Abstract

When nineteenth-century British curators described an Andean mummy as 'a dried corpse only', they were not merely making an empirical claim – they were attempting to resolve a problem of classification. This paper examines how Andean human remains troubled European categories of Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty from the sixteenth century onward. Spanish campaigns of extirpation produced both the destruction and the study of Inca and Andean ancestors, whose preservation was described in print and compared to Egyptian mummification. These comparisons encouraged their circulation into European collections, where their status remained uncertain. Focusing on the 1821 transfer of an 'Inca mummy' to Britain, and its subsequent rejection by the British Museum, this talk shows how Andean bodies occupied an unstable position between antiquity, natural history, and anatomy, whose uncertainty only fuelled their further collection. Their classification depended not only on their comparison with Egyptian preservation techniques, but also on assumptions about civilisation, race, and history generated as much in Peru as in Britain. One consequence of their uncertain scientific categorisation was their excess and commodification, lifting the rising tide of 'overseas' human remains in British collections still debated in the UK today.