Plundered Skulls

Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade against museums to reclaim their sacred objects and to rebury their kin. This controversy has exploded in recent years as hundreds of tribes have used a landmark federal law to recover their looted heritage from more than one thousand museums across America. Many still question how to balance the religious freedoms of Native Americans with the freedoms of American scientists, and the arguments continue on about whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys humanity’s common heritage.

Written by a leading museum curator, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits is an unflinching insider view of these tangled debates. Told as a personal journey to understand how repatriation has transformed both museums and tribes, this book follows the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and then returned to their sources. These stories reveal the labyrinthine process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the thin lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.

Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits is the first popular book to illuminate the profound impacts of the repatriation crusade. It shows how the law has become an imperfect but necessary tool to resolve the collision of worldviews between scientists and Native Americans—to decide the nature of the sacred and the destiny of souls.

University of Chicago Press (2017)

* National Council on Public History Book Award

* Society for Historical Archaeology James Deetz Book Award

* Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award

* Colorado Book Award

* Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, Honorable Mention

* Choice Outstanding Academic Book Title

Important, necessary reading for all those who grapple with the essential question of how best to respect and honor the past.
- Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History

... moving and thoughtful work.
- Publishers Weekly

Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits breaks new ground.
- David H. Thomas, author of Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity

... a careful and intelligent chronicle ...
- Wall Street Journal

... the best single account to date of negotiations between museums, archaeologists, and native people ...
- Apollo

Plundered Skulls & Stolen Spirits

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