The core principle is to put heart into your work

Here is the interview with one of the most outstanding Russian physical anthropologist, the author of more than 250 scientific papers, published in the leading Russian and foreign publications, the creator of one of the areas of population studies — “ethnic cranioscopy”, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher of the MAE RAS Alexander G. Kozintsev, recently celebrated his 75th anniversary.

Blood Affairs: Racial Blood Group Research and Nation Building in Greece, 1920s–1940s

This paper examines the transnational exchanges associated with the emergence of racial blood group studies in Greece. It explores the overlap between anthropological and medical perspectives as well as the concurrences and tensions between national and transnational concerns. By following the work of the main Greek physical anthropologist of the interwar period, the paper asks how politics interpenetrates into this case study in a scientifically consequential way and conversely how innovation in research allows anthropologists to intervene with politically timely questions. It showcases how wartime mobilities generated anthropological data that weaved and strengthened the fabric of the Greek national narrative.

The colonial ethnological line: Timor and the racial geography of the Malay Archipelago

This article examines the connected histories of racial science and colonial geography in Island Southeast Asia. By focusing on the island of Timor, it explores colonial boundaries as modes of arranging racial classifications, and racial typologies as forms of articulating political geography. Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia's work on the ethnology of East Timor is examined as expressive of these productive connections. Correia's classificatory work ingeniously blended political geography and racial taxonomy. Between 1916 and 1945, mainly based on data from the Portuguese enclave of Oecussi and Ambeno, he claimed a distinct Malayan racial type for the whole colony of ‘Portuguese Timor’. Over the years he developed an anthropogeographical theory that simultaneously aimed to reclassify East Timor and to revise the racial cartography of the Malay Archipelago, including Wallace's famous ethnological line.

Fieldwork in the Southern Dongola Reach and Third Cataract Region in 2015/2016

The settlement remains surrounding the churches at the sites of Banganarti and Selib continued to be excavated in the 2015/2016 season by a team directed by Bogdan Żurawski. The research focused primarily on the living quarters around the churches and fortifications. An ethnographic survey carried out in Banganarti and Selib, and in the nearby villages documented traditional crafts, such as pottery making, basketry, baking and cooking using traditional techniques and recipes. Conservation and construction work were undertaken simultaneously with preparations for turning the Banganarti and Selib 1 sites into tourist attractions. Skeletal remains from earlier excavation were examined by a physical anthropologist. A survey combined with aerial documentation was carried out on selected archaeological sites in the Southern Dongola Reach (Soniyat, Diffar, Hettani, Bani Israil) and in the Third Cataract Region (Kissenfarki, Fagirinfenti). Short excavations were also conducted in the temple at Soniyat.

Life and Death on the Nile

Physical anthropology in Nubia has contributed to three intellectual movements, each of which was a result of archaeological surveys associated with the construction of successively higher dams at Aswan in Egypt. The analysis of human remains excavated by the first survey was guided by the then strongly held belief that the capacity for cultural achievement was determined by the racial attributes of Nubian populations. The role of the physical anthropologist was to establish the racial types associated with the rise and fall of Nubian civilizations. The second survey resulted in a critical reaction to racial determinism in which racial attributes were viewed as independent of cultural achievement. The third produced the third intellectual shift and informs the theoretical basis of this volume. Known as the biocultural perspective, the focus is on the interaction between the biology of human populations and the cultural and natural environments in which they exist.

The “strong nucleus of the Greek race”

This article deals with the theory of the "strong nucleus of the Greek race" elaborated by the Greek physical anthropologist Ioannis Koumaris (1879-1970), who headed all academic anthropological institutions in Greece between 1915 and 1970. According to this theory human groups were in a state of "fluid constancy," meaning that the "proper" nucleus of the predominant race always persisted in a stable form despite miscegenation, and was hence capable of resurfacing. This theory footed, first, on racial theories challenging the existence of "pure races" in favor of evidencing "racial varieties" and "racial types" and, second, an early Greek national idea according to which Hellenism possessed the ability to acculturate and absorb foreign peoples or nations without losing its innate qualities. The Greek notion fili (meaning both nation and race), and its shifting semantics from religious to national and racial, is similarly instrumental to this analysis. By means of this theory racial purity was not so much rejected as it was relativized, essentially being replaced by the constancy of a race over time. With the shift from purity to constancy, the imperative of the homogeneity of an entity is not violated but, in contrast, supported by race anthropological arguments. Race hygienic theories, in turn, advanced the shift from racial consistency to purification.

Raymond Dart and the danger of mentors

Archaeology, like all scientific and scholarly disciplines, requires the transmission of knowledge and ideas. This commonly involves the influence of mentors and role models: figures who can at times take on the role of gurus. But adherence to mentors has its dangers. That is shown in the career of Raymond Dart, whose professional work was deeply flawed by the adherence he paid to his mentor Grafton Elliot Smith. His status has been maintained by his dedicated disciple, the great physical anthropologist Phillip Tobias, but critical assessment of the corpus of Dart’s work (Dubow 1996; Derricourt 2009) contrasts with his selective reputation.In the first part of 1925, Dart — then a youthful professor of anatomy in Johannesburg — published in quick succession two papers in the pre-eminent British science journal Nature.One (on the discovery of Australopithecus with the announcement and interpretation of the Taung fossil cranium) would become a landmark document in the history of palaeoanthropology and prehistory (Dart 1925a). The other is a classic example of the approaches which would later be seen as belonging in the lunatic fringe of archaeology. Dart would continue publishing on both themes throughout his long and productive life (from his birth in Australia in 1893 to death in Johannesburg in 1988).

The Physical Anthropologist as Craniofacial Biologist

Growth—the progressive change in size and complexity of a person as he moves toward maturity—is often viewed as anatomy's "fourth dimension." It is the "dimension" that provides change: change in size, in proportionality, in morphology, in spatial relationships of structures, in complexity, as well as profound changes in the child's psychological and behavioral framework. As we all appreciate, an adult is not just a very large infant; instead, different tissues and structures have their own agespecific patterns of growth, which accounts for our pretty good ability to determine someone's age simply from their proportions (as in a photograph) without regard to their absolute size.