History of Science, Technology, the Environment, and Medicine

4 February 2022 — 12:00 noon — online

Jesse Ritner (UT)

“Making Powder Snow: Skiing and Researching Avalanches, 1945-1990”

The paper traces the development of avalanche mitigation, forecasting, and research in Utah and Colorado. The first people to embark on avalanche research did so to protect Alta ski area (in Utah) from avalanche risk. As skiing grew, ski resorts and departments of transportation increasingly relied on new forms of avalanche forecasting and mitigation. As a result, when the military invested in avalanche research in the 1970s, snow rangers and ski patrollers used to working on ski resorts became key participants in national
projects. Ski areas over the 1960s-70s became well practiced at recording snow data. Therefore, as forecasting became increasingly important to both departments of transportation and backcountry skiers, forecasters relied on patrollers and snow rangers to provide the information they needed to predict risk. As a result, even as professional researchers moved away from ski areas, the highly exclusive form of winter recreation continued to play an active and irreplaceable role in professional avalanche sciences.
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Jesse Ritner is a PhD candidate in the UT History Department, specializing in U.S. Environmental History. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Making Snow: Weather, Technology, and the Rise of the American Ski Industry, 1900-present,” explores how the North American ski industry came of age in the second half of the twentieth century, despite the increasingly unreliable snowpack of the last seventy years. The project explores themes of weather modification (both successful and unsuccessful), environmental resilience, race, and the politics of place and space, as well as the ways in which people experience and discuss weather and climate.

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To take part in this event, please register in advance by using this link:
https://utexas.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEscOqqrDIiE9f8tkPASwA4hC2yyvRPPimV
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12 November 2021 — 12:00 noon — online

Christopher Heaney (Pennsylvania State University)

“The Mismeasure of Incas: Samuel George Morton and a Peruvian Foundation for American Anthropology”

From 1820 through 1920, American anthropologists acquired more Andean human remains than from any other individual population worldwide. Samuel George Morton, the Smithsonian, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the American Museum of Natural History all made “ancient Peruvians” core to their collections, asserting authority over the Americas’ racialized past and present by using “ancient Peruvians” as a historic set against which living Native Americans might be compared. This paper seeks to reframe the rise of anthropology and craniology as disciplinary practices by paying particular attention to the particularly Peruvian conditions that turned ancestors into such statistically significant and “collectible” sets. Given those conditions, and outside interest, Peruvian scholars reframed their own anthropological and scientific trajectories in ways that ask us, today, to think through the multiple temporalities of science, museum-building, Indigeneity, and the collection and repatriation of human remains in the Americas.

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Christopher Heaney earned his PhD from the UT History Department in 2016 and is now an Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu (2010), published in Peru as Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la Busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas (2012), and is currently at work on two monographs, both informed by research in museums and archives in Peru, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain: a cultural and material history of the collection, circulation, study, and display of Inca mummies and ancient Peruvian skulls in the Americas; and an intellectual history of the legalization of grave-robbing in Peru and the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic World.

View his website at: http://www.christopherheaney.net.

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