ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Peru Writes to London: Andean Epistemes and the Making of a Transatlantic Science of the Dead

• In Event: Andean Sciences Untranslated

English Abstract

This paper examines an overlooked episode in late eighteenth-century Andean science to show how Peruvian intellectuals sought recognition from—and collaboration with—Britain’s scientific community in the study of ancient remains. In 1793, Hipólito Unanue, Lima’s leading naturalist, published a report that a mummified “giant” found in the southern Andes had been sent to Spain for study, only to be seized en route by the British and taken to London. In Peru, only the specimen’s enormous molar remained. Rather than denounce the loss, Unanue used the Mercurio Peruano to invite British savants to examine their collections, verify whether the tooth was missing, and join Peruvian scholars in interpreting Andean antiquity.

When the story was translated for British readers in 1805, at least one reviewer responded with derision. They dismissed Unanue’s claims about Peruvian “giants” and monumental ruins, and expressed anxiety that the translation risked political entanglement. Amid the Napoleonic wars, and speculation about Britain’s ambitions in Spanish America, acknowledging Peruvian scientific overtures seemed diplomatically uneasy—at least until Independence, when more human remains began to flow.

Recovering this exchange therefore illuminates a moment when South American scholars understood Andean mummies, bones, and ruins as belonging to both Andean and transatlantic epistemic traditions, and as such expected British institutions to meet their inquiries as intellectual equals. Their reception offers a new vantage on early encounters between nineteenth-century British science and “foreign” human remains. When was the British collection of the dead shaped by empires, polities, and sciences beyond Europe?

Author

• Christopher Heaney, Pennsylvania State University