When one skull can hide another!
by Séverine Georgin
Two trepaned skulls are now on display in a showcase in the Anthropology Room of the Museo de La Plata. Their museography highlights two trepanning techniques practised in Peru within a showcase entitled “modificaciones corporales”, associating trepanning with other bodily mutilations such as cranial deformation and dental alterations. Carved stone surgical instruments and a small metal tumi (a semi-circular-bladed ceremonial knife used in pre-Hispanic Peru) allow visitors to imagine the techniques used and perhaps the suffering endured [Fridberg, 2006]. The two labels indicate that these are replicas and that their provenance is Peruvian. The cast on the left, pierced by multiple circular holes, is made of resin and is recent. The second plaster cast, with its “trepanación rectangular de tipo corte Perú”, patina and number in red ink: 1740, is intriguing (fig.1). On closer inspection, a slightly faded inscription in black ink can still be read: “caverne de Baye”.

Fig.1 – Details of skull 1740. 2024 © Author.
These indications are consistent with the catalog of the anthropological section of the La Plata Museum in Argentina, written in 1910 by the German-born anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (1872-1938) [Sardi, Del Papa, 2022]. The inscription in black ink refers to Neolithic hypogeum burials in the Marne region, east of the Paris Basin. These “caves” were excavated in the early 1870s by Baron Joseph de Baye (1853-1931), a young aristocrat with a keen interest in archaeology [Charpy, Homer, 2013]. The reference affixed directly to the skull would therefore indicate that the skull used as a model came from France, not Peru.
What does this discrepancy tell us?
An error on the label?
A search in internet quickly reveals that rectangular trepanning is a widely publicized phenomenon, always associated with Peruvian trepanning. The 1740 cast echoes a debate that began in 1867, when the American diplomat Ephraim George Squier (1821-1888) brought Broca (1824-1880) a trepanned Peruvian skull bearing a scar very similar to the one presented by the La Plata museum. The famous surgeon and founder of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris (1859) made a diagnosis [Broca, 1867, 403-408] that was to sound like “a thunderclap in a serene sky” [Charon, Thillaud, 2010: 41], particularly at the Académie de médecine, where the skull was presented. At the time, skull surgery was outlawed as a highly lethal surgical procedure. Seven years later, the debate was to rally prehistorians when, in 1873, Barthélémy Prunières, in Lozère, then Joseph de Baye, in Marne, discovered skulls with strange openings associated with cranial disks [Prunières, 1873, 704]. People considered “primitive”, prehistoric or modern, were able to open the skull without causing the death of the patient, whereas western surgery failed.
The “Squier skull”, the first of a long series, has since become a kind of icon of trepanning, to which authors writing on the subject must refer [Arnott, Finger, 2003]. The evocative nature of these skulls makes them of undoubted aesthetic, scientific and museographic interest.
A skull from “la caverna Baye [sic.]”?
The first source for tracing the 1740 cast is the deed of donation from the Moreno collection to the province of Buenos Aires, dated November 1877. The plaster cast noted “caverne de Baye” appears there as part of a batch of fifteen, which arrived in Argentina from Paris in 1874, in gratitude for an initial consignment of American skulls sent by the young collector Francisco Moreno to Paul Broca [Farro, 2009]. Three casts of skulls from the Baye caves are listed in the same document as follows:
“dos habitantes de la caverna Baye […], “un cráneo trepanado de la caverna ó gruta de Baye [sic., …]”.
So the La Plata Museum was indeed in possession of a skull from Baye, France. Is it possible that the 1740 skull currently on display is French?
Trepaned skulls from the Baye caves have been described many times in the literature. Texts and illustrations provide clear information on the shape of the openings found in these burials.

Fig.2 – Drawing by Joseph de BAYE in his memoir: La trépanation préhistorique, published in 1876.
These openings are presented as circular, elliptical or irregular. Broca described two skulls sent by de Baye in 1874: “You can see on each of them a large, regular, elliptical opening with healed edges” [Broca, 1874, 553]. In 1876, de Baye presented five skulls that had “undergone well-characterised loss of substance”, two of which had not been presented by Paul Broca. The first had an “elliptical, bevelled opening”, while the second had an “almost round opening”. Illustrations accompany these two specimens. The third, diagnosed as hydrocephalic, is probably the one described by Broca in 1874, while the fourth has “two openings in the left posterior part”. The last, with its “loss of substance, the most considerable”, cannot be classified as trephined according to Joseph de Baye [De Baye, 1876, 12-13]. There is therefore no mention of a rectangular opening on these skulls.
In conclusion, a few unanswered questions…
The confusion surrounding the 1740 skull is probably linked to the debate on trepanning, which leads to frequent comparisons between Neolithic and Peruvian skulls, and naturally leads to their association in museum collections. But there are still many unknowns surrounding this number and the two skulls it represents. For the time being, the identity of the original cast remains a mystery, and we don’t know what happened to the specimen that arrived from France in 1874, or how or when the error found its way into the collection.
The questions surrounding number 1740 tell the story of a collection that, all in all, is fairly banal [Jardin, 2019]. It contradicts the idealized image that visitors may have of the order and permanence of museum objects [Podgorny, 2024], but also of the fabrication of science from these objects. Here, the history of trepanning was not written on the basis of the object. On the contrary, the specimen was chosen for its typicality on the basis of a pre-established story. Here, the object, conceived as a tangible trace of reality, is ‘reinvented’ by the museum’s narrative. The destiny of the 1740 cast is a reminder of the often chaotic path taken by objects, which carry within them “the traces of several strata of history” [Robert, 2010, 188], the fruit of debates rooted in their time, of varied arrangements and sensibilities [Appadurai, 2020].
Sources :
« Acta de donación y aceptación de noviembre de 1877 », 1910, Digesto de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Buenos Aires, Imprenta Coni Hermanos, p.142. [copy of document provided by Susana Garcia].
BROCA Paul, 1867, « Trépanation chez les Incas », Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, II° Série, séance du 4 juillet, pp.403-408.
BROCA Paul, 1874, « Sur les trépanations préhistoriques », Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, Paris, Masson, séance du 2 juillet.
BROCA Paul, 1876, « Sur la trépanation du crâne et les amulettes crâniennes », Association Française pour l’Avancement des Sciences, comptes-rendus de la 8e cession, séance du 28 août 1873, Budapest, Imprimerie Franklin-Társulat, p.140.
DE BAYE Joseph, 1976, La trépanation préhistorique, Paris, Ernest Leroux, p.13.
LEHMANN-NITSCHE Robert, 1911, Catálogo de la sección antropologica, del museo de la Plata, Buenos-Aires, Imprenta Coni Hermano.
PRUNIÈRES Barthélémy, « Sur les objets de bronze, ambre, verre, mêlés aux silex, et sur les races humaines dont on trouve les débris dans les dolmens de Lozère », Association Française pour l’Avancement des Sciences, comptes-rendus de la 2e cession, séance du 28 août 1873, Lyon, Imprimerie Pitrat Ainé.
References :
APPADURAI, Arjun, 2020, La vie sociale des choses – les marchandises dans une perspective culturelle, Paris, Les Presses du Réel.
ARNOTT Robert, FINGER Stanley, SMITH C.U.M, 2003, Trepanation : History, discovery, theory. Lisse, Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers.
CHARON Pierre, THILLAUD Pierre-Léon, 2010, L’invention de la paléopathologie, une anthologie de la langue française, Saint-Etienne, Publication de l’Université.
CHARPY, Jean-Jacques, HOMER, Isabelle, 2013, « Joseph de Baye, de la Marne au Caucase », Catalogue de l’exposition des Archives départementales de la Marne, Conseil Général de la Marne.
JARDINE Boris, KOWAL Emma, BANGHAM Jenny, 2019, « How collections end. Objects, meaning and loss in laboratories and museums », British Journal for History of Science, Themes, 4, pp. 1-27.
FARRO Máximo, 2009, La formación del Museo de La Plata, Coleccionistas, comerciantes, estudiosos y naturalistas viajeros a fines del siglo XIX, Rosario, Prohistoria ediciones, colección historia de la Ciencia.
FRIDBERG, Diana, 2006, The Enchantment of a Medical Technology, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.
PODGORNY Irina, 2024, « Los museos, un espacio nada permanente », Sabers en acció, 10 janvier.
ROBERT Renaud, 2010, « Histoire d’objets. Objets d’histoire », Dialogues d’histoire ancienne, vol. 41, no. Supplement 4.1, pp. 175-199.
SARDI Marina, DEL PAPA Mariano, 2022, « Escrito en los huesos y el papel. Una revisión de las colecciones antropológicas del Museo de La Plata », Revista del Museo de Antropología, 15 (1).
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank the various members of the Museo de La Plata who made my research possible: Marina Sardi, Mariano Del Papa, Gustavo Barrientos, Andrés Di Bastiano and Juan Cruz Galván from the anthropological section, Ana Igareta and Mariano Bonomo from the archaeological section. My warmest thanks go to Susana Garcia for her expertise and kind guidance in the archives and museum, and to Irina Podgorny for her encouragement and her wonderful library. My gratitude also goes to my thesis supervisor Nathalie Richard, Alexia Comte and Chloé Rousseau for integrating me and organising the SciCoMove project.