kaijutegu: oddarticulations:Want a chance to win a real human skull for only $25?? This elongated fe
kaijutegu: oddarticulations:Want a chance to win a real human skull for only $25?? This elongated female is currently being raffled off, and there are only 130 tickets left!! International participation is welcome, and if you don’t want the skull there’s a cash prize alternative available. Click the link in my bio or go to https://www.oddarticulations.com/shop/raffle-for-real-elongated-human-skull/ to get your tickets!https://www.instagram.com/p/CQy2ZKwhhiP/?utm_medium=tumblr and today on “clearly looted human remains being raffled off like a goddamn quilt at the county fair,” we have an Andean elongated skull. It’s one thing to own medical prep skulls that were prepared for a commercial market. It’s another entirely for a white guy like Dalton to be raffling off an indigenous woman’s cranium. Even if this is a deaccessioned museum piece this is deeply unethical.oh goody, he even knows where she’s from. Actually, let’s talk about that real quick. Fun thing about the Paracas peninsula:https://traffickingculture.org/encyclopedia/case-studies/paracas-textiles/http://www.anonymousswisscollector.com/2014/06/paracas-past-looting-and-trafficking-of-mummy-bundle-textiles-from-peru.htmlIt’s one of the most looted and trafficked Andean sites due to the looting frenzy that began after Julian Tello had to halt his excavations. The site was picked over, the context was destroyed, the mummy bundles were ripped open to sell the textiles, and the remains ended up… honestly, a lot of them were just left on the surface, mixing up mortuary contexts and making it impossible to learn anything about the site. This was a big deal because Peru’s national museum in the 30s was actually one of the biggest driving forces in Andean anthropology and it was kind of a unique case because the man who founded and ran the museum, Julian Tello (whomst I mentioned earlier), was an actual indigenous person from the region. Do you know how many national/state archaeologists were indigenous people in the 1920s-30s? Not fucking many! Anyways, the reason I bring that up is because what this means is that the standards and practices for human remains were in line with what the descent communities believed. If you look at ancient Andean people they had really different understandings of ancestors and what you should and shouldn’t do with bodies- it’s very different than almost anything we see in Native North America, for instance. Peruvian archaeology really is quite different from what we considered standard in North America at the time and when those sites were looted it was an incredible tragedy for the native communities and the scientific community alike because the destruction of these sites meant that there were big chunks of prehistory that now nobody could know.Honestly this would still be shitty even if the item on raffle wasn’t something with the huge emotional/ethical charge as human remains have. It doesn’t matter when something was looted- buying looted objects reinforces the antiquities black market. It’s buying something that was probably exposed during the destruction of mummy bundles for the European textile market back in the 1930s, a market that persists with much of the same abuse of historical and prehistoric artifacts today. and let’s be perfectly transparent here: no museum would likely take this, and there’s nobody easily identifiable to give it back to. I’m sure people will say that in the comments, but this isn’t ever gonna be repatriated. I don’t like the idea of owning a skull like this and I don’t think it’s ethical at all, but I’m livid that it’s being sold. -- source link