hoarded the remains of two MOVE
children when he was the curator-in-charge of the Morton Cranial Collection, says that
Morton is considered by some to be “the founder of physical anthropology.”
8
During Morton’s lifetime, the city of Philadelphia was the cultural and medical center of
the United States, and Morton was a well-connected and well-respected member of the
political elite.
9
Mann himself had a distinguished career first at the University of Pennsyl-
vania, and later at Princeton University, where he retains emeritus status despite student
protests after his role in the theft of MOVE bombing victim remains became public.
10
And
3
Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022. The remains at the Penn Museum are discussed in most depth in section 2
of the report. Additionally, as the article was going to print, new photographic evidence emerged of Janet Monge
displaying the remains of two MOVE victims at a public event in her lab at the Penn Museum in 2014, including
Delisha Africa, whose remains she and the Penn Museum denied ever having. Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad, “Statement
on new evidence about MOVE Remains held at Penn Museum,”read at press conference at Penn Museum on 31
August, 2023, https://aaliy.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-evidence-about-move, accessed September 25,
2023.
4
See the petition “MOVE Children Deserve to Rest in Peace! Return Our Family’s Remains NOW!”https://
actionnetwork.org/petitions/move-children-deserve-to-rest-in-peace, accessed September 25, 2023.
5
Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad and Lyra D. Monteiro, “Finding Ceremony for Ancestors Held in the Penn Museum
and Other Colonial Institutions,”SAPIENS, 10 May 2023, https://www.sapiens.org/biology/finding-ceremony-
morton-collection-repatriation, accessed September 25, 2023.
6
For the latest updates, see Finding Ceremony,https://www.findingceremony.com, accessed September 25, 2023.
7
Penn Museum, “Background,”https://www.penn.museum/sites/pmclassroom/collection, accessed Septem-
ber 25, 2023.
8
Mann 2009, 159.
9
Fabian 2010.
10
Benjamin Ball, “Students Hold Protest in Solidarity with MOVE,”Daily Princetonian, 2 May 2021, https://
www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2021/05/move-bombing-remains-princeton-protest-university-pennsylva
nia, accessed September 25, 2023.
106 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Mann’s former student, Janet Monge, the curator who filmed the video using Katricia
Dotson’s remains,
11
who was also in charge of the Morton Cranial Collection, is fondly
regarded by many who have encountered her in real life or through her numerous television
appearances and presentations and was even named 2014 Curator of the Year by Philadelphia
magazine.
12
Each of these scientists was nurtured by, and remains embedded in, institu-
tional structures that trained and supported their work and sanctioned it in various ways –
for example, Monge was recently a co-author on a publication in the prestigious journal
Nature.
13
At the other end of the spectrum, there have been calls in print
14
as well as commissions
established by various anthropological associations
15
seeking stricter legal and ethical
standards as a result of the abuses that came to light in 2021. Still more of their colleagues
and successors have attempted to minimize the actions of Mann, Monge, and the Penn
Museum as just another example of possibly unethical, but unexceptional, practices that
appear everywhere. This is absurd and reflects the continued racism rampant in museum,
medical, and anthropological fields; indeed, if it is true that every museum contains the
remains of victims of very recent police violence whose families believed them to be buried,
this in no way makes it okay.
The focus of this article, however, is on centuries-old practices of data sharing by white
scientists and on how it is a political act when people who consider themselves to possess
the remains of our ancestors publish the data they extract from them. We cannot heal the
wounds of empire by making the intricacies of its violence available to all. Every act of data
sharing is political; given my own position within the academic and museum worlds, it is a
political act for me to share the story of the work of Morton, Mann, Monge, and the Penn
Museum as well as of the broader structures of power that have supported, enabled, and
encouraged them. At the same time, I am intentionally not sharing everything that has
been entrusted to me by those who are involved in this ongoing struggle, or that I have
uncovered through my own archival research, because much of it is not for me to share. In
attempting to strike a balance, I have made some calls with which I do not feel fully at ease.
One involves sharing a blurred image from the online Princeton course video, which
appears in the next section.
Turning people into data
The data that colonizers create out of the bodies of those they oppress is itself violence. The
data discussed here includes not only the measurements and value placed on the skulls by
Morton himself but also the online presence of data, images, and the ongoing circulation of
racist analyses grounded in his work as well as the circulation of photographs and x-rays of
11
Katricia Dotson is Tree Africa; I use the former name in this article because that is what her living sibling,
Lionell Dotson, calls her.
12
Malcolm Burnley, “Best of Philly Snapshot: Janet Monge, Best Museum Curator,”Philadelphia, 30 July 2014,
https://www.phillymag.com/things-to-do/2014/07/30/best-of-philly-snapshot-janet-monge-best-museum-cura
tor, accessed September 25, 2023.
13
Brielle et al. 2023.
14
Dunnavant, Justinvil, and Colwell 2021; Passalacqua and Pilloud 2021; Stantis et al. 2023.
15
See the American Anthropological Association’s“Commission on the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains,”
American Anthropological Association,https://americananthro.org/about/committees-and-task-forces/tcethr,
accessed September 25, 2023; Benjamin M. Auerbach and Fatimah L. C. Jackson, “Preliminary Report: Results of
the AABA Taskforce on the Ethical Study of Human Remains Survey of Members of the African American
Community and of Biological Anthropologists,”Fall 2022, American Association of Biological Anthropologists,
https://bioanth.org/documents/333/Preliminary_Report_-_AABA_Taskforce_on_the_Ethical_Study_of_Human_
Remains_Surveys.pdf, accessed September 25, 2023.
International Journal of Cultural Property 107
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Katricia’s remains and the teaching video of the examination of her bones. The data crimes
of scientific experts are multifaceted and are a major tool that they use to keep afloat a
dispute grounded on the territory that they control –to have the excuse to continue to keep
the dead as their property.
Katricia was 14 years old when she was murdered. She would have been 50 by the time
4,553 students from all over the world had enrolled in Princeton University’s Massive Open
Online Course (MOOC) on the free platform Coursera and watched the first lesson that
culminated in the examination of her bones.
16
The six-week course was titled “REAL BONES:
Adventures in Forensic Anthropology.”Coursera removed the course from public view
when the controversy over it broke out in April 2021, but, at the time of writing, part of the
video in which Monge uses Katricia’s bones as teaching tools can be viewed in a segment
from “Democracy Now!”
17
Additionally, some of the pages associated with the course are
preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, including transcripts of some of the
videos and the description of the first week’s contents.
18
This learning tool was originally filmed to support Monge’s own teaching at Princeton,
19
and she assigned it to students in her own Spring 2021 Forensic Anthropology course at the
University of Pennsylvania. Monge later said that she understood the MOOC “would have a
global reach, forensic anthropologists routinely handle cases involving missing persons or
genocide”and considered the MOVE case study of special value for that audience.
20
In the
first four videos of this “lesson”(Figure 1), Monge, then a visiting lecturer at Princeton,
Figure 1. Screenshot from Wayback Machine capture of now-deleted Princeton University course on
Coursera open learning platform, “REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology,”showing videos
for the first week’s lesson. Courtesy of the author.
16
See the archived version of the course webpage prior to its deletion. “REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic
Anthropology,”August 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20210421222119/https://www.coursera.org/learn/
real-bones-forensic-anthropology, accessed September 25, 2023.
17
Amy Goodman and Juan González, “Ivy League Secret Exposed: Classes Used Bones of Black Children Killed in
1985 MOVE Police Bombing,”Democracy Now! The Quarantine Report, 27 April 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/
2021/4/27/philadelphia_move_bombing_human_remains, accessed September 25, 2023.
18
See the syllabus, archived before it was deleted in April 2021. “REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic
Anthropology,”August 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20210421222119/https://www.coursera.org/learn/
real-bones-forensic-anthropology#syllabus, accessed September 25, 2023.
19
Pratt, Kastenberg, and Vassallo 2021.
20
Pratt, Kastenberg, and Vassallo 2021, 29 (paraphrasing their interview with Janet Monge); Janet Monge,
interview with author, March 2022.
108 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

introduces the MOVE bombing as the kind of event that can take away “personhood”and
describes some of the methods that forensic anthropologists use to determine the age of an
unknown victim.
21
In the second and third videos, she spends time discussing the images of
Katricia’s bones –closeup photographs as well as x-rays –and explains how this is a
controversial case because while “we”have concluded that this was the body of a young
woman, of the age of 18 or older, “other folks looking at the material”have concluded that
she was 14 years old.
In these videos, Monge lectured in a studio on Princeton’s campus.
22
But, for the final
video, titled “Forensic Anthropologist at Work: Jane Weiss,”the scene shifts to the Center for
the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) Room 190 classroom, in the basement of
the Penn Museum, where Monge was a curator.
23
This location was chosen by Monge as a
better set.
24
In this video, a number of bones are arrayed on a table –some smaller, more
fragmentary bones on the right, in front of Monge, and larger, more complete bones whose
origin is never given, in front of her student, Jane Weiss. The three small, fragmentary bones
in front of Monge are part of Katricia’s right thigh (femur), right hip (innominate), and part
of the left pubic bone (pubic symphysis).
25
While they discuss the bones of a murdered Black child, the two white women literally
stand in the center of a triangle of racialized human remains –on the examination table in
front of them and also in two walls of glass-fronted cabinets full of Morton’s stolen skulls
behind them (Figure 2). As their visual arrangement in the Coursera video suggests, these
two sets of remains –the bones of the MOVE children murdered in 1985 and the crania in
Morton’s nineteenth-century collection –are directly linked in ways that can help us to see
how white scientists extract data from the remains of the Black and brown dead in order to
support their interests. Morton’s collecting practices were both enabled by, and constituted,
US empire. Historian Ann Fabian describes the 138 suppliers that Morton recruited to rob
graves: “[M]issionaries in Africa, doctors in Florida and Cuba, diplomats in Mexico and Cairo,
white settlers …in Indiana, soldiers in Georgia, explorers in the Arctic, scientists in Oregon,
21
Janet M. Monge, “REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology,”Coursera course, Department of
Anthropology, Princeton University, 2020.
22
Pratt, Kastenberg, and Vassallo 2021.
23
As recently as August 1, 2023, the Penn Museum still listed Monge as “associate curator-in-charge and keeper
of collections”for the Physical Anthropology section, titles that she held for many years. Penn Museum, “Contact
Us,”https://web.archive.org/web/20230801072524/https://www.penn.museum/about/contact-us, accessed Sep-
tember 25, 2023. However, Monge told me that she had been fired on 25 September 2021. Janet Monge, interview
with author, April 2022. Penn Museum’s director aggressively denied that she had been fired when I met with him
two weeks later. Christopher Woods, interview with author, April 2022. The truth seems to lie somewhere in
between: Monge’s lawsuit on 20 April 2022 states that she was demoted to the position of keeper, resulting in a
$50,000 pay cut for two years, after which “she will have been deemed to retire.”Alan B. Epstein and Adam A. Filbert,
Janet Monge v. University of Pennsylvania, Spector Gadon Rosen Vinci P.C, Civil Action 22-2942, 20 May 2022, 44. The
Penn Directory, which draws from the university’s centralized Human Resources database, shows Janet Monge
holding the title of “manager, Museum Collections”rather than curator. “Penn Online Directory,”https://
directory.apps.upenn.edu/directory/jsp/fast.do, accessed on September 26, 2023. It seems that this is one of the
many things that the museum has decided to be secretive about –it is unclear whether they fear giving the
impression that they caved to the demands of MOVE members and others that she be fired. See petition “MOVE
Children Deserve to Rest in Peace!”
24
Pratt, Kastenberg, and Vassallo 2021,39–41.
25
A fourth bone fragment associated with Body B-1 (the designation for Katricia’s remains), the right pubic
symphysis, is not shown in this video, but is shown in a 2018 X-ray in an earlier video in Monge’s Coursera course
(Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022,33–38). As outlined in detail in section 2 of the report commissioned by the
city of Philadelphia in 2021, this is consistent with documentation from 1985 and 1986, which indicates that the
Medical Examiner’s Office as well as outside experts examined four fragments of Body B-1: the right femur, the right
innominate, and both the right and left pubic symphyses (Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022). However, the right
pubic symphysis remains unaccounted for after the 1 November 2018 Penn Museum x-ray.
International Journal of Cultural Property 109
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

and a president of Venezuela.”
26
The dead that Morton accumulated in Philadelphia were
trophies of American whiteness, which enacted the expanding empire simply by being
gathered together in one place, thousands of miles from where they had lived and breathed;
just as Katricia’s remains –from a house in West Philadelphia whose proximity Monge
stressed in the first video lesson –represent trophies of white dominance over Black
resistance.
Everything that shaped this fifth, and final, video in the lesson was built upon a
foundation of operationalizing the bodies of non-white dead in the service of white
supremacy. The CAAM 190 classroom was built in 2014 to Monge’s specifications, with
custom-made, old-fashioned cabinets to display skulls from the Morton Cranial Collection.
27
Their ordered presence, contained behind glass, conveys authority, control, knowledge –all
of which are about whiteness, wealth, and empire. The crania represent the proud lineage of
racial science as they were the very instruments with which Morton “proved”the biological
superiority of the white race, in the 1830s and 1840s. The door that led to the hallway was to
the left of where the film crew set up, and the shelves of the cabinet that faced the glass
window of that door exhibited dozens of skulls of dozens of African people who died in Cuban
slavery.
28
In the final Coursera video, Monge describes the condition of the remains and explains
that very little was recovered from “this individual”
29
–one who she had implied in the
previous four videos is still unidentified. She introduces her student, Jane Weiss, as “the
Figure 2. Dr. Janet Monge (right) and Penn undergraduate student Jane Weiss in CAAM 190 Classroom at the Penn
Museum, discussing the remains of Katricia Dotson, who was murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing (on the right, on
the table, in front of Monge) from Week 1 video in Princeton Coursera Course “REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic
Anthropology”(remains not blurred in the original). Courtesy of the author.
26
Fabian 2010, 36.
27
See 2014 announcement of the opening of this classroom in “New Center for the Analysis of Archaeological
Materials (CAAM), in Penn Museum’s Renovated Conservation and Teaching Labs,”University of Pennsylvania
Almanac, 61(7): 12, September 30, 2014, https://almanac.upenn.edu/archive/volumes/v61/n07/pdf/093014.pdf,
accessed on September 26, 2023.
28
Paul Wolff Mitchell, interview with author, January 2022.
29
Monge, “REAL BONES.”
110 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

person who’s looked at them most carefully”because she is doing her senior thesis on them
(this lesson was filmed in January 2019). While Monge holds one of the bones up to the
camera, she explains that they are “juicy,”they have a sheen reflecting the leeching of bone
marrow to the outside of the bone and a distinctive greasy smell –a sign that they are not
that old, and she points out the remains of the ligaments.
At Monge’s prompting, Weiss recites some of the different kinds of testing that she has
done, and some other kinds of testing that they hope to do. Monge adds that “hopefully this
is part of your thesis too, like sampling for DNA analysis and then attempting to match it
with, you know, records that are out there of missing folks,”reinforcing the impression that
the identity of the person whose remains are in the video is entirely unknown. When asked
to estimate the age of the bones, Weiss states: “I know that the person is in their preteen or
teenage years,”and Monge redirects her to offer the same explanations that she herself gave
in the previous videos for why the bones might seem to be that age (according to Monge,
those reasons include: their size, the apparent state of the various growth plates, and so on),
but, really, they are of an older individual (according to Monge, those reasons include: MOVE
people were malnourished, what look like an unfused epiphysis on the innominate bone is
really just the effect of the high heat and of something falling onto the bone when the house
collapsed, and so on).
Monge’s language, which I cannot see a way to quote directly without compounding the
harm, is remarkable –as intimate as the details she describes are, she does not acknowledge
that the forensic experts officially hired to investigate the bombing agreed on the identi-
fication of this individual, whose remains were initially designated “B-1.”The expert
forensic team that was brought in to identify the remains after the city very publicly
botched their investigation of the crime they committed, identified the B-1 remains as those
of 14-year-old Katricia “Tree”Africa, who was also described as being present in the
basement of the MOVE house at 6221 Osage Avenue by both of the bombing’s two survi-
vors.
30
In the Coursera videos, Monge notably does not call them “Body B-1,”even though
that label is used in the x-rays of Katricia’s remains that she shows in the second video
31
and
by Weiss in her thesis.
32
Monge’s specific line of reasoning to support her aging estimate,
however, can be traced back to 1985, when her mentor Alan Mann, first used these same
arguments to identify “Body B-1”as a 20-year-old woman.
33
Weiss also replicates Mann’s
analysis (presenting it as her own independent opinion) in her senior thesis, completed
months after the video was filmed.
34
How did Katricia’s remains –separated from her name and identity so as to serve as an
introductory “case study”of what it means for forensic anthropologists to restore “lost
personhood”–end up in front of a film crew in the museum of the Ivy League university in
the city that had been that child’s home? Why did Monge claim that her remains had not
been identified? And why does she, and the Penn Museum, continue to deny that they also
had Delisha Africa’s remains?
35
30
For the identification of these remains as those of Katricia, see Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022. For the
bizarre sequence of disputes in connection with her remains, see Heim et al. 2022,90–96.
31
Monge, “REAL BONES.”
32
Weiss 2019.
33
Tucker Law Group 2021, Exhibit 6.
34
Weiss 2019.
35
Delisha Africa is Delisha Orr. I use the former name in this article because it is what her living mother, Janet
Africa, calls her. For the identification of the “Body G”remains as those of Delisha, and the evidence for her remains
having been at the Penn Museum from 23 September 1986, until (at least) 1 November 2018, see Bradford-Grey and
Remondino 2022; Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad, “Decades after Philadelphia’s MOVE Bombing, Penn Museum Still
Keeps Secrets on the Remains of 12-Year-Old Girl,”Hyperallergic, 20 April 2022, https://hyperallergic.com/725976/
philadelphia-move-bombing-penn-museum-still-keeps-secrets-on-the-remains, accessed on September 26, 2023;
International Journal of Cultural Property 111
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Anonymizing Katricia, Disappearing Delisha
The harm in this case is unthinkable.
36
And, yet, the violence inflicted on the children by
the police department that took their lives, by the white medical examiner who gave
away their remains, and by the white scholars and curators who used them as teaching
tools and props for over 30 years, even exposing them in a teaching video distributed
worldwide, is not in any way inexplicable. Rather, it is part of a centuries-long pattern of
Philadelphia’s scientists and agents of the state defining themselves as white and human
and defining people who looked like these murdered children as Black and subhuman. On
13 May 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department bombed the West Philadelphia home of
the members of MOVE, a Black anti-police organization, igniting a fire that burned down
an entire Black neighborhood, and murdered 11 people.
37
The premeditated attack was
designed to kill everyone in the house that day, including the children –afactacknowl-
edged obliquely in October 2022 when the Department of Public Health reissued the death
certificates of all 11 victims, to characterize their deaths as homicides rather than
accidents.
38
The attack continues to haunt the city of Philadelphia. Thus, the news in April 2021 that
some of its violated dead had been kept at the Penn Museum –and, in the following month,
that the city’s Medical Examiner’s Office had also secretly kept a number of trophies from
the victims’bodies
39
–opened old wounds for many, including specifically those who loved
these people during their lives. Fourteen-year-old Katricia’s family thought that she had
been buried, alongside her sister Zanetta, in December 1985, when her father watched her
baby blue coffin be lowered into the earth as her aunt collapsed in tears beside the grave.
40
Katricia’s brother, Lionell Dotson, learned that his sister’s bones were in a teaching video
when his wife saw an article about it on the Internet in 2021.
41
A representative for
12-year-old Delisha’s incarcerated parents authorized the burial of their daughter in
September 1986. After believing her daughter to have been buried for 35 years, Janet Africa
has had to live with uncertainty as to the whereabouts of her daughter’s remains since 2021.
as the article was going to print, new photographic evidence emerged of Janet Monge displaying the remains of two
MOVE victims at a public event in her lab at the Penn Museum in 2014, including Delisha Africa, whose remains she
and the Penn Museum denied ever having.Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad, “Statement on new evidence about MOVE
Remains held at Penn Museum,”read at press conference at Penn Museum on 31 August, 2023, https://aaliy.sub
stack.com/p/statement-on-new-evidence-about-move, accessed September 25, 2023.
36
Our understanding of the harm in this case has been even more painfully compounded by the testimony of the
survivors who were raised in MOVE, and who came forward a couple of months after the revelations that the Penn
Museum had Katricia and Delisha’s remains, to speak to the horrifying sexual violence they suffered at the hands of
MOVE adults. West Philadelphia journalist and organizer Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, captured the painfully interwo-
ven nature of the violence that Katricia and Delisha were subjected to at the end of their lives and in death, and that
which MOVE children were subjected to in life, tweeting: “It’s possible to know and understand that what happened
to MOVE over decades is the result of white supremacist violence. It’s possible to know and understand that what
happened to MOVE survivors of childhood abuse/sexual violence is the result of the same systems.”Twitter,
4 August 2021, https://twitter.com/MxAbdulAliy/status/1422955664155029509, accessed on September 26, 2023.
37
Harry 1987.
38
Jason Laughlin, “Families of 11 People Killed in the 1985 MOVE Bombing Never Considered Their Deaths
Accidental. Now Pennsylvania Officially Agrees with Them,”Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 October 2022, https://
www.inquirer.com/news/move-bombing-1985-philadelphia-victims-homicide-20221012.html, accessed on Sep-
tember 26, 2023. This was done in direct response the recommendations of the report commissioned by the city
of Philadelphia. Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022; Heim et al. 2022.
39
Heim et al. 2022.
40
Amy Linn, “2 Victims of MOVE Fire Are Buried, But Questions Linger,”Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 December 1985.
41
Lionell Dotson, “Wake Up with WURD,”interview by Mark Kelly Tyler, 22 March 2022, https://soundcloud.
com/onwurd/wake-up-with-wurd-32222-lionell-dotson-sr-and-attorney-daniel-hartstein, accessed on September
26, 2023.
112 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shortly after the news broke in April 2021, she described the horror: “[W]hen our babies are
born, they kill them. When they’re growing up, they kill them. When they get older as adults,
they kill them …over and over. And now after so called death …they’re going to do this?”
42
The “why”behind this horror is complex and also not: the dismembered remains of these
criminalized Black people constituted trophies for the white people who had subdued them
–a long-standing practice of American white supremacy, reflecting what historian Daina
Ramey Berry terms their “ghost value.”
43
The “how”is still emerging, but what we do know
of the path that the girls’unburied remains took –from the day that their home was bombed
to that teaching video –is long and horrifying. Three days after the bombing, Monge, who
was then a doctoral student, and her advisor, Mann, a paleoanthropologist at the University
of Pennsylvania, examined the remains of all 11 people murdered on 13 May and made
identifications of their age and whether they were male or female.
44
An independent team
was brought in two months later, hired by the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commis-
sion set up by the mayor and led by world-renowned forensic experts. This team found that
Mann and Monge had misidentified a number of the bodies.
45
Even though he had only been employed by the Medical Examiner’s Office for a day and a
half at the beginning of the investigation, Mann reinserted himself following the MOVE
Commission’s public hearings in November 1985.
46
Upon re-examining the remains with
Janet Monge, challenged the expert reevaluation of the remains where it contradicted his
own, particularly the assessment of the two bodies for which the new teams’identifications
were not backed up by airtight evidence (prior x-rays of unique injuries or bone configu-
rations and so on). Mann insisted these remains, which the external team had identified as
12-year-old Delisha (“Body G”) and 14-year-old Katricia (“Body B-1”), were instead those of a
six-year-old girl and an 18- to 20-year-old woman, respectively. Because no individuals
fitting those descriptions were in the house at the time of the bombing, Mann essentially
argued that there were two Jane Does, two unknown victims of the fire. He was backed in
42
Livestream of press conference by hate5six, “MOVE Press Conference 4/26: Addressing UPenn & Princeton’s
Theft of Bones of Murdered MOVE Children,”26 April 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3N1D10Fcw,
accessed on September 26, 2023.
43
Berry 2017.
44
Tucker Law Group 2021, Exhibit 7. A second graduate student, Michael Spiers, initially joined Mann and
Monge, but told the New York Times that “The minute I saw the scope of the task, I realized that Alan was not the
right person for this,”he said. “This was not his field of expertise.”Bronwen Dickey, “She Was Killed by the Police.
Why Were Her Bones in a Museum?”New York Times Magazine, 19 October 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/
10/19/magazine/philadelphia-move-bombing-katricia-dotson.html, accessed September 26, 2023.
45
Tucker Law Group 2021, Exhibit 4.
46
Tucker Law Group 2021, Exhibit 6. Mann’s challenge led to numerous newspaper articles that caused
additional trauma to the families of the victims, even as further evaluations by outside experts continued to
affirm that the age estimates of the official forensics team had been correct. For examples of these news articles, see
Marc Kaufman, “Professor: MOVE Body Incorrectly Identified,”Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 November 1985; Marc
Kaufman, “MOVE Finding Disputed: 4 Experts Challenge Panel on Remains,”Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 January 1986.
When asked to provide the reports of the “four experts”from the headline of the January Philadelphia Inquirer article
to the members of the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission or MOVE Commission (William B. Lytton to
Robert J. Segal, 24 January 1986, Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission Records [PSIC Records], Temple
University Special Collections [TUSC]), Segal was unable to offer anything other than Mann’s report and mention
that Janet Monge had also been present for Mann’s reexamination (Robert Segal to William B. Lytton, 27 January
1986, PSIC Records, TUSC). By contrast, the forensic team’s determination that Body B-1 was Katricia Dotson was
affirmed by reports from several additional outside experts, most notably that of Judy Suchey, an expert on aging
pelvic bones (“Age Determination of the ‘MOVE’Pelvic-Femoral Fragments,”22 January 1986, PSIC Records, TUSC).
Following receipt of Suchey’s report, which estimated the age of the B-1 remains at 12–17 years old and,
hence, consistent with Katricia Dotson’s age at her death (14), Segal acknowledged that “It would be unreasonable
for me to reject these findings in light of the evidence available at this time”(Robert J. Segal to William Lytton,
23 January 1986, PSIC Records, TUSC).
International Journal of Cultural Property 113
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

these identifications by the city’s assistant medical examiner, Robert Segal, who had
reportedly threatened the leader of the independent team with filing a contradictory report
if he was not allowed to co-author their report.
47
Segal’s own write-up of that reexamination
seems to show that Mann quietly conceded that it was possible that Body G was indeed
Delisha.
48
Mann continued to insist that B-1 was not Katricia Dotson.
The painful paper trail for Delisha’s and Katricia’s bones that ended up in Mann’s
possession can be seen in three documents from a box that was recently discovered at
the Medical Examiner’s Office and is now in the City of Philadelphia’s Archives.
49
On 6 March
1986, after Katricia’s family believed they had buried her, Segal sent both Katricia’s and
Delisha’s remains out for one last review by Stephanie Damadio, an anthropologist at the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, who still had the remains
when Segal submitted his final report on 18 March 1986 (Figure 3).
50
And when Damadio sent
Figure 3. Letter from Robert Segal to Stephanie Damadio, sending “B-1”and “G”remains to the
Smithsonian, 6 March 1986. Courtesy of the City of Philadelphia Archives.
47
Ali Hameli, the leader of the independent forensics team, specifically stated that he suspected that “the noise
that [Segal] raised regarding the age of Cases G and B-1”was him following through on this threat. Letter from Ali
Z. Hameli to William B. Lytton, staff director and counsel, Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission,
28 February 1986. PSIC Records, TUSC.
48
Robert Segal, memorandum, “Postmortem Examination Addenda,”14 November 1985, PSIC Records, TUSC.
49
Heim et al. 2022,66–77.
50
Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022.
114 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

them back in September 1986 (Figure 4)–without the written aging report that Segal had
asked for –he gave Katricia’s and Delisha’s bones to Mann (Figure 5). His graduate student,
Monge, picked them up at the Medical Examiner’s Office, which was then a short walk away
from the Penn Museum, and Mann kept the murdered children’s remains in his office at the
museum –where he held the curatorial position his advisee, Monge, would later hold –and
never bothered to return them.
51
Figure 4. Shipping invoice from Damadio to Segal, returning “human skeletal remains,”17 September 1986.
Courtesy of the City of Philadelphia Archives.
51
Monge has denied repeatedly that she ever received Delisha’s remains and insists that Katricia’s remains are
not actually hers. In April 2022, she initiated a lawsuit against 38 defendants, as of 30 July 2022, who she claims have
International Journal of Cultural Property 115
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 5. Segal’s memo and receipt signed by Monge, transferring bones sent by Smithsonian to Mann,
23 September 1986. Courtesy of the City of Philadelphia Archives.
defamed her by (among other things) claiming that she had Delisha’s remains. Epstein and Filbert, Janet Monge
v. University of Pennsylvania. A federal judge has been granting motions to dismiss this lawsuit, and, at the time of
writing, a number of her charges had been thrown out. Segal and Mann refused to talk to the attorneys conducting
the City of Philadelphia’s recent investigation into the chain of custody of the remains (Bradford-Grey and
Remondino 2022), one of whom says that Segal hung up on her after saying: “I have no interest in talking about
something that happened so long ago. Don’t call me again.”Kier Bradford-Grey, “Return, Rebury, Repatriate,”
Distillations Podcast, interview with Alexis Pedrick, 7 March 2023, https://sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/
return-rebury-repatriate, accessed on September 26, 2023. See also footnote 3 for the newly uncovered photo-
graphic evidence placing Delisha’s remains in Monge’s possession at the Penn Museum.
116 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Mann appears to have lost interest in the remains quickly, stating that, after 1986, “Ido
not recall opening the Penn Museum cabinet that safeguarded the fragments or reviewing
the fragments.”
52
However, over the next three decades, Monge invited multiple students to
confirm Mann’s aging of Katricia’s bones.
53
Jane Weiss, the daughter of Jill Topkis Weiss, a
major donor to the Penn Museum and member of its Board of Overseers, as well as a trustee
of the University of Pennsylvania, was only the most open and public sharing of the data that
Mann extracted from Katricia Dotson’s body. In the Coursera video, we witness Monge in the
process of teaching yet another student how to “properly”replicate the data of her advisor.
Monge engaged in this pattern of inviting students to replicate the data of a white male
predecessor with Morton’s crania as well. In Morton’s case, his data had been publicly
debunked in Stephen Jay Gould’s1981 bestseller The Mismeasure of Man.
54
By 1985, Monge
recruited students into the project of measuring and remeasuring the crania in order to
defend the accuracy of Morton’s science. With their focus on Morton’s data, the multiple
generations of students who have jumped into this debate –either to challenge Gould or to
support him –continue to miss the fact that the “collection”is not a set of scientific
“specimens”; it is evidence of an ongoing colonial crime in which they are now, at the very
least, accomplices.
55
The Coursera video’s visual juxtaposition of the two sets of stolen remains –Morton’s
Cranial Collection and Katricia’s bones –allows us to unlock the ways in which the more
recent and ongoing racial violence was built upon a broader logic of white supremacy, rather
than just being the deeds of a misguided handful of deranged racists. As Black biocultural
anthropologist Rachel Watkins has observed, anatomical collections such as Morton’s often
come from the same places that have witnessed some of the most horrifying instances of
anti-Black state violence, pointing to their role in shaping white perceptions of Black bodies:
the Robert J. Terry anatomical collection, now held by the Smithsonian, originated near
where Michael Brown’s body was left in the street for four hours, and the Hamann-Todd
anatomical collection is still housed in the same town where, as she describes it, “a
12-year-old boy playing in a park with a toy gun, Tamir Rice, was mistaken for a
20-year-old man brandishing a weapon and was shot dead.”
56
Similarly, the Morton Cranial
Collection is housed just over three miles from 6221 Osage Avenue, the site of the MOVE
bombing.
White science, Black bodies, open data
Katricia Dotson and Delisha Africa were not the first criminalized Black Philadelphians to
have parts of their bodies collected by the Penn Museum. A number of the skulls that lined
the walls of the classroom in which Monge filmed her Coursera video (Figure 2) were also
unofficial gifts of the City of Philadelphia to white scientists.
57
Prior to publishing the 1849
52
Tucker Law Group 2021, Exhibit 15.
53
Monge has openly described this in a number of contexts, including her statements to investigators for Tucker
Law Group (2021) and Ballard Spahr LLP (Pratt, Kastenberg, and Vassallo 2021), in their reports for the University of
Pennsylvania and Princeton University, respectively.
54
Gould 1981,82–101. Gould first published his critique of Morton in Science in 1978.
55
I have learned of numerous episodes of remeasuring the Morton crania and reexamining Morton’s data over
the decades. In some cases, this work resulted in publications by Janet’s students and interns (Michael 1988; Lewis
et al. 2011; Mitchell 2018).
56
Watkins 2018, 40.
57
Jacquelyne Germain, “Stolen Skulls of Black Philadelphians Were Displayed in an Ivy League Classroom for
Years. They May Soon Receive a Proper Burial,”CNN.com, 13 August 2022, https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/13/us/
penn-museum-skulls-black-philadelphians-reaj/index.html, accessed on September 26, 2023. An assessment of the
abuse to which the ancestors in the Morton Cranial Collection were submitted through exhibition at the Penn
International Journal of Cultural Property 117
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

catalog of his collection of crania, Samuel George Morton appears to have personally stolen
the heads of at least seven Black people who died in Philadelphia’s almshouse, who were
confined there for the crime of being poor.
58
Such theft from the city-run institution was not
an anomaly but, rather, an accepted practice; grave robbing from the almshouse’s burial
ground was so widespread that an 1845 letter revealed: “[T]hat it occasions dread and
anxiety in the minds of some of the inmates of this House is a well known fact.”
59
Morton was
a physician at the almshouse and may have treated the people whose heads he stole after
death. He turned them into objects for his collection of “crania,”the anatomical term for the
top portion of the skull that holds the brain and upper teeth, without the moving mandible
or lower jaw. There, they joined nearly 1,000 crania that Morton stole from around the world
over about two decades.
Based on what he and the men who did most of the stealing for him recorded, the people
likely came from all of the countries highlighted on the map (Figure 6).
60
Morton’s research
was boldly expansive in its faith that measuring skulls offered definitive proof of the relative
inferiorities of the darker people of the world: those who he believed deserved enslavement,
displacement, and exploitation. Morton was not the first to suggest that the human head
could be the key to the science of race –a science that was ultimately concerned with
proving the superiority of white people over the races they encountered, subjugated, and
murdered in their imperial endeavors. In the second half of the eighteenth century,
European scientists made much of the supposed perfection of form of Greek and Roman
statues as indicative of white superiority,
61
and the practitioners of phrenology measured
thousands of living heads in a closely related project of linking human character and worth
to head shape.
62
Many nineteenth-century scientists and doctors in the United States and
Europe also collected skulls of various humans and animals, and engaged in similar work,
63
though arguably none had the impact that Morton did.
Museum, as well as through use in educational programing and events, is outside of the scope of this article;
however, for a representative program centered on the Morton Cranial Collection, see the website for “The Public
Classroom @ Penn Museum”from 2016, https://www.penn.museum/sites/pmclassroom, accessed on September
26, 2023; and the short film about this project: When Science Meets Race, directed by Arjun Shankar, 27 June 2017,
https://vimeo.com/223316500, accessed on September 26, 2023.
58
I have arrived at this tentative number based on cross-referencing a variety of sources for indications that
Morton listed himself, and not another doctor, as the source of specific crania, in particular, Morton’s first catalog of
his collection (Morton 1840) and the manuscript catalog of the collection housed at the Academy of Natural
Sciences at Drexel (formerly, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia), which held the collection prior to it
being moved to the Penn Museum in 1966 (“Ethnology Collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences of
Philadelphia catalog,”vol. 1, Collection 177, Academy of Natural Sciences Archives). Paul Wolff Mitchell (2021)
points out that Morton acquired these skulls during the time that he working at the Philadelphia Almshouse, and
this along with other aspects of their descriptions in his records suggest strongly that the crania belonged to people
who were incarcerated at the almshouse.
59
Humphrey 1973.
60
While modern nation-states do not correspond to the identities that had any meaning for many –if any at all –
of the people whose remains were stolen for Morton’s collection, I have settled on this imperfect solution for
conveying the global scope of Morton’s theft of ancestors and the ongoing theft that grew the collection following
his death. It is often the case that more precise data about locations and races are offered by Morton and those who
acquired the skulls for him, but, for many reasons –not least of which is the violence of this data and its use –I have
chosen not to map those locations. I also find this approach to mapping helpful for members of descendant
communities in offering a quick view, at a glance, of which countries are impacted by Morton’s collection. Even so,
this map is incomplete, as it only represents where people’s bodies were taken from, not necessarily where they
were born (as, for example, with the 53 people whose heads José Rodríguez Cisneros stole from Cuba, but claimed
had been born in Africa), nor does it fully represent the relative impact, as Morton stole hundreds of crania from
within the borders of some modern nation-states, and only one from others.
61
Bindman 2002; Monteiro 2012.
62
Colbert 1997.
63
Dain 2002, 197–226.
118 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Morton used German racial scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s division of human-
ity into five races, between which Morton’s uniquely large collection supposedly allowed
him to distinguish on the basis of skull size and shape. According to Morton, bigger skulls
meant more intelligence, and he interpreted the data he extracted from his collection to
mean that “Caucasians”had the biggest heads,
64
and the other races fell into a hierarchy
beneath them, based on their head size: first “Mongolian,”then “Malay,”“American”
(meaning people indigenous to the Americas), and, finally, “Ethiopian.”The central aspect
of Morton’s work was data making –capturing data –which is every bit as much a colonial
process as is race making. How a measurement gets defined, and what meaning gets assigned
to it, is far from neutral or natural. All data creation is reductive, and, when applied to
humans, it turns a person into a number or a two-dimensional image, reducing them to
something less than fully human. Through the data that he created from the crania he held
captive, Morton ventriloquized the beliefs in white superiority that were as widespread
among white men in Philadelphia as they were in the American South.
65
Proving Black people’s“natural”subservience, low intelligence, and, thus, suitability for
enslavement seems to have been Morton’s primary preoccupation, whether ostensibly
writing about Indigenous people of the Americas or Ancient Egyptians.
66
For his efforts,
he was eulogized thus in the Charleston Medical Journal:“[W]e of the South should consider
him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as
an inferior race.”
67
What made Morton’s work so powerful was his aggressive openness with
his data. Morton spread his racist ideologies beyond his circle of friends and correspondents
Figure 6. Map indicating modern nation-states from which Morton and his successors stole crania, based on the
information recorded about each cranium by Morton, the 138 people who collected crania for him around the world,
and those who gave additional crania to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia following Morton’s death in
1851. Cartographer: Catherine Gilman; courtesy of SAPIENS.
64
For how Morton came up with justifications for excluding “Caucasians”with smaller heads from his
calculations, see Gould 1981, 92.
65
Lapsansky 1980.
66
Frederickson 1971,76–78; Monteiro 2012,90–97.
67
Stanton 1960, 144.
International Journal of Cultural Property 119
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

most significantly through his two major books and their prospectuses and published
reviews, which traveled more broadly than did the expensive, image-rich volumes them-
selves and inspired devoted followers who would advance his racial science even further.
68
Crania Americana and Crania Aegyptiaca are filled with lists of measurements and detailed
lithographs of his collection, tied together by racist conclusions to support the growth of the
white supremacist republic he held dear.
69
In a practice that is still well regarded as a sign of
scientific rigor and transparency, Morton obsessively made his raw data available, inviting
challenges to his conclusions without, of course, inviting challenges to the data itself.
Morton also published and then republished and then republished again the catalog of
his collection so that gentlemen scientists everywhere could know as much as possible about
its contents.
70
Images are data too, and, as with Morton’s measurements, the extremely detailed
drawings in his books quite literally “capture”that which he has determined to be
meaningful about the person, a two-dimensional representation that is so overflowing with
details that it redirects our attention from noticing all of the details –all of the three-
dimensionality, the humanity of the person –that are missing. These images also hide the
damage, violence, and violation that produced the state of the cranium depicted by the
artists who Morton hired –the theft, the dismembering, the boiling off of flesh, and, before
all of that, perhaps, the violence and starvation that caused the death. The artists also left off
of their illustrations all of the writing that Morton and his dealers scribbled directly onto the
bones of his “specimens.”Nevertheless, they are a substantial presence in all of the modern
photographs and in-person encounters with the crania. Collectively, these labels make a
powerful impression of the intellectual mastery of Morton and his circle, across time and
space, and their physical possession of these people who he had made his property.
Due to the violence and violation that is Morton’s data, I am reproducing it as little as
possible in this article. The specific manner in which he shared his data is crucial and directly
related to the Penn Museum’s data-sharing practices, so I feel the need to at least give a sense
of the outlines and the characteristics of this data. In doing so, I seek also to foreground my
awareness of my position as a scholar and a human with respect to those who were, and
continue to be, violated. When it comes to the Morton Cranial Collection, the question of
positioning is rendered extremely complex by the breadth of his collecting. His work
targeted not just one person or a group of people but was quite clearly also designed to
dehumanize all non-white people.
I approach this material as a member of one of the many descendant groups from whom
Morton and his network of donors stole ancestors. My Indian ancestors lived and died under
Portuguese and British colonial rule in Bombay, Goa, Mangalore, and Karachi; South Asian
crania made up one of the largest “groups”in Morton’s collection, after Native Americans,
ancient Peruvians, ancient Egyptians, and enslaved Africans.
71
Following patterns that more
or less hold for the rest of his collection, Morton’s catalogs record little other than a racial
categorization for most of the 40 heads stolen from the subcontinent, sometimes followed by
a gender, some measurements, and maybe concluding with the name of the donor. The
person themselves is almost always nameless, their identity subsumed within that of the
white collector and the white scientist.
Three of these Indian crania –nameless but for another physician at the Philadelphia
almshouse, Joseph Carson, who brought them back from India –hover above the right
shoulder of the white student, Jane Weiss, in the widely published stills from the Coursera
68
Fabian 2010.
69
Morton 1839,1844.
70
Morton 1840,1843,1849.
71
Morton 1849,v–vi.
120 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

video, exposed in their own degradation even as they witness the consequences of nearly
200 years of Morton’s numericized racial hatred (Figure 2).
72
Like Katricia’s bones, their
skulls have been rendered anonymous by science, removed from the contexts of their lives
and families to become the research tools of empire.
Data versus repatriation
After Morton’s death in 1851, his followers continued his work, providing some of the most
enduring images of racial science.
73
In 1966, his collection of crania was given on permanent
loan to the Penn Museum by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Two decades
later, Monge, then a graduate student, was appointed as the first and only “keeper”of the
collection, a title that is rarely used in the United States, which the Penn Museum uses to
describe a role that combines aspects of a curator and a collections manager.
74
Monge’s
oversight of the Morton Cranial Collection reveals a set of curatorial practices that we see
mirrored in her ownership of the MOVE remains: a strategic deployment of the idea of
science, of the primacy of data, of the expert and their research that directly overrides the
rights of survivors, family, and descendants of lost loved ones who were snatched from
crime scenes, battlefields, and graves.
75
She has been able to do so in large part because there
are few rules –whether in terms of law or professional practice –preventing non-medical
scientists from extracting data from human remains or requiring them to return the dead to
their respective communities.
In the United States, the idea that it was possible for descendant communities to take
back their ancestors from the museums and scientists who claimed them as property was
codified into law by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)
in 1990.
76
Under NAGPRA, federally funded museums must at least attempt to return certain
stolen remains –those that can be associated with federally recognized Indian tribes and
Native Hawaiian organizations.
77
Beyond Native American remains, however, there are few laws that protect human
remains in museum contexts. Despite increasing recognition internationally of the rights
of postcolonial nations to seek repatriation for their ancestors stolen for science by former
colonial powers, museums in the United States are not required to comply with such
requests.
78
Additionally, no legislation offers protection similar to NAGPRA for Black
remains in the United States, though efforts to create an African American Graves
72
My identification of these crania is based on reconstructing the location of the crania in the CAAM 190
classroom in the basement of the Penn Museum, where they were on display from 2014 until 2020, with the
assistance of Paul Wolff Mitchell (interviews with author, December 2021 and January 2022). Mitchell worked for
and with Monge in the Physical Anthropology Section of the Penn Museum from 2009 until 2019, as an
undergraduate work-study student and later as a PhD student. Short of Monge herself, he is the carrier of
institutional memory around both the Morton Cranial Collection and the MOVE remains.
73
Nott and Gliddon 1854, figures 339–44.
74
Janet Monge, interview with author, March 2022.
75
The Morton Cranial Collection and the MOVE remains are not the only human remains that have been under
Monge’s care for decades –estimates range from 10,000 on the Penn Museum’s website (Penn Museum “Physical
Anthropology Section,”https://www.penn.museum/about-collections/curatorial-sections/physical-anthropol
ogy-section [accessed on September 26, 2023]) to Monge’s statement that the museum has 250,000 human remains
(Tucker Law Group 2021, Exhibit 14), a truly staggering number when it comes to considering the need for return.
76
Fine-Dare 2002; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 16 November 1990, 104 Stat. 3048
(NAGPRA).
77
The extreme failure of most institutions to fulfill their obligations under NAGPRA is highlighted by
ProPublica’s ongoing series “The Repatriation Project: The Delayed Return of Native Remains,”January 11, 2023-
(ongoing), https://www.propublica.org/series/the-repatriation-project, accessed on September 26, 2023.
78
Fforde, McKeown, and Keeler 2020.
International Journal of Cultural Property 121
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Protection and Repatriation Act were reinvigorated by the revelation that the Penn Museum
secretly held Katricia’s and Delisha’s remains.
79
This leaves the majority of the Morton Cranial Collection not legally covered by any
repatriation laws –positioned, in the words of Rachel Watkins, as “static entities perpetually
available for research”
80
–to be used without consent at any time and in any way that the
researchers desire. While these practices are widespread among museum anthropologists,
Monge is extreme in her insistence on making sensitive data widely available and unique in
terms of the sets of remains on which she has primarily focused her work at the Penn
Museum: the iconic collection of Samuel George Morton, which was used to rank the relative
value of different races, and the remains of Black people murdered by the police in the 1985
MOVE bombing.
In 2019, the Penn Museum’s cavalier attitude toward the remains it treats as its
possessions was directly challenged by West Philadelphia organizer and writer Abdul-Aliy
Muhammad, who was the first to say, according to Manlu Liu in The Daily Pennsylvanian, that
“[t]he crania in the Morton collection should be returned to relatives, and if that’s not
possible, buried.”
81
Muhammad found out that the remains of enslaved people were in the
museum’s basement at the 2019 Penn & Slavery
82
Symposium on 3 and 4 April, which they
learned about from a pop-up ad online the previous day.
83
The following year, Muhammad’s
calls for return and reparations
84
were joined by others, including the abolitionist assembly
Police Free Penn
85
and Penn undergraduate student Gabriela Alvarado.
86
Alvarado, who was
79
Dunnavant, Justinvil, and Colwell 2021.
80
Watkins 2018, 32.
81
Manlu Liu, “Penn & Slavery Project Finds Profs Collected Body Parts of Enslaved People in the 1800s,”The Daily
Pennsylvanian, 19 April 2019, https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/04/penn-slavery-project-findings-research-
medicine, accessed on September 26, 2023.
82
The Penn & Slavery Project, a multi-year project run by undergraduate students, seeks to uncover the history
of the university’s involvement with slavery in the face of multiple statements by the university administration
denying any such involvement. See Zoe Greenberg, “Indebted: At the University of Pennsylvania, a ‘Comforting
Story’about Slavery and an Ongoing Search for the Truth,”A More Perfect Union series, Philadelphia Inquirer,
22 October 2022, https://www.inquirer.com/news/inq2/more-perfect-union-university-pennsylvania-history-
slavery-research-20221011.html, accessed on September 26, 2023.
83
Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, interview with author, January 2022.
84
Muhammad’s consistent and impactful publication on the need to return the Morton Cranial Collection spans
from social media to Philadelphia’s paper of record; some key examples include Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, “Demand
University of Penn to Return Enslaved Crania,”Change.org, 18 May 2019, https://www.change.org/p/president-of-
university-of-penn-and-board-of-trustees-university-of-penn-to-return-enslaved-crania, accessed on September
26, 2023; Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, “As Reparations Debate Continues, the University of Pennsylvania Has a Role
to Play,”Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 July 2019, https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/university-of-penn
sylvania-slavery-reparations-debate-20190712.html, accessed on September 26, 2023; Abdul-Aliy Muhammad,
“Penn, Complicit in Slavery and Displacement Must Engage in Reparative Action,”The Daily Pennsylvanian, 29 August
2019, https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/08/penn-slavery-project-racism-ivy-league-upenn-philadelphia,
accessed on September 26, 2023; Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, “It’s Past Time for Penn Museum to Repatriate the Morton
Skull Collection,”Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 April 2021, https://www.inquirer.com/news/mortion-collection-skulls-
upenn-museum-repatriation-racial-justice-20210405.html, accessed on September 26, 2023.
85
Police Free Penn, “Abolition Now: We Demand a #PoliceFreePenn,”Medium.com, 15 June 2020, https://
policefreepenn.medium.com/abolition-now-we-demand-a-policefreepenn-8f6ca2d30f1a, accessed September 25,
2023. For a more detailed discussion of this stage of resistance, see Kinjal Dave and Jake Nussbaum “How the
Possession of Human Remains Led to a Public Reckoning at the Penn Museum,”Hyperallergic, 31 October 2021,
https://hyperallergic.com/688818/how-the-possession-of-human-remains-led-to-a-public-reckoning-at-the-
penn-museum, accessed September 26, 2023.
86
Gabriela Alvarado, “The Penn Museum Must End Abuse of the Morton Collection,”The Daily Pennsylvanian,
25 June 2020, https://www.thedp.com/article/2020/06/penn-museum-samuel-morton-collection-repatriation-
nagpra-skulls-racist-science, accessed September 26, 2023.
122 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

transcribing Morton’s correspondence at the time of the George Floyd Uprising, published a
piece in the Penn student newspaper on 25 June 2020, vividly describing the horror of the
Morton Cranial Collection, wherein “[m]any [of the human beings in the collection] were
brutally exploited by colonialism while they were alive, and now they rest in a predomi-
nantly white institution.”Alvarado uplifted Muhammad’s and Police Free Penn’s demands
for repatriation, stating that “[t]hese people belong with their descendants. They belong in
their homeland.”
By the end of the summer, the Penn Museum had removed “the part of the Morton
Collection that has been located in a classroom,”
87
noticeably not mentioning how many
crania had been on display in CAAM 190. In part, this reflects the broader disorganization of
the Morton Cranial Collection. To this day, there is no precise count of the crania in the
collection, though Paul Wolff Mitchell, who worked for Monge for a decade, estimates that
between 500–600 of the crania were arranged on shelves in the small classroom.
88
The
museum also established an internal committee to study the “complications”of repatriating
the remains of enslaved people in the Morton Cranial Collection.
89
The membership of this
committee remains secret. The Morton Collection Committee’s initial charge was to address
the repatriation of the 51 crania of African-born enslaved people who were stolen from their
graves in Cuba.
90
In February 2021, Mitchell, who was then a doctoral candidate in
anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, published a report that called into question
the basic assumption that those were the “only”remains of enslaved people in the
collection, highlighting the presence of 14 Black Philadelphians who were listed in Morton’s
catalogs, some of whom would have been enslaved earlier in their lives.
91
As a result, the
Penn Museum press release on 12 April 2021, containing their apology, and the Morton
Collection Committee’s recommendations, expanded the scope of repatriation to include the
entire Morton collection.
92
Another recommendation was “the Museum should ensure that Community consultation
is integrated into the process of assessment and action at every step.”
93
And after hiding
from a sea of bad press related to the MOVE remains, the Penn Museum did indeed form a
“Morton Cranial Collection Community Advisory Group,”to address the Black Philadel-
phians in the Morton Cranial Collection. It appears, however, that this is a purely superficial
attempt at “community involvement”; without informing the group’s members, the Penn
Museum petitioned Philadelphia’s Orphans’Court for permission to bury these Black
Philadelphians, claiming that the burial plan in their petition is the recommendation of
87
According to an “Update on the Morton Collection”that is visible on this archived version of the Penn
Museum’s“Morton Cranial Collection”page from 20 July 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/
20200720174404/https://www.penn.museum/sites/morton, accessed September 26, 2023.
88
Mitchell told me that the crania that were catalogued as numbers 1 through 1,000 by Morton and his
successors were on display in the classroom, minus those that had been repatriated under NAGPRA, or were being
stored in the repatriation room, pending possible return (this included crania that fell under NAGPRA, as well as
some others that did not –including crania from Greenland and Canada). Paul Wolff Mitchell, interview with
author, December 2021.
89
A new webpage for the Morton Cranial Collectionwas publishedin April 2021, coincidingwith the release of the
Morton Collection Committee’s report. It is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210409045433/https://
www.penn.museum/sites/morton, accessed September 26, 2023.
90
See Morton Collection Committee, “Report on Evaluation Phase,”Penn Museum, 8 April 2021, https://
www.penn.museum/sites/morton/MortonCommitteeReport.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
91
Mitchell 2021.
92
“Museum Announces the Repatriation of the Morton Cranial Collection,”press release, Penn Museum, 12 April
2021, https://www.penn.museum/documents/pressroom/MortonCollectionRepatriation-Press%20release.pdf,
accessed September 26, 2023.
93
Morton Collection Committee, “Report on Evaluation Phase.”
International Journal of Cultural Property 123
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the Advisory Group.
94
However, one member of that body has made it clear that the plan was
proposed in its current form by the museum’s director, Christopher Woods, and that they
were not even notified that the museum had sought legal permission to carry out the plan.
95
These top-down processes by the Penn Museum, to borrow the words of Police Free Penn
about other egregious actions of the museum, “reproduce[e] Morton’s violent and white
supremacist assumption: that the descendents [sic] of enslaved Africans, and of Indigenous,
Latinx, and Asian communities do not have the right to care for their own ancestors; and
that the desires of imperial knowledge-producers supersede the self-determination of Black
and brown communities.”
96
Will the ancestors be returned, or will the “complications”of
repatriation necessitate ever more research by “experts”–and the extraction and open
sharing of ever more “data”–indefinitely?
Data theft
The Penn Museum’s promise to repatriate the collection has not been accompanied by
any indication that they are considering relinquishing the valued property of the data
that their staff and students –and, before them, Penn Medicine alumnus Morton and his
followers –extracted from these crania and which the Penn Museum has disseminated
on their website for years. The inherent violence of data creation makes each instance of
its use an intensification of that violence. This was as true when Morton shared his data
widely as it is when Monge used the Internet to spread them even further. In continuing
to use this data following any commitment to repatriation, Monge and the museum call
into question their understanding of the concept of, and need for, repatriation in the
first place. Either they really do not get it, or they are not acting in good faith.
The Penn Museum’s lack of transparency means that it is not entirely clear who
“they”are –who is making the decisions about these matters at the museum and if it
really goes beyond Monge, who, having worked at the museum for over four decades
and developed close relationships with many donors, has an unusually high level of
influence for a curator. Regardless, their continued support of her extraction and
dissemination of information about the crania is entirely at odds with the perspectives
of those who are calling for repatriation of the crania and who insist as well that the
museum should “[e]nd the use of data sourced from the collection without consent and
remove all images from the Museum’s digital footprint that represent the deceased
without consent.”
97
Is the supposed absence of identification a justification for proceeding without consent?
If we lack a known descendant to seek consent from –more often than not because the links
of kinship have been severed by empire –is there any ethical way to conduct scientific
research or teaching activities on human remains? The emphasis of student activists on the
principles of consent invokes the many non-consensual experiments on Black people and
other colonized populations carried out by doctors like Morton
98
as well as the theft of
Henrietta Lacks’s DNA, taken from a Black woman dying of cancer at Johns Hopkins
94
Jennifer Nevins, Petition, In re: Morton Cranial Collection, for Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. Court of
Common Pleas of Philadelphia County, Orphans’Court Division, 12 May 2022.
95
See Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, “Objections to Penn’s Orphans’Court Petition,”filed on 29 July 2022, https://
drive.google.com/file/d/19-MiFoyDYjbuLls6oK5fNp_QOrI9X1Ne/view, accessed September 26, 2023.
96
Police Free Penn “Repatriation & Reparations NOW! Restating What We Mean by Abolish the Morton
Collection,”Medium.com, 15 July 2020, https://policefreepenn.medium.com/repatriation-reparations-now-restat
ing-what-we-mean-by-abolish-the-morton-collection-9a67f9206279, accessed September 26, 2023.
97
Police Free Penn, “Repatriation & Reparations NOW!”
98
Washington 2006; Denis 2015,33–36.
124 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

University, without her knowledge or consent, by doctors who profited from it financially.
99
Similar concerns are raised by the ongoing #FreeRenty campaign, supporting the legal battle
of a descendant of enslaved people photographed by one of Morton’s collaborators, Louis
Agassiz, to get the daguerreotypes of her ancestors back from Harvard University’s Peabody
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
100
On the new “Morton Collection”webpage that the Penn Museum posted in April 2021 to
coincide with their apology and commitment to repatriate the collection, the following
answer is offered to the “Frequently Asked Questions”:“How has the Morton Collection been
used for research?”:
From 2004 to 2011, the Museum was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to CT
scan the Morton Collection. As of March 2020, more than 17,500 CT scans have been
distributed to scholars around the world; often, researchers use both the actual crania
with the CT scans in their research. Researchers have included colleagues from Penn
Medicine, Penn Dental, and Penn Law; topics have included worldwide variation in the
functional morphology (shape) of the cranium, patterns of growth and development of
the cranium and dentition, the analysis of traumatic injury, shape changes in dentition
and palate, health and disease patterns of peoples in past human populations, and
more.
101
This statement reflects Monge’s understanding of the crania as scientific research
specimens first, foremost, and fairly exclusively. Her pride at making the Morton cranial
data so very available to researchers seems to be in alignment with the values of her
dissertation research on the methods and materials for casting fossil hominids and primates
as tools for scientists –work in which Mann trained her and which she continued to employ
students to assist with in the museum’s casting lab.
102
The seamless connection that she
perceived between the two projects is evident from the webpage for the University of
Pennsylvania Museum Fossil Casting Program, which includes under “Related Links”on its
homepage a (now defunct) link to the database for ordering the CT scans of the crania in the
Morton Cranial Collection.
103
Even with this context, it is hard not to read the above words, which were posted on a
website in April 2021, as a refusal to hear or acknowledge the demands to cease research and
the distribution of data extracted from stolen ancestral remains. Or perhaps it is the
opposite: can we read this as Monge showing by her words and actions that she does hear
these demands but that, as a white scientist who is officially in charge of the collection, she is
still the one who gets to make decisions about extracting and sharing new data in the form of
National Science Foundation-funded CT scans?
The science performed with this data painfully illustrates how reproduction of data
compounds the violence of its extraction. The researchers who use the CT scans treat them
as generic samples: their violent origin and their connection to Morton and his research is
99
Harvey 2016.
100
Valentina Di Liscia, “Legal Precedents or Reparations? Lawsuit against Harvard May Decide Who Owns
Images of Enslaved People,”Hyperallergic, 27 October 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/687964/lawsuit-against-
harvard-may-decide-who-owns-images-of-enslaved-people, accessed September 26, 2023.
101
The FAQ are near the bottom of the Penn Museum’s“Morton Cranial Collection”webpage, https://
www.penn.museum/sites/morton, accessed September 26, 2023.
102
Monge 1991; Paul Wolff Mitchell, interview with author, February 2022.
103
The Open Research Scan Archive (ORSA) is referred to as “Penn Modern Primate and Human CT Database”on
the website of Janet Monge’s and Alan Mann’s long-standing project Skelastic III in the University of Pennsylvania
Museum Fossil Casting Program, https://www.pennfossilcasting.com, accessed September 26, 2023.
International Journal of Cultural Property 125
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

irrelevant, and they are merely useful data points. In one of the many examples of scientific
research offered in the “Bibliography”published as part of the Penn Museum’s April 2021
Morton Cranial Collection site,
104
three scholars from Texas A&M and Florida Atlantic
University –Lauren N. Butaric, Robert C. McCarthy, and Douglas C. Broadfield –selected
26 “specimens”from the Morton Cranial Collection for their study of the variation in size
and shape of the maxillary sinus in “a small sample of 39 dried human crania of known
ecogeographic provenience.”
105
The public face of Monge’s lack of consideration for consent is a database called the Open
Research Scan Archive (ORSA).
106
The timing of this project, initiated in the early 2000s, is
not at all coincidental; many museum anthropologists who were concerned about losing
valuable scientific specimens, endeavored to capture and share as much data as possible
from any remains that they might be forced by NAGPRA to relinquish.
107
While the ORSA
does not hold the actual CT scans, it is, in effect, a mail-order catalog for these “scholars
around the world,”a one-stop shop for nearly all of the dehumanizing data extracted from,
and recorded about, the crania by everyone from Morton in the 1830s to Monge and her
students and colleagues in the 2000s. The database, which is linked to the Penn Museum’s
website currently has 4,450 entries, of which 1,677 are from the Morton Cranial Collection.
The main page of the user interface is shown in Figure 7.
The entries in this database are not based on the actual composition of the Morton
Cranial Collection at the Penn Museum since no catalog of that collection exists.
108
Instead,
there is an ORSA entry for each skull contained in the published and manuscript sources for
this collection,
109
specifically the crania listed in Morton’s1849 catalog, J. Aitken Meigs’s
1857 catalog,
110
the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia’s Ethnology Collection
catalog, as well as curatorial notes on the collection from the late 1930s and early 1940s. This
means that the entries do not represent the specific crania that the Penn Museum physically
possesses and includes many that they do not possess, such as the cranium of a Black
Philadelphian that Morton cataloged as no. 55.
111
What each ORSA entry for each cranium
104
See the heading “Modern Research on Morton and His Skull Collection from 1980 to Today,”https://
www.penn.museum/sites/morton/bibliography.php, accessed September 26, 2023.
105
Butaric, McCarthy, and Broadfield 2010, 426.
106
Monge and Schoenemann 2011. The database is hosted by the Penn Museum and can be accessed at http://
130.91.83.227/fmi/webd#ORSASpecimenDatabase, accessed September 21, 2023.
107
Projects for extracting data prior to returning NAGPRA remains, similar to Monge’s, were widespread and
above board, and there was great demand for protocols and best practices for doing so. See Buikstra and
Ubelaker 1994.
108
The absence of a catalogue for the Morton Cranial Collection as it currently exists at the Penn Museum was
mentioned to me by many who have engaged with the collection directly and was raised by Penn Anthropology
professor Deborah Thomas as an impediment to the work of the Morton Collection Committee, of which she was a
member, in the discussion of “The African Burial Ground: Lessons for the Morton Cranial Collection.”Thomas 2021.
In January 2023, Penn Museum shared a printout from their registrar that they claim shows the full catalog of the
collection they house, but it can only be quite generously described as a very preliminary document, which they
have only just begun to work on, likely in direct response to the informal discovery requests Abdul-Aliy Muhammad
and I made as part of the Orphans Court process. “List of Contents for the Morton Collection,”Penn Museum,
8 January 2023, https://www.penn.museum/sites/morton/documents/ContentsMortonCollection.pdf, accessed
September 26, 2023. For example, it includes crania that other documents provided by the museum at the same
time indicate were never transferred to the museum from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and also
mischaracterizes the contents of many accession numbers as “skeleton,”when there are extremely few instances of
more than a cranium and a mandible being preserved for any ancestor in the Morton Cranial Collection.
109
Paul Wolff Mitchell, interview with author, January 2022.
110
Meigs 1857.
111
“Research Reports on the Cranial Remains of Black Philadelphians in the Morton Collection,”Penn Museum,
10 January 2023, https://www.penn.museum/sites/morton/documents/PennMuseumResearchReportonBlackPhi
ladelphiansintheMortonCranialCollection.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
126 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

from the Morton Cranial Collection does do is replicate the violent “data”collected by
Morton and his successors (including his protégé, J. Aitken Meigs), presented uncritically, no
matter how racist the descriptions (and they are all racist). The Penn Museum’s webpage
offers a justification for using these terms that boils down to the “man-of-his-time”idea that
that is just how “people”talked.
112
The association of data creation with whiteness is
profoundly evident here, as Monge joins her nineteenth-century predecessors in being
unable to conceive of the (mostly) non-white people whose heads they stole and held captive
as humans, who would most definitely have found those descriptions of their bodies to be
“insulting and racist,”even “in the nineteenth century.”
The “Photos”tab displays images from a number of invasive angles, many of which reveal
that some of that language that is “insulting and racist to us today”has been literally written
onto the crania –whether by Morton or by the small army of white men of leisure and
science who may stole these ancestors for his study.
113
Viewing them in these photographs
Figure 7. Screenshot of user interface for “Open Scan [sic] Research Archive”database, hosted by the Penn
Museum. Courtesy of the author.
112
“Search the Archive,”Penn Museum,https://web.archive.org/web/20220122185658/https://www.penn.
museum/sites/orsa/Search_The_Archive.html, accessed September 26, 2023.
113
Paul Wolff Mitchell, interview with author, January 2022.
International Journal of Cultural Property 127
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

makes it almost impossible to imagine the overwhelming horror of being in a classroom
surrounded by the crania, as Alvarado describes CAAM 190: “[R]ow upon row, marked with
numbers and labels such as ‘idiot,’‘lunatic,’and ‘negro’directly on their foreheads.”
114
Among the final text fields on the “Other”tab is one for “Repatriation,”which is almost
always answered “No”or left empty. It is pretty chilling.
Because the ORSA is based on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century catalogs, rather
than the actual catalog of the crania currently at the Penn Museum, it still contains all of the
crania that have been designated as subject to NAGPRA, including those that have already
been repatriated.
115
This turns the ORSA into a complete, digital Morton collection,
unblemished by the ravages of repatriation, complete with the racist descriptions and
“data”extracted from each person. The only thing that distinguishes the NAGPRA-
repatriated or eligible crania from the others is that, for almost all Native American crania,
the “Photos”tab is empty.
116
The violation and dehumanization of the nonconsensual
publication of images of the dead has become increasingly well understood among anthro-
pologists as unethical,
117
but it is not forbidden legally by NAGPRA.
118
It’s somewhat
confusing why Monge would make what seems to be a concession toward the idea that
the photographs themselves constitute a form of intangible heritage that someone other
than her might have claim to and similarly confusing why she would not extend that
awareness to other impacted communities who are not covered by NAGPRA. Whatever the
reason, it seems a clear example of the bifurcation of anatomical collections that Watkins
identifies with the passage of NAGPRA.
119
The continued existence of this dehumanizing database –which has not been changed at
all since the demands for return began in 2019 –seems to powerfully contradict the
museum’s April 2021 claims that they wish to repatriate the crania. The disorganization
of the collection, and the inconsistent relationship between the ORSA and the crania at the
Penn Museum, is evident in the Penn Museum’s May 2022 petition to bury “at least thirteen”
crania of Black Philadelphians, with a provision for burying any additional crania from the
Morton collection that they discover in the future to be those of Black Philadelphians.
120
Although the original petition did not specify which crania these are, the research reports
released in January 2023 confirmed that the original number was based on the Black
Philadelphians identified in Mitchell’s2021 report,
121
which was based primarily on an
114
Alvarado, “Penn Museum Must End Abuse.”
115
A large number of the crania in the Morton Cranial Collection are subject to NAGPRA, but not all of them have
been returned. ProPublica documented that 64 percent of the 632 Native American remains that the Penn Museum
reported to the federal government have not yet made available for return. “Repatriation Database,”ProPublica,
26 September 2023, https://projects.propublica.org/repatriation-nagpra-database/institution/university-pennsyl
vania-museum-archaeology-and-anthropology, accessed September 26, 2023. Crania from the Morton Cranial
Collection comprise a large percentage of these Native American remains.
116
Paul Wolff Mitchell, interview with author, January 2022.
117
Chip Colwell, “Is It Ever OK to Publish Photographs of Human Remains?”SAPIENS, 11 March 2020, https://
www.sapiens.org/culture/photographing-human-remains, accessed September 26, 2023.
118
The sense that it is not acceptable to display images of remains covered by NAGPRA is widely shared; in 2020,
the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, adopted a policy explicitly forbidding the creation or use of images of
NAGPRA-eligible remains or cultural objects without written permission from the tribe, which defines “images”as
“photographs, scans, 3D printing, CT and PET scans, MRIs, drawings, and any other depictions.”“Knoxville Campus
Policy: RE00001-K Creation and Publication of Images of Human Remains and Cultural Objects Subject to NAGPRA
Protections,”University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 19 June 2020, https://provost.utk.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/
2020/06/UTK-NAGPRA-image-policy-approved-2020-06-19.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
119
Watkins 2018, 33.
120
Nevins, Petition, In re: Morton Cranial Collection.
121
See “Research Reports,”Penn Museum, 10 January 2023, 1–2, https://www.penn.museum/sites/morton/
documents/PennMuseumResearchReportonBlackPhiladelphiansintheMortonCranialCollection.pdf, accessed Sep-
tember 26, 2023.
128 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

analysis of Morton’s1849 catalog, and did not involve an examination of the actual
collections of the museum.
122
In their revised request to the Orphans’Court judge, which was granted, the Penn
Museum increased the number of Black Philadelphians to bury to 20. But because the
Morton Cranial Collection has never been catalogued by the Penn Museum, it is extremely
unclear whether the physical crania they are claiming they plan to bury correlate to
particular descriptions by Morton and his successors. Based on my ongoing research, which
is limited by my access only to the ORSA and to published and manuscript sources and not to
the crania themselves, I think it is unlikely that all of the 20 crania that the Penn Museum
plans to bury are in fact the crania of people of African descent who died in Philadelphia;
some seem to lack identifying marks that would allow us to match them clearly with the
descriptions of a given Black Philadelphian in Morton’s catalog. And, of course, despite the
Penn Museum’s claims to desire to give them rest, each person’s skull is still laid bare in
dehumanizing descriptions, violating data, and invasive photographs in their entries within
the ORSA.
Worse, images of the Morton crania are unfortunately not confined to the ORSA. The
Penn Museum’s extensive and profligate use of the images of the stolen crania in the Morton
Cranial Collection is in evidence on many pages of their website. On various museum
webpages, they function in a decorative manner, marking the topic, the content of the
collection in that particular space, setting the tone while simultaneously asserting a white
institution’s ownership over these people of color whose bodies were stolen from around the
country and around the world. Photographs dehumanize. They measure. They thing-ify.
What does Penn hope to gain through its promise of repatriating the entire collection, if not
to end and counteract, to the extent possible, such treatment of the colonized by the
colonizer?
Again, it is hard to take seriously the museum’s commitment to repatriation when it
apparently cannot see the need to make the very straightforward changes to remove these
dehumanizing images from its website. Views on the use of images of human remains are
currently in flux,
123
and this is reflected in how multiple publications have first added and
then removed images of Morton crania or stills from the Coursera video from their online
news articles in recent years.
124
In each case, the editors have cited different reasons for
removing the violent images, but they all seemed to agree that doing so was necessary. This
is reflective, I think, of the degree to which such images are one of those aspects of the
violence of empire that are not easily parsed. Nevertheless, it is striking that multiple
editors at campus, local, and national media outlets all recognized that it was not ethical to
show even one image of human remains to illustrate the subject of their news story, while
the Penn Museum persists in using thousands of images of the deceased without consent on
their website.
125
122
Mitchell 2021.
123
Harries et al. 2018; Squires, Roberts, and Márquez‐Grant 2022.
124
See, e.g., Alvarado, “Penn Museum Must End Abuse”; Komal Patel, “Penn Museum to Remove Morton Cranial
Collection from Public View after Student Opposition,”The Daily Pennsylvanian, 12 July 2020, https://www.thedp.
com/article/2020/07/penn-museum-morton-cranial-collection-black-lives-matter, accessed September 26, 2023;
Maya Kassuto, “Remains of Children Killed in MOVE Bombing Sat in a Box at Penn Museum for Decades,”Billy Penn,
21 April 2021, https://billypenn.com/2021/04/21/move-bombing-penn-museum-bones-remains-princeton-
africa, accessed September 26, 2023; Hakim Bishara, “Controversy Erupts over Penn Museum’s Possession of MOVE
Bombing Victims’Remains,”Hyperallergic, 22 April 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/639910/controversy-penn-
museums-possession-of-move-bombing-victims-remains, accessed September 26, 2023.
125
Not all publications have abandoned the use of images of human remains; some recent articles that show
photographs and drawings of crania from Morton’s work include Remy Tumin, “Penn Museum to Bury Skulls of
Enslaved People,”New York Times, 9 August 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/us/university-pennsyl
International Journal of Cultural Property 129
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Centering the ancestors
The Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania have shown again and again that,
when it comes to the remains of over 12,000 people that they hold in their collections –
accessioned and unaccessioned –they cannot be relied upon to understand what the right
thing is, much less do it.
126
This is most evident in the way in which the museum has
continued to act unilaterally in connection with the Morton Cranial Collection. After
promising to return the entire collection in 2021, they sought permission from the courts
in 2022 to bury the remains of “at least 13”Black Philadelphians, claiming to be acting on the
recommendation of their “Community Advisory Group.”
127
Despite the fact that five of
the 14 members appointed to this group are high-level Penn administrators, including the
museum’s director,
128
and that this group at no point operated according to best practices
for working with descendant communities,
129
a judge threw out the objections of the
concerned parties and ruled that Penn could proceed with the burial without the knowledge
or consent of the descendants of the Black Philadelphians in the Morton Cranial Collec-
tion.
130
vania-black-skulls-burial.html, accessed September 26, 2023; Ed Pilkington, “Ivy League University Set To Rebury
Skulls of Black People Kept for Centuries,”The Guardian, 7 August 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/
2022/aug/07/us-university-plans-repatriation-black-american-remains, accessed September 26, 2023.
126
To consider only two examples from the Penn Museum’s response to the events and revelations of 2020–21:
first, the Morton Collection Committee’s 2021 recommendation to hire one “BIPOC bioanthropologist, who would
combine expertise in analysis of human remains with a track record of advocacy for Black and Indigenous matters
in repatriation requests. This appointment should be made jointly as a Curator in the Museum and as a Faculty
member in the Department of Anthropology.”Morton Collection Committee, “Report on Evaluation Phase.”This is
a classic case of a university putting an impossible amount of work onto one person of color, who is called upon to
clean up their white mess; unsurprisingly, this was a failed search and attracted an honorable mention from the
field’s flagship journal, American Anthropologist, in their “The Worst Job Ads for 2021”(Dennis et al. 2022). A second
example is the so-called “independent”report on the MOVE remains (Tucker Law Group 2021), prepared by the
legal firm hired by the University of Pennsylvania, which was overseen by Carl E. Singley, the attorney under whose
watch the MOVE remains had originally been so mistreated in 1985 and 1986 when he served as counsel to the
Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission (more commonly known as the “MOVE Commission”). Penn
Museum hailed this report as essentially clearing them and their staff of any wrongdoing, despite the fact that
it was sloppily researched and argued, and it put more energy into scapegoating one of Monge’s former graduate
students than it did on verifying Monge’s statements about the crucial issues, such as the whereabouts of Delisha’s
remains. Indeed, its dependence on Monge’s statements as “fact,”as well as her narrative that there was no
wrongdoing, and all that happened was a media storm prompted by a vengeful student, makes it read almost as if it
were an early draft of Monge’s 2022 defamation lawsuit. Epstein and Filbert, Janet Monge v. University of Pennsylvania.
127
Nevins, Petition, In re: Morton Cranial Collection.
128
Nevins, Petition, In re: Morton Cranial Collection, Exhibit B.
129
Some relevant examples, which were shared with the judge by Muhammad and myself, as well as by others
who submitted letters to the court, include “Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at
Museums and Historic Sites,”a rubric published in 2018 by James Madison’s’Montpelier and the National Trust for
Historic Preservation, https://montpelier-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/Interpreting%20Slavery%2010-30-
18.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023; the work of the Family Representative Council for the East Marshall Street
Well Project of Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University, https://emsw.vcu.edu, accessed September 26,
2023; and Harvard University’s Fall 2022 Report on Human Remains in University Museum Collections, which
centers the role of descendant communities in addressing ancestors in their museums who have a very similar
history, before and after death, to the Black Philadelphians Penn sought permission to bury, https://provost.
harvard.edu/files/provost/files/harvard_university-_human_remains_report_fall_2022.pdf?m=1663090982#:~:
text=Nonetheless%2C%20the%20human%20remains%20under,in%20these%20categorically%20immoral%20sys
tems, accessed September 26, 2023.
130
Sheila Woods-Skipper, A.J., Decree, In re: Morton Cranial Collection, O.C. 578 NP of 2022, Court of Common Pleas
of Philadelphia County, Orphans’Court Division, 13 February 2023. See also the annotation of Judge Woods-
Skipper’s decree by Finding Ceremony, https://drive.google.com/file/d/19P-uTUNwALOswI_kaQ2CfYgTB83S_
xVO/view?usp=sharing, accessed September 26, 2023.
130 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Whatever comes next cannot be about “shared authority”; it is time for the museum and
the university to relinquish their control entirely, however benevolent they may believe
themselves to be. But this does not mean that they can step away completely. The museum
and the university are responsible for this violence and for making it right as much as they
possibly can. These institutions have only two roles to play in the work to come: to raise and
provide the funding for the development of solutions by descendant communities as well as
for the implementation of those solutions and to fully cooperate with any requests for
support or information made of them by descendants and family members of those whose
bodies they have treated as their property.
131
This goes hand in hand with the Penn Museum
having insisted on its right to use the crania for so many decades, regarding them as items of
prestige from which it has benefited and proudly claiming Morton as a valued alumnus of
the university.
132
Indeed, the Penn Museum can conceptualize this as part (but not all, by any
means) of the reparations it owes as one of dozens of institutions of higher education in the
United States that directly profited from slavery as well as provided intellectual backing for
white supremacy.
133
There are at least three types of harm that need to be addressed: on the levels of the
actual physical bones (and associated materials, including the documentation of the Medical
Examiner’s Office, Morton’s correspondence, and so on); the intangible (digital data such as
CT scans of the crania, intellectual property such as Weiss’s2019 senior thesis, and curatorial
notes from the Academy of Natural Sciences, the only copies of which are currently held by
the Physical Anthropology Section of Penn Museum); and what I will term “legacy harm,”
referring to the broader impacts of the Penn Museum’s actions and the actions of the white
supremacist systems that it benefits from.
The Penn Museum must abandon its support for Monge’s claim that she only ever had the
remains of one MOVE bombing victim
134
and must work to return Delisha’s remains to her
mother, Janet Africa. In contrast to the reports commissioned by the Penn Museum and
Princeton University, a number of published and unpublished investigations by scholars,
journalists, lawyers, and community members have concluded, as do I, that there is ample
evidence that Monge herself brought Delisha’s remains to the museum in September 1986
and ordered x-rays of her remains at the Penn Museum in November 2018.
135
While it is very
131
Even the legal arguments upon which the Penn Museum’s attorney based their case treated these human
remains as property, which became clear during a pre-hearing conference in which she referred to the ancestral
remains of Black Philadelphians as “charitable assets.”Jennifer Nevins, Status Conference with for 578NP of 2022,
January 2023.
132
For one example of this emphasis on Morton’s high status as a Penn alumnus, see Emily S. Renschler and Janet
Monge, “The Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection: Historical Significance and New Research,”Expedition, 50(3):
30-38, https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-samuel-george-morton-cranial-collection, accessed Sep-
tember 26, 2023.
133
On the colonial origins of American universities, see Wilder 2013. On reparations owed by the Penn Museum,
specifically, see Muhammad, “As Reparations Debate Continues.”
134
Their continued refusal to do so is evident in the supplemental report they commissioned from Tucker Law
Group and then quietly posted on their website, on 16 September 2022. In direct response to the findings of the
report for the city (Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022), Penn’s supplemental report proports to “prove”that the
museum never had Delisha’s remains. The museum has not drawn attention to its existence, but it can be viewed
here (and also is linked from their “Towards a Respectful Resolution”webpage for updates on the MOVE remains.
“Towards a Respectful Resolution,”https://www.penn.museum/towards-respectful-resolution, accessed Septem-
ber 26, 2023): Tucker Law Group, “Supplemental Report to ‘The Odyssey of the MOVE Remains,’” September 12, 2022,
https://www.penn.museum/documents/pressroom/Tucker_Law_Group_Supplemental_Report_September_2022.
pdf, accessed September 26, 2023. See also footnote 3 for newly uncovered photographic evidence from 2014 of
Janet Monge’s possession of Delisha’s remains at Penn Museum.
135
Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022; Muhammad, “Decades after Philadelphia’s MOVE Bombing”; Bronwen
Dickey, “She Was Killed by the Police. Why Were Her Bones in a Museum?”New York Times Magazine, 19 October
International Journal of Cultural Property 131
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

possible that Monge, or someone else, removed Delisha’s remains from the museum
subsequent to the November 2018 x-rays, it is absolutely the Penn Museum’s responsibility
to find them and return them to her mother.
Similarly, the Penn Museum owes Katricia’s family a full explanation for the missing right
pubic symphysis, as specified by her brother Lionell Dotson’s November 2022 lawsuit against
the University of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia.
136
This bone fragment is visible
in the November 2018 x-ray of Katricia’s remains and described in the forensic records from
1985 and 1986 but does not appear with the other three bone fragments in the Coursera
video with Monge and Weiss.
137
Could it have been destroyed for the DNA testing that Monge
mentioned in the Coursera video she was planning in 2019? Although the legal reports
commissioned by the Penn Museum and by Princeton described Monge’s 2019 plan for
stealing a sample of Katricia’s mother’s DNA from her trash (in order to support Monge’s and
Mann’s assessment that the bones were not Katricia’s), neither report explains how she
planned to get the DNA from the remains for comparison.
138
Of all the fragments, it does
seem likely to me that the one she would choose to test would be the right pubic symphysis,
given that it is more clearly associated with the innominate and femur.
139
As for the Morton Cranial Collection, the secret Morton Cranial Committee that the
museum established –on which Monge herself was widely known to sit –proposed in April
2021 that the museum “[f]ollow the NAGPRA model”and establish a parallel process for the
repatriation of non-NAGPRA remains in the collection. But NAGPRA, which is a process that
was developed in consultation with Native Americans in the 1980s, is out of date with
evolving understandings of the rights of colonized peoples and vests far too much power and
control over the remains in the hands of the same colonial institutions that originally stole
and have retained ancestral remains in order to dehumanize non-white people. Instead, we
need to think beyond the assumptions and practices of perpetrator-driven repatriation.
This is work that I am personally committed to and am actively in conversations about
how to proceed. Along with Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, I am co-convening a descendant-
controlled process we call “Finding Ceremony,”which we are building as a stewardship
body made up of members of the many descendant communities, hailing from (at least) all of
the countries indicated in Figure 6.
140
This body would be truly independent and composed
of people drawn to the work of caring for ancestors rather than arbitrarily selected and
appointed by the museum (as happened with the “Morton Cranial Collection Community
Advisory Group”).
141
Such a body could arrange for the respectful transfer of the ancestors
out of the basement of the Penn Museum to an intermediate site and provide care for the
crania, while determining how to help them return home –with the ultimate fate of each
person’s remains determined exclusively by their lineal descendants, their descendant
community members, and their relatives.
Ending the use of all the data extracted from our ancestors –and, thus, the violence its use
does to those from whom it was extracted as well as its ability to continue to uphold
patriarchal white supremacy –will also be a massive undertaking. Penn must take the ORSA
2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/magazine/philadelphia-move-bombing-katricia-dotson.html,
accessed September 26, 2023.
136
See Daniel P. Harstein and Bakari Sellers, Lionell Dotson v. Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania and City of
Philadelphia, Court of Common Pleas, Philadelphia County, 4 November 2022, 10–11.
137
Bradford-Grey and Remondino 2022; Monge, “REAL BONES.”
138
Tucker Law Group 2021, 65, Exhibit 16; Pratt, Kastenberg, and Vassallo 2021, 35.
139
Based on the way that it was labelled in Segal’s notes, the left pubic symphysis appears to have been assigned
to “B-1”later. Robert Segal, “Postmortem Examination Addenda,”11 November 1985, PSIC Records, TUSC.
140
Muhammad and Monteiro, “Finding Ceremony.”
141
Nevins, Petition, In re: Morton Cranial Collection, Exhibit B.
132 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

database offline immediately, and provide it, along with all the CT scans, x-rays, 3D scans,
and photos and other digital and analog materials related to the collection, to the descen-
dants. Of course, we do not even know the extent of the data that will be revealed in this
process. As of 2018, Monge had unsuccessfully attempted DNA testing on two of the 11 crania
that Morton described as Nubian; it is unknown whether she extracted material from other
crania for testing since then.
142
Additional intangible materials must also be relinquished,
including the Coursera course, which includes images not only of Katricia’s remains but also
of dozens of crania in the Morton Cranial Collection as well as other human remains that
Monge filmed for the other lessons in the course. These videos are currently Monge’s
property.
Other issues that descendant communities will be faced with include the many digitiza-
tions and ebooks of Morton’s works that are available free to the public via Google Books, the
National Institutes of Health, the Smithsonian Institution’s Biodiversity Heritage Library,
the Wellcome Collection in the United Kingdom, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg,
HathiTrust, and Canadiana. In addition to perpetuating the intentionally shaming exposure
of the people whose heads Morton held captive, these publications contain a wealth of
fodder for present-day hate groups seeking to justify the oppression of people of color, much
as they did when Morton first had them printed in the 1830s and 1840s. And what of the
archives around the world where Morton’s correspondence and papers have been preserved
and sometimes digitized, including the American Philosophical Society and the Library
Company of Philadelphia, once again enacting the ideal of “open data”without consider-
ation of the harm these materials can cause?
143
142
These tests are not published anywhere, but because DNA testing is inherently destructive, it can be
observed. In this case, Paul Wolff Mitchell (interview with author, January 2022) told me that he asked Monge
about the highly specific damage he noticed to two of the Nubian crania in the Morton Cranial Collection in 2019,
after he returned to the country from extended research oversees. Mitchell believed that the damage was clearly
not due to dropping but, rather, was targeted, unilateral drilling of the petrous part of the temporal bone, which
contains the inner ear bones commonly used in ancient genetic analyses (as described in Chris Palmer, “The Skull’s
Petrous Bone and the Rise of Ancient Human DNA: Q & A with Genetic Archaeologist David Reich,”Biomedical Beat
Blog: National Institute of General Medical Sciences, 11 April 2018, https://biobeat.nigms.nih.gov/2018/04/the-skulls-
petrous-bone-and-the-rise-of-ancient-human-dna-q-a-with-genetic-archaeologist-david-reich, accessed Septem-
ber 26, 2023. Mitchell said that Monge explained that she had sent a sample from which David Reich hoped to be able
to extract DNA for his Harvard lab’s study but that they had been unable to do so (based on the timing and the
limited description of the research, I believe this may be the article Monge hoped to contribute to: Sirak et al. 2021).
Reich, a long-time (and apparently ongoing: see Brielle et al. 2023) collaborator of Monge, who she has sent other
samples from other collections of human remains at the Penn Museum and elsewhere, is a notoriously racist
geneticist. See his New York Times op ed. David Reich, “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race,’”
New York Times, 23 March 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html,
accessed September 26, 2023. In this case, Reich’s study focused on the pre-Islamic-migration population of the
ancient civilization whose Blackness has most vexed white supremacists—including Morton, who wrote of them, in
Crania Americana:“The hair of the Nubian is thick and black, often curled either by nature or by art, and sometimes
partially frizzled, but never woolly”(Morton 1839, 26).
143
Some measures have been taken by some of these digital purveyors of Morton’s dehumanizing data,
including the American Philosophical Society, which has placed “access restrictions”on the digitized versions of
some of Morton’s images. See, for example, the restriction in the American Philosophical Society’s catalog entry for
“Original drawing of a Botocudo cranium in the cabinet of Dr. Blumenbach,”https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/
islandora/object/graphics:11355, accessed September 26, 2023 (it is unclear what exactly this “restriction”means,
as it did not prevent The Guardian from publishing an American Philosophical Society image from Morton’sCrania
Americana in their August 2022 article cited above), and the Smithsonian Institution’s Biodiversity Heritage Library,
which provides a tiny, easy-to-miss link above the digitized pages of Morton’s works stating “Please read our
Acknowledgement of Harmful Content,”which links to a separate page containing this acknowledgement.Biodi-
versity Heritage Library, “Acknowledgement of Harmful Content,”September 2021, https://about.biodiversityli
brary.org/about/harmful-content, accessed September 26, 2023.
International Journal of Cultural Property 133
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

So much of the harm of the actions supported by the Penn Museum cannot even be
paused or halted, as the property transfers described above suggest. The consent of a person
whose head was stolen, abused, and used as a source of data with which to oppress their kin
cannot be retroactively restored. The best we can aim to do is offer survivors and descen-
dants that which will, if not make them whole, then support them in moving toward healing,
which will doubtless look different in every case. The broader challenge is that the legacy of
the white supremacist acts of the past will continue to shape our future, even after the
ancestors have been returned to the care of their descendants. Morton’s work asserted
American Empire overseas in order to collect the “specimens,”which in turn justified the
institution of slavery, the war against Mexico, and the colonization of the West, while the
collecting practices of Morton’s dealers removed the social ties of those they kidnapped,
dismembered, and entrusted to the US Postal Service to deliver to Morton in Philadelphia.
The data that Morton extracted from the crania created the scientific support for white
Philadelphia’s racism in the 1830s and beyond, laying the foundations upon which was built
the specific flavor of racism that made it thinkable in 1985 to bomb a house full of Black
people and shoot those who tried to escape; that made it thinkable to let the fire burn until it
destroyed a Black neighborhood; that made it thinkable to excavate the burned home, which
held the remains of the murdered MOVE members, using construction equipment, thus
dismembering and intermingling the remains and making it even possible to question the
identity of two of the young girls murdered by the police, to begin with. Morton’s data laid
the foundation for the respect accorded to the white scientist, which made it seem
reasonable for a white assistant medical examiner to slip his boss’s pal, the paleoanthro-
pologist, a box of the remains of murdered Black children; for that professor to leave the
remains in a cardboard box in a filing cabinet in his office; for his former student to later take
them out and display them at a donor reception; for her to assign them as a senior thesis
project to a white student and have that white student handle the bones on camera for a
public teaching video.
There is not a part of the MOVE story –or of any modern story of white supremacist
violence –that has not been enabled by the work of Samuel George Morton and supported by
the data he extracted from the stolen ancestors to justify the colonial projects of his white
nation. It is impossible for us to know the wishes of the people who were decapitated for
Morton’s collection, and so much time has passed that, even in cases where we can identify
their direct descendants, we will not be able to speak to those who knew them in life. We
would like to think that, if we could, we would follow their desires fully and without
question.
But the loved ones of Katricia and Delisha have made it clear what they wanted us to
do. As Krystal Strong, then an assistant professor of education at the University of
Pennsylvania asked readers of Anthropology News,“[h]ow might we professional anthropol-
ogists honor the one demand MOVE has consensus around –the release of political prisoner
Mumia Abu Jamal –and organize toward his release in honor of Delisha and Tree Africa and
MOVE?”
144
And, indeed, this demand was first linked to the Penn Museum’s possession of
Katricia and Delisha’s remains by the MOVE mothers at their press conference on 26 April
2021: “If they want to do anything to show people that they are sincere about resolving this
situation with MOVE and the city, let Mumia out. He’s still alive.”
145
144
Krystal Strong, “A Requiem for Delisha and Tree Africa.”Anthropology News, 25 October 2021, https://
www.anthropology-news.org/articles/a-requiem-for-delisha-and-tree-africa, accessed September 26, 2023.
145
Janine Africa, speaking at press conference livestreamed by hate5six, “MOVE Press Conference 4/26:
Addressing UPenn & Princeton’s Theft of Bones of Murdered MOVE Children,”26 April 2021, https://www.youtu
be.com/watch?v=5J3N1D10Fcw, accessed September 26, 2023.
134 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

As I write today, more than two years later, this demand for the release of a Black political
prisoner has not even been acknowledged by the University of Pennsylvania. It may seem
that it is not the role of a university to secure freedom for a prisoner –that it is too political
to even consider –but, if that is the case, then how will the University of Pennsylvania ever
make amends for its role in the oppression of Black Philadelphians over its proud 283 years
of existence? That oppression was, and is, political too, and Mumia’s 1983 conviction and
initial death sentence for killing a white police officer is also built upon Morton’s racial
science. The University of Pennsylvania needs to make this right, and it is within its power to
do so. It may not be able to sign Mumia Abu Jamal’s pardon, but, as the state’s respected and
powerful Ivy League university, there is no question that it can influence the person who
can. And as scholars who would seek to bring healing to the long-dead families of those
stolen by Samuel George Morton, and held captive by our professional colleagues, it would
be hypocritical to do anything other than to support existing efforts to free Mumia Abu
Jamal and to put pressure on the University of Pennsylvania to secure his release, that it may
bring some healing to the MOVE mothers.
Acknowledgments. In addition to the interviews cited in this article, I must thank the many dozen museum
professionals, anthropologists, historians, heritage scholars, Philadelphia community members, journalists, and
current and former Penn and Princeton students, faculty, and staff, who spoke (or direct messaged) with me about
the issues at the Penn Museum. This research was also facilitated by the staff of the City of Philadelphia Archives,
the Penn Museum Archives, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Temple
University Special Collections, and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel Archives. The writing itself would not
have been possible without the knowledgeable, trauma-informed, and laughing-to-keep-from-crying support of
Margaret Sanford; the sweet giggles of Alexandre; and the deep wells of curiosity, kindness, and care (for me, for the
living and the dead in this story and for my cat!) of Elisabeth Koechlin and Vic Vega.
Bibliography
Berry, Daina Ramey. 2017. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building
of a Nation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Bindman, David. 2002. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Bradford-Grey, Keir and Brian G. Remondino. 2022. Final Report of the Independent Investigation into the City of
Philadelphia’s Possession of Human Remains of Victims of the 1985 Bombing of the MOVE Organization, Part 2: The MOVE
Victim Remains in the Custody of Drs. Alan Mann and Janet Monge. Philadelphia, PA: Montgomery, McCracken, Walker
& Rhoads LLP. https://www.phila.gov/media/20220609141446/move-investigation-report-20220609.pdf,
accessed September 26, 2023.
Brielle, Esther S., Jeffrey Fleisher, Stephanie Wynne-Jones, Kendra Sirak, Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht, Kim
Callan, Elizabeth Curtis, Lora Iliev, Ann Marie Lawson, Jonas Oppenheimer, Lijun Qiu, Kristen Stewardson,
J. Noah Workman, Fatma Zalzala, George Ayodo, Agness O. Gidna, Angela Kabiru, Amandus Kwekason, Audax Z.P.
Mabulla, Fredrick K. Manthi, Emmanuel Ndiema, Christine Ogola, Elizabeth Sawchuk, Lihadh Al-Gazali, Bassam R.
Ali, Salma Ben-Salem, Thierry Letellier, Denis Pierron, Chantal Radimilahy, Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa, Ryan L.
Raaum, Brendan J. Culleton, Swapan Mallick, Nadin Rohland, Nick Patterson, Mohammed Ali Mwenje, Khalfan
Bini Ahmed, Mohamed Mchulla Mohamed, Sloan R. Williams, Janet Monge, Sibel Kusimba, Mary E. Pendergast,
David Reich, and Chapurukha M. Kusimba. 2023. “Entwined African and Asian Genetic Roots of Medieval Peoples
of the Swahili Coast.”Nature 615: 866–73.
Buikstra Jane E., and Douglas H. Ubelaker. 1994. Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains: Proceedings of
a Seminar at the Field Museum of Natural History. Fayetteville: Arkansas Archaeological Survey.
Butaric, Lauren N., Robert C. McCarthy, and Douglass C. Broadfield. 2010. “A Preliminary 3D Computed Tomography
Study of the Human Maxillary Sinus and Nasal Cavity.”American Journal of Physical Anthropology 143, no. 3: 426–36.
Colbert, Charles. 1997. A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Dain, Bruce R. 2002. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Denis, Nelson. A. 2015. War against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony. New York: Nation Books.
International Journal of Cultural Property 135
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Dennis, Dannah, Dara Docot, Daniel Gendron, and Ilana Gershon. 2022. “The Worst Job Ads for 2021.”American
Anthropologist 124, no. 4: 900–5. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.13781,
accessed September 26, 2023.
Dunnavant, Justin, Delande Justinvil, and Chip Colwell. 2021. “Craft an African American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act.”Nature 593, no. 7859: 337–40.
Fabian, Ann. 2010. The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fforde, Cressida, C. Thomas McKeown, and Honor Keeler, eds. 2020. The Routledge Companion to Indigenous
Repatriation: Return, Reconcile, Renew. London: Routledge.
Fine-Dare, Kathleen. 2022. Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press.
Frederickson, George M. 1971. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny,
1817–1914. New York: Harper and Row.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1978. “Morton’s Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity: Unconscious Manipulation of Data May
Be a Scientific Norm.”Science 200, no. 4341: 503–9.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton.
Harries, John, Linda Fibiger, Jan Smith, Tal Adler, and Anna Szöke. 2018. “Exposure: The Ethics of Making, Sharing
and Displaying Photographs of Human Remains.”Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4, no. 1:
3–24.
Harry, Margot. 1987. “Attention, MOVE! This is America!”Chicago: Banner Press.
Harvey, Sandra. 2016. “The HeLa bomb and the Science of Unveiling.”Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2,
no. 2: 1–30.
Heim, Robert C., Sozi P. Tulante, Carla G. Graff, Stefanie A. Tubbs, Chukwufumnanya I. Ekhator, and Tooba N.
Hussain. 2022. Final Report of the Independent Investigation into the City of Philadelphia’s Possession of Human Remains of
Victims of the 1985 Bombing of the MOVE Organization. Philadelphia, PA: Dechert LLP, 2 May. https://www.phila.gov/
media/20220609141446/move-investigation-report-20220609.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
Humphrey, David C. 1973. “Dissection and Discrimination: The Social Origins of Cadavers in America, 1760–1915.”
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 49, no. 9: 819–27.
Lapsansky, Emma Jones. 1980. “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian
Philadelphia.”American Quarterly 32, no. 1: 54–78.
Lewis, Jason. E., David DeGusta, Marc R. Meyer, Janet M. Monge, Alan E. Mann, and Ralph L. Holloway. 2011. “The
Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias.”PLOS Biology 9, no. 6:
e1001071.
Mann, Alan. 2009. “The Origins of American Physical Anthropology in Philadelphia.”American Journal of Physical
Anthropology 140, no. S49: 155–63.
Meigs, J. Aitken. 1857. Catalogue of Human Crania in the Collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson.
Michael, John S. 1988. “A New Look at Morton’s Craniological Research.”Current Anthropology 29, no. 2: 349–54.
Mitchell, Paul Wolff. 2018. “The Fault in His Seeds: Lost Notes to the Case of Bias in Samuel George Morton’s Cranial
Race Science.”PLOS Biology 16, no. 10: e2007008.
Mitchell, Paul Wolff. 2021. “Black Philadelphians in the Samuel George Morton Collection.”Penn Program on Race,
Science & Society, 15 February. https://prss.sas.upenn.edu/penn-medicines-role/black-philadelphians-samuel-
george-morton-cranial-collection, accessed September 26, 2023.
Monge, Janet M. 1991. “An Assessment of the Materials and Methods used in the reproduction of anthropological specimens.”
PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania.
Monge, Janet M. and P. Thomas Schoenemann. 2011. “The Open Research Scan Archive (ORSA): A Massive Open-
Access Archive of Research Quality Computed Tomography (CT) Scans.”In Pleistocene Databases: Acquisition,
Storing, Sharing, edited by Roberto Macchiarelli and Gerd-Christian Weniger, 61–67. Mettmann, Germany:
Wissenschaftliche Scriften des Neanderthal Museums 4.
Monteiro, Lyra D. 2012. “Racializing the Ancient World: Ancestry and Identity in the Early United States.”PhD diss., Brown
University.
Morton, Samuel George. 1839. Crania Americana; or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North
and South America: To Which Is Prefixed, An Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species, and on the American Race in
Particular. Philadelphia, PA: John Fuller.
Morton, Samuel George. 1840. Catalogue of Skulls of Man, and the Inferior Animals, in the Collection of Samuel George
Morton. Philadelphia, PA: Turner & Fisher.
Morton, Samuel George. 1843. Catalogue of the Skulls of Man and the Inferior Animals in the Collection of Samuel George
Morton. 2nd ed. Philadelphia, PA: F. Turner.
136 Lyra D. Monteiro
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Morton, Samuel George. 1844. Crania Aegyptiaca; or Observations on Egyptian Ethnography derived from Anatomy, History
and the Monuments.Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 2. Philadelphia, PA: John Pennington.
Morton, Samuel George. 1849. Catalogue of Skulls of Man, and the Inferior Animals, in the Collection of Samuel George
Morton. 3rd ed. Philadelphia, PA: Merrihew & Thompson.
Nott, Josiah C., and George R. Gliddon. 1854. Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient
Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical
History: Illustrated by Selections from the Inedited Papers of Samuel George Morton, M.D. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott,
Grambo & Company.
Passalacqua, Nicholas V., and Marin A. Pilloud. 2022. “The Importance of Professional Organizations as Disciplinary
Leaders and the Need for Meaningful Ethical Codes in Anthropology.”American Anthropologist 124: 198–203.
Pratt, Marcel S., Stephen J. Kastenberg, and Emilia McKee Vassallo. 2021. Investigative Report Regarding Princeton
University’s Role in the Handling of Victim Remains from the 1985 MOVE Bombing in Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA:
Ballard Spahr LLP. https://www.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2021/08/2021-08-30-FINAL-
MOVE-REPORT.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
Sirak, Kendra A., Daniel M. Fernandes, Mark Lipson, Swapan Mallick, Matthew Mah, Iñigo Olalde, Harald Ringbauer,
Nadin Rohland, Carla S. Hadden, Éadaoin Harney, Nicole Adamski, Rebecca Bernardos, Nasreen Broomand-
khoshbacht, Kimberly Callan, Matthew Ferry, Ann Marie Lawson, Megan Michel, Jonas Oppenheimer, Kristin
Stewardson, Fatma Zalzala, Nick Patterson, Ron Pinhasi, Jessica C. Thompson, Dennis Van Gerven, and David
Reich. 2021. “Social Stratification without Genetic Differentiation at the Site of Kulubnarti in Christian Period
Nubia.”Nature Communications 12, 7283: 1–14.
Squires, Kirsty, Charlotte A. Roberts, and Nicholas Márquez‐Grant. 2022. “Ethical Considerations and Publishing in
Human Bioarcheology.”American Journal of Biological Anthropology 177, no. 4: 615–19.
Stantis, Chris, Carlina de la Cova, Dorothy Lippert, and Sabrina B. Sholts. 2023. “Biological Anthropology Must
Reassess Museum Collections for a More Ethical Future.”Nature Ecology & Evolution 7: 786–89.
Stanton, William R. 1960. The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-1859. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Thomas, Deborah 2021. “The African Burial Ground: Lessons for the Morton Cranial Collection.”Paper presented at
Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Problem of Decolonizing Museums, Center for Experimental Ethnography,
University of Pennsylvania, 20 October. https://decolonizingmuseums.com/discussion-1, accessed September
25, 2023.
Tucker Law Group. 2021. The Odyssey of the Move Remains: Report of the Independent Investigation into the Demonstrative
Display of MOVE Remains at the Penn Museum and Princeton University. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania.
https://www.penn.museum/documents/pressroom/MOVEInvestigationReport.pdf, accessed September 25,
2023.
Washington, Harriet A. 2006. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from
Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday.
Watkins, Rachel J. 2018. “Anatomical Collections as Bioanthropological Other: Some Considerations.”In Bioarch-
aeological Analyses and Bodies: New ways of Knowing Anatomical and Skeletal Collections, edited by P. Stone, 27–48.
New York: Springer.
Weiss, Jane. 2019. “Who Is Jane Doe?”Senior thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York:
Bloomsbury Press.
Cite this article: Monteiro, Lyra D. 2023. “Open access violence: Legacies of white supremacist data making at the
Penn Museum, from the Morton Cranial Collection to the MOVE remains.”International Journal of Cultural Property 30,
no. 2: 105–137. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127
International Journal of Cultural Property 137
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739123000127 Published online by Cambridge University Press